Re-abandoning Cats
Like other communities, Riverside County Department of Animal Services refuses to do its job and cats are paying the price
Half of all cats taken in by the Riverside County, CA, pound are put to death. At the behest of the “shelter,” the county’s Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a policy change to cut that significantly — it will stop taking them in. Is that better than killing? Absolutely, because virtually everything is better than killing. But cats not only have a right to life, they have a right to rescue.
Of course, The No Kill Advocacy Center supports “Return to Field” and “TNR” for cats who are not social with people and, when it is obvious they are not lost, even healthy, social cats. But when cats who are social with people are lost and not reclaimed, they deserve homes. Likewise, cats who need special care, such as young kittens and senior animals, deserve that care. But that requires full, complete, and robust implementation of the No Kill Equation, which Riverside County refuses to do.
For example, last week, Riverside County told a woman who found a neonatal kitten — with his eyes not yet open — to put him back on the street. She left in tears. That kitten was entitled to foster care and then a loving home. And as obscene as Riverside County’s policy is, they are not alone.
Not far from Riverside, Orange County Animal Care is doing the same thing. For example, when a pregnant cat showed up in the yard of a Good Samaritan and then gave birth, the woman did what she thought was responsible: allowed the kittens to nurse and then wean before taking them all — mama and kittens — to the shelter.
Shelter staff told her to return the feline family to where she had found them. The woman explained that the mother cat might not have a home. She did not have a collar or tag and was also pregnant when she was found. At any rate, the kittens certainly had no home to go to because they were not yet born and would not know where to go even if they did. Orange County shelter staff still turned them away, telling her to release them back on the street.
Not only does this harm individual animals, including animals that end up dead, but we’re already starting to see a return to the 1970s when roaming animals were a familiar sight. The above photo shows cats abandoned across the street from one of the Los Angeles city “shelters” after being turned away, putting the burden on rescuers and volunteers to feed and care for them without the shelter’s $31 million budget.
Like Los Angeles and Orange County, Riverside could choose to take care of the cats: foster them, bottle feed them, put them up for adoption, and find them homes. They choose not to. It is so much easier to leave the animals to whatever fate should befall them while the agency collects millions to care for them.
This policy results from a disastrous program called Human Animal Support Services (HASS). Under HASS, “shelter” staff tell people who find lost, abandoned, and homeless dogs and cats to re-abandon them on the street. It is designed to artificially increase “live release rates” without doing the work necessary to care for animals humanely.
The animals deserve so much better. But they will not get it until the residents of Riverside County, Orange County, Los Angeles, and other communities with similar policies demand that they do — and vote out politicians who willfully look the other way.
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