05/28/2018
Almost all feral cats are murdered at shelters. For some shelters dead animals are money makers. A shelter in SC sells cats to Vet schools so students can practice declawing on them and other procedures. And then they murder them.
A student who objected to dissection of cats reached out to Carolina Biological, the company that gets the dead cats from “animal shelters” (pounds) and supplies them to the school, and asked: “How can we as students be sure that these cats are not being euthanized [killed] for reasons other than terminal illness or pain and suffering which cannot be treated (which is the only acceptable reason to euthanize an animal)?” She also wanted to know if the company paid money to these pounds for the cats, thus creating a perverse incentive for the pounds to kill them.
After admitting they paid for dead cats, Carolina Biological wrote that they do NOT “only use terminally ill or suffering animals.” In fact, they insisted the cats “are not diseased.” Instead, the company said they “are most often feral cats” and then went on to disagree that “disease and suffering” are the only reasons to kill cats. They also defended the killing of cats saying that pounds “must and do resort to that”: “it is an unavoidable fact that communities throughout the nation must deal with feral cat populations.”
Upton Sinclair once wrote that, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” The manager at Carolina Biological who responded to the student is an example of that. There is no need to kill feral cats: nokilladvocacycenter.org/community-cat-program.html There is no need to kill healthy and treatable cats: nokilladvocacycenter.org/no-kill-equation.html (And in an age of computer modeling, there is no need to dissect cats.) But there is money to be made and salaries which depend on not understanding that and so companies like Carolina Biological and the pounds who are paid to supply them with the bodies will continue to do so until enough students simply refuse to participate,* pounds are forced to stop killing: nokilladvocacycenter.org/companion-animal-protection-act.html, and companies which make money on the broken backs of cats are put out of business.
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* Students in California have a legal right to object. They must be told they have a right to object. They have a right to leave the room, to an alternative assignment, and they cannot be punished academically for doing so. We need these laws in every state.
Photo via Flikr creative commons (no endorsement by photographer is implied): flickr.com/photos/nwartist/
