War Horse Puppet Theatre

Many audience members weep openly. When the play reaches its moving climax, it sends them to their feet in rapturous applause.

In the somewhat blasé world of London theatre-going, this kind of emotional empathy with what’s happening onstage is a rarity. And when puppetry is involved, one might imagine further barriers to connecting viscerally to what in essence is a battlefield horror story.

But War Horse – the latest jewel in the crown of Britain’s National Theatre – is a horror story with heart. It’s a brilliantly realized stage version of Michael Morpurgo’s acclaimed novel about a Devonshire farm horse named Joey who is sold to the cavalry and thrown into the carnage of the First World War. There, after suffering dreadful ordeals, he ends up reunited with the humble farm boy who has enlisted at the age of 16 with one goal in mind: to find the beloved animal from whom he has been parted.

But it’s not just another tenderly wrought story of a boy and his animal. It is also a searing examination of an almost forgotten chapter from the First World War.

When you watch the lacerating scene where members of the cavalry are mowed down by the Germans’ mechanical might, you can’t help but recall the idiotic assertion by the British military establishment that the machine gun had no stopping power against the horse. The grisly truth is that between the years 1914 and 1918, a million horses were sent across the English Channel to France – and only 62,000 returned. War Horse tells us what it was like for them.

They were used as cavalry horses, for pulling guns and ambulances; in the battlefields of the Western Front they were essential to the armies on both sides. I discovered also that at the end of the war most of our surviving horses were sold off to French butchers. Here was a strong story, I felt, the story of how it was to be a horse in the First World War.

And so I wrote War Horse, like most of my novels a book that is as much for adults as for children. Now, 25 years later, War Horse has been turned into a play at the National Theatre. It would be difficult to imagine a production of greater ambition and complexity.

The puppetry miracles are wrought by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company. There’s a touch of the abstract in these awesome, larger-than-life creatures whose components include a flexible bamboo framework, translucent skin and the brilliant manipulations of teams of puppeteers – yet they emerge as intensely real, both physically and emotionally, in the toss of a mane or the pricking of the ears or in the basic flexing of the loins in preparation for a charge.

Other puppet imagery also emerges, ranging from the comical – in the form of a cranky farmyard goose – to the horrific – in the moment when a carrion crow descends on a dying horse.

This is an astounding production with emotional resonance, performed by an exceptional company of actors.

Full review at National Post.

Michael Morpurgo website

Images from the production

Water for Elephants

Today’s Globe & Mail ran a little piece on The Long Summer of the Carny.

The carnival workers of Conklin Supershows don’t see the big-city glam of the CNE or the PNE. From April to October, they travel small towns, setting up shopping mall midways and county fairs. It’s a fading way of life with few rewards.

A few weeks ago, they had set up a sad little show in the nearly empty parking lot of the East York Towne Centre, with rides for the kiddies, a couple of bored elephants shuffling back and forth under an awning in the July heat, and some small performing dogs racing back and forth in an enclosure.

I was reminded of Sara Gruen’s wonderful book, Water for Elephants, which is a must-read for anyone who is fascinated by the circus, elephants, or the Depression-era hobo life.

As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie.

It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and, ultimately, it was their only hope for survival.

After Jacob puts Silver Star down, August talks with him about the reality of the circus. “The whole thing’s illusion, Jacob,” he says, “and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what people want from us. It’s what they expect”

Dave Weich of Powell’s Books interviewed the author. An excerpt of the interview:

DW: Is it true that you’d never been to a circus before starting your research for Water for Elephants?

Sara Gruen: It’s true. I had no history whatsoever. No interest, no connection to anyone associated with the circus. I grew up in northern Ontario. I don’t know if they didn’t come up that far or if I just never went, but if I did go it made such a little impression on me that I didn’t remember it.

DW: What wound up being your favorite act?

SG: In the end, the liberty horses… A person, usually a beautiful woman, comes out with a group of twelve horses typically, sometimes all white, sometimes black and white. She stands and makes signals with whips in the air, and she talks to them, and they obey her.
I have a horse, and I think it’s very cool that they can get horses doing that with no restraint and no halter.

DW: Marlena is that woman in Water for Elephants.

SG: Yes, and in fact I modeled her act after ones I had watched.

DW: And Rosie was based on a real elephant?

SG: Several elephants, yes. There was actually an elephant that would pull her stake out of the ground to go and steal lemonade, and then she’d go back and put her stake back in the ground and look innocent while they blamed the roustabouts.

DW: One of my favorite details in the book, having nothing to do with the circus, describes the boys in the hobo jungle: when they sleep, they take off their shoes but tie them to their feet. How did you educate yourself in Depression-era America?

SG: I wasn’t quite sure at first that this was the era I’d set the story in. A circus photo set me off on the path of the novel, but then I got on a sidetrack about hobos and I realized that something like 80 percent of them were under twenty-one. You think about hobos and you imagine middle-aged, dirty men by the side of the track, but no, they were kids.

DW: So much happens on the train or just off the train. It’s the book’s main setting.

SG: The whole of a circus worker’s social life happened on a moving train. When they were off, they were setting up or they were performing or they were tearing down, so everything happened while they were moving. Once they collected your quarter, they did their act and then they got out. You were leaving by the front end of the tent, and they were hauling the benches out by the back end—they’re done, they’re finished, they want to get on the train.

SG: For Water for Elephants, which was the first historical thing I’ve written, I did all the research ahead of time. I needed to feel that I knew the subject matter in and out. I hate outlining. I hate outlines, hate them, hate them. I usually know what the crisis of the book is going to be, though I don’t know how I’m going to get there. I try to make it bad enough that I don’t know how I’m going to get out of it. And when I get there, I have to get out of it. I just get myself geared up, and I write every day and see what happens.

DW: Has your technical-writing background helped, or has it been a hindrance?

SG: It was great training. For one thing, it taught me to sit down and write for eight hours a day. For another, it taught me not to take personally editorial comments. The first instructional project I gave to an editor ten years ago came back covered in red. I was practically in tears. It has to be a thousand times worse if it’s a piece of fiction, but I don’t take it personally anymore.

DW: Did you get up close and personal to elephants in your research?

SG: At the Kansas City Zoo, I observed the elephants with their ex-handler for a couple of days, taking notes on body language and behavior. I got into the habit of walking up to elephant handlers at the circus and saying, “Hi. I’m writing a book. May I meet your elephant?” I got lucky twice. The first time was right after I’d been out with this elephant handler at the Kansas City Zoo who had been gored by an elephant. He took a tusk through the thigh, one through the rib cage, which just missed everything vital, and another through his upper arm. So I still had that in mind. I was standing beside this huge thing with his amber eye staring down at me.

The guy said, “Go ahead. You can touch her.” I was shaking, but I touched her. I said, “Okay, I’m done now.” Several months later, I met the second one. It was one of these little circuses that throws a tent up and says, “Free tickets!” And then it’s twenty-dollar popcorn. I snuck out of the big top because it was small and pretty cheesy, but during the show I asked to meet the elephant; the handler gave me a bucket of peanuts and stuck me in an enclosure with this thing. He shut the gate. I was alone with this African elephant. I was looking at her, and she was looking at me like, This is not part of the usual repertoire. So I fed her the peanuts. By the end of it, she was such a love bug. I was hugging her and kissing her, posing for photos. She gave me a kiss, a big, sock puppet, mushy elephant kiss with the end of her trunk. It was really memorable.

Sara Gruen’s website

Elizabeth Judd’s review at the International Herald-Tribune

straydog

A female collie mix, so beautiful, all gold and white and dirty; she’s in the last cage on the aisle, curled up quiet, watching everything – but when I get too close she goes completely crazy, biting at the bars, herself, anything in reach, until I back off and away. Her growl’s like ripping metal, jagged, dangerous, and strong . . . Don’t mess with me, that growl says. I may be in a cage but I can still bite.

Rachel is happiest when she’s volunteering at the animal shelter, especially after she meets the feral collie she names Grrl: they’re both angry and alone. When a teacher encourages her to write about the dog, Rachel finds another outlet for her pain and frustration. Writing about Grrl is easy. But teaching Grrl to trust her is a much tougher task. And when Griffin, the new boy in school, devises a plan to bring Grrl home, Rachel finds that the dog isn’t the only one who must learn to trust. Kathe Koja offers a raw and emotional tale about a girl who risks breaking out of her own cage to find the help she needs.

straydog is Kathe Koja’s compelling debut novel. Koja writes for young adults.

Writing straydog, my first book for young people, ushered me into a world I knew already as a reader. Many of the characters I love best in fiction — Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet, J.D. Salinger’s Holden and Franny and Zooey, Francesca Lia Block’s Witch Baby — are people who say what they think, show their bewilderments, struggle with hard ideas, love with all their hearts; exasperating, funny, intense people. Young people.

I’m a strong supporter of animal rights, so I’m especially proud that straydog was honored by both the ASPCA and the Humane Society. I believe that you can learn everything you need to know about a person by watching the way s/he acts with animals and little kids, the powerless ones.

“So what’s up with that collie?”

Melissa’s at her desk, an old-fashioned school teacher’s desk, dented metal drawers and heaping piles of junk: fund-raising appeals, cruelty investigation forms, food orders, a busted leash tagged DON’T BUY THIS KIND!!! At the center of the heap is the brand-new computer, the one new thing in the place, a donation from some distributor. Now Melissa scrabbles like Shiva through the mess, hunting for “The pen,” she says to herself, “where is the pen ?” and then to me “What collie?” She gives me the major Melissa-stare, her wide blue eyes like What! do! you! want! Her hair’s really, really short and blonde, she gels it so it sticks up like porcupine quills. “You mean the one Jake brought in?”
“Yeah. Grrl.” It was what I called her, writing last night in my paper; it fit, it’s just right but “The feral one, you named her?” and she rolls her eyes. “Rachel, before you start, stop, all right? She’s been all her life on the streets, you know what they’re like when they’re –”

“I know, I know.” You can almost never socialize the feral ones, they’re almost always euthanized .I’ve seen dozens of dogs, and fallen in love with half of them, and cried my heart out when they died; that’s how it is here. But this one is different, somehow. There’s something about her, something in her eyes, I can’t stop thinking about her: as if I know what she’s like, know her from the inside out. And I have a plan for her, or at least the plan for a plan so “I just want to try,” I say to Melissa, “just get to know her a little. And it won’t interfere with my work schedule, I’ll still do all my regular stuff –” 

“I don’t have time — there you are! — to argue with you now,” she says, snatching up her pen. “Go away. Go talk to the dogs,” which I do, sweep and swab and water and feed, all the while sneaking little looks at Grrl in her cage lying on a blue blanket, one of the old torn-up blankets from the rescue van. Her eyes are half-closed, cloudy; the cage card says she’s got a fever from the leg infection. When I reach to put the card back she growls at me, that ripping, ugly sound: Don’t mess with me , that growl says. I may be in a cage but I can still bite.

So I start talking like I always do, to all the dogs — hey you guys, how’s it going — but once in awhile I say “Grrl”, looking into her eyes, making sure she knows it’s meant for her. “Grrl, Grrl,” almost like her growl but warm and crooning, the name and the idea came to me like a gift last night as I sat looking over the essay, two gifts at once because I’m going to write about that dog, I thought, about Grrl and from “A Dog’s Life” I changed the title to “straydog,” all one word, like a dog would think of herself.

And once I’d done that the words just, just flew, it was like I couldn’t write fast enough. It was like I knew her, knew how she would think and feel and fear, knew it all from the inside out and when I finally stopped writing — not done, only just started but my hand was hot and aching, and my eyes were as dry as little rubber balls — I felt so good, so full , I don’t know how else to explain it; like I’d eaten at a banquet, like I was a banquet. — Oh, that’s not it either, how can words say exactly what you want sometimes and sometimes nothing at all?

Winner of the Humane Society’s KIND Book Award
Winner of the ASPCA’s Henry Bergh Award
A BOOK SENSE 76 Top Ten Summer Teen Reads pick
A selection of the Junior Library Guild
A selection of the Children’s Literature Choice List for 2003

Kathe Koja website

Matthew Scully: A Compassionate Conservative

A horrible, wonderful, important book

Pigs prematurely taken from their mothers root incessantly for something to chew or suck on; and if they are pigs spending their abbreviated lives in a factory farm, where maybe 500 animals are crowded into a space no bigger than a living room, the thing they try to chew on is the tail of the hog in front of them. This is not a happy habit for the industrial farmer: chewed tails can result in infections, and pigs that die, in Matthew Scully’s pitch-perfect phrase, ”an unauthorized death.”

The factory farmer’s solution? When the piglets are weaned, a good 12 to 16 weeks before nature had planned, their tails are docked, the lower part amputated with a pliers-like instrument. That small operation leaves the pigs with hypersensitive tails, which means the animals will not get complaisant and will struggle ever after to keep their clipped, throbbing appendages out of the mouths of their penmates.

Should you be inclined to pity the beasts for that or any other detail of their treatment in today’s giant meat-making plants, however, the executives in charge of booming factory farms like Smithfield Foods in Virginia, which kills 82,300 pigs a day — a quarter of the nation’s total — are eager to set your conscience at ease. When Scully asked Sonny Faison, head of Smithfield’s Carroll’s Foods division, in North Carolina, whether there isn’t something ”just a little sad” about confining millions of animals to cramped concrete enclosures, where there is no sun, wind, rain or even so much as a scattering of straw to sleep on, Faison declared au contraire. ”They love it,” he insisted. ”They’re in state-of-the art confinement facilities. The conditions that we keep these animals in are much more humane than when they were out in the field.” Another Smithfield supervisor seconded the notion, painting a bleak picture of the life of free-ranging swine: ”I mean, you put ‘em out, they kind of scrounge around in the mud, and in the summer, around here, animals that are outside risk getting mosquito bites and things.”

Dominion is a horrible, wonderful, important book. It is horrible in its subject, a half-reportorial, half-philosophical examination of some of the most repugnant things that human beings do to animals, notably keeping them in the factory farms that have taken over the business of supplying America’s insatiable meat tooth; and hunting them down on a new style of ‘’safaris,” which are nothing more than canned, risk-free opportunities to bag exotic species as easily as one might drown a suckling kitten. The book is wonderful in its eloquent, mordant clarity, and its hilarious fillets of sanctimonious cant and hypocrisy. For example, Scully quotes from a book called In Defense of Hunting, by James A. Swan — an authority favored by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and other proud, manly-men hunters — citing a passage that addresses the critics who weep over the animals and asks, aren’t they special, even sacred, too?

”A thing can become truly sacred only if a person knows in his or her heart that the object or creature can somehow serve as a conduit to a realm of existence that transcends the temporal,” Swan argues. ”If hunting can be a path to spirit, unhindered by guilt, then nature has a way of making sure that hunters feel compassion.”

Dominion is important in large measure because the author, an avowed conservative Republican and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, is an unexpected defender of animals against the depredations of profit-driven corporations, swaggering, gun-loving hunters, proponents of renewed ”harvesting” of whales and elephants and others who insist that all of nature is humanity’s romper room, to play with, rearrange and plunder at will.

As his friend and fellow political commentator, Joseph Sobran, said on hearing of Scully’s dietary preferences: ”A conservative, with a Catholic upbringing, and a vegetarian? Boy, talk about aggrieved minorities!” At the very least, Dominion will encourage patronage of the small, independent organic farms, where the cattle are grass-fed and treated humanely, an option that Scully calls ”a decent compromise.”

Scully’s argument is, fundamentally, wholly a moral one. It is wrong to be cruel to animals, he says, and when our cruelty expands and mutates to the point where we no longer recognize the animals in a factory farm as living creatures capable of feeling pain and fear, or when we insist on an inalienable right to stalk and slaughter intelligent, magnificent creatures like elephants or polar bears for the sheer, bracing thrill of it, then we debase ourselves. As the earth’s most powerful species and the only one capable of meditating on our actions, we have a moral responsibility to treat the animals in our care with kindness, empathy and thoughtfulness, Scully says. When we forfeit that responsibility, we forfeit the right to any of the little self-congratulatory designations we have claimed: as God’s ”chosen” ones.

As Scully sees it, we may be ”of” nature but we are not in it. For better or worse, we have dominion over the earth, and how we manage that position, whether as bloodthirsty tyrants or as benign patrons, is a core measure of our worth. ”Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind’s capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship,” he writes.

The author takes a particular dislike toward those who argue that animals, being incapable of dwelling on their mortality, therefore don’t really suffer the way neuronally well-endowed humans can suffer. He also finds fault with those he considers moral relativists, like the philosopher Peter Singer, who has argued that reason, rather than knee-jerk compassion or squeamishness, should dictate what we deem the comparative worth of the lives of animals or severely handicapped infants. Scully can wax self-righteous and absolutist, and he considers the ‘’squeamishness factor” to be a handy indicator of something, like a factory farm, that is morally wrong. ”It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes,” he writes, ”and no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory.”

Overall, a beautiful and thoughtful book that forces some of us to look more closely into the mirror.

~~ Excerpted from The New York Times Book Review, by Natalie Angier

Matthew Scully, interviewed by National Review Online:

National Review Online: In a nutshell, how are we abusing dominion, our stewardship over animals?

Matthew Scully: In the same way that human beings are prone to abusing any other kind of power — by forgetting that we are not the final authority. The people who run our industrial livestock farms, for example, have lost all regard for animals as such, as beings with needs, natures, and a humble dignity of their own. They treat these creatures like machines and “production units” of man’s own making, instead of as living creatures made by God. And you will find a similar arrogance in every other kind of cruelty as well.

Washington Post Viewpoint: Animal Cruelty and the Need for Reform

Matthew Scully

Beautiful Joe and Sirius

My name is Beautiful Joe, and I am a brown dog of medium size. I am not called Beautiful Joe because I am a beauty. Mr. Morris, the clergyman, in whose family I have lived for the last twelve years, says that he thinks I must be called Beautiful Joe for the same reason that his grandfather, down South, called a very ugly colored slave-lad Cupid, and his mother Venus.

I do not know what he means by that, but when he says it, people always look at me and smile.

In 1892, Halifax novelist Margaret Marshall Saunders travelled to the small lakeside town of Meaford, Ontario to visit her brother and his fiancée, Louise Moore.

The Moores had adopted a mistreated dog. Louise’s father had found him malnourished and bleeding, with his ears and tail chopped off, and although he looked pathetic, the Moores named him Beautiful Joe.

On her return to Halifax, Saunders heard of a contest sponsored by the American Humane Education Society. It challenged entrants to write a novel based on the 1877 bestseller Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell, in which a horse recounts tales of cruelty and kindness to inspire humane treatment of horses.

Saunders wrote Joe’s story. In her manuscript, she renamed the adoptive family Morris and, following contest rules, set the tale in the United States – in the fictional town of Fairport, Me. She won.

The wonderfully successful book, entitled “Black Beauty,” came like a living voice out of the animal kingdom. But it spake for the horse, and made other books necessary; it led the way. After the ready welcome that it received, and the good it has accomplished and is doing, it follows naturally that some one should be inspired to write a book to interpret the life of a dog to the humane feeling of the world. Such a story we have in “Beautiful Joe.”

The story speaks not for the dog alone, but for the whole animal kingdom. Through it we enter the animal world, and are made to see as animals see, and to feel as animals feel.

~~ From the introduction to the Phoenix Edition

Beautiful Joe: An Autobiography appeared in 1894. By 1900, its sales stood just shy of 1 million. By 1939, it had sold 7 million copies in more than 10 languages. Around 1914, Saunders settled to Toronto and went on to write more than two dozen books. She died in 1947, at 85.

The book was out of print but, over the years, the dog’s grave had been located and a cairn built. A municipal Beautiful Joe Park had also been founded on the property once owned by the Moores.

In 1994 – the novel’s centenary – the Beautiful Joe Heritage Society was formed, and it got the book republished. The society held dog-oriented parades and put up statues in the park. One was a sculpture of Beautiful Joe, another a police K-9 memorial.

In 2002, the society also built a memorial to Sirius, the one police dog killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. His partner, New York Port Authority officer David Lim, attended the unveiling with his superior officer.

Attached to the statue is an iron cross, forged from a fallen World Trade Center beam.

In the fall of 2007, vandals took a chisel to the memorial, in an attempt to remove the cross. They failed.

And, like Beautiful Joe, the statue has since been lovingly restored.

.

K-9 Sirius, Badge #17 was a yellow Labrador Retriever, born in January 1997. He became an Explosive Detection Dog upon graduation from the Port Newark K-9 Center on July 15, 2000.

Sirius and his handler, Police Officer David Lim, Badge #1219, were assigned to the World Trade Center. Their duties there included searching vehicles entering the WTC Complex,
clearing unattended bags and sweeping areas for V.I.P. safety.

Toronto Star

Beautiful Joe Heritage Society

Read Beautiful Joe online

Meaford Museum

The Myth of Pet Overpopulation

Nathan Winograd’s new book, “Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America” is a startling look at the deficiencies of the generally-accepted animal shelter philosophy in the U.S., and the possibility of massive change for the better.

Winograd has all the credentials any shelter professional could ask for. He left a lucrative career as a prosecuting attorney to devote himself to helping animals. He has spearheaded the No Kill Advocacy Center, a national organization aimed at ending the killing of pets in animal shelters. While director of operations at the San Francisco SPCA, he worked with then-president Richard Avanzino to implement a wide variety of animal livesaving programs, and then went on to achieve similar success as director of a rural shelter in upstate New York.

His book challenges the very foundation of nearly every principle of shelter management: The idea that there are more pets dying in shelters each year than homes available for those pets.

New York City offered Bergh’s ASPCA money to run the dog pound… Henry Bergh [Founder of the ASPCA] refused.

He believed that the ASPCA was a tool to champion and protect life, not to end it. He believed that its role to protect animals from people was fundamentally at odds with that of a pound. Bergh understood implicitly that animal welfare and animal control were two separate and distinct movements, each opposing the other on fundamental issues of life and death.

~~ Redemption, p.11

Why are so many animals ending up in shelters in the first place?

Conventional wisdom tells us it’s because of irresponsible pet owners who aren’t willing to work to keep their pets in their homes. It’s a failure of commitment, of caring, and of the human/animal bond. If fewer pets were born, there would be fewer coming into shelters. If people cared more about their pets, they wouldn’t give them up so easily, would spay and neuter them so they wouldn’t reproduce, and wouldn’t let them stray.

Winograd’s argument is simply this: Based on data from the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Animal Hospital Association, the Pet Food Manufacturers Association, and the latest census, there are more than enough homes for every dog and cat being killed in shelters every year. There aren’t just enough homes for the dogs and cats being killed in shelters. There are more homes for cats and dogs opening each year than there are cats and dogs even entering shelters.

This means that the problem is not insurmountable and it does mean that we can do something short of killing for all savable animals today.

There is probably nothing Winograd could say that would more inflame the shelter and humane society establishment than calling pet overpopulation a myth. But Winograd doesn’t just stop there. In “Redemption,” Winograd lays the lion’s share of the blame for shelter deaths not on pet owners and communities, but on the management, staff, and boards of directors of the shelters themselves.

“If a community is still killing the majority of shelter animals, it is because the local SPCA, humane society, or animal control shelter has fundamentally failed in its mission,” he writes. “And this failure is nothing more than a failure of leadership. The buck stops with the shelter’s director.”

Redemption makes the case that bad shelter management leads to overcrowding, which is then confused with pet overpopulation. Instead of warehousing and killing animals, shelters, he says, should be using proven, innovative programs to find those homes he says are out there. They should wholeheartedly adopt the movement known as No Kill, and stop using killing as a form of population control.

“Let’s just look at various animals dying in shelters around the nation today. If … motherless kittens are killed because the shelter doesn’t have a comprehensive foster care program, that’s not pet overpopulation. That’s the lack of a foster care program.”

“If adoptions are low because people are getting those dogs and cats from other places, because the shelter isn’t doing outside adoptions (adoptions done off the shelter premises), that’s a failure to do outside adoptions, not pet overpopulation.”

“And you can go down the list. If animals are killed because working with rescue groups is discouraged, again, that’s not pet overpopulation. If dogs are going cage-crazy because volunteers and staff aren’t allowed to socialize them, and then those dogs are killed because they’re “cage crazy,” because the shelter doesn’t have a behavior rehabilitation program in place, once again, that’s not pet overpopulation; that’s the lack of programs and services that save lives.”

“And you can say that about feral cats being killed because a shelter doesn’t have a trap-neuter-return program. You can say that about shy or scared dogs because the shelter is doing this bogus temperament testing that’s killing shy dogs and claiming they are unadoptable. It goes on and on and on.”

Winograd’s not just talking about something that could happen, but something that has already happened many times in a number of American communities — including San Francisco, which in 1994 became the first city in the United States to end the killing of healthy dogs and cats.

Of course, the San Francisco SPCA was not the first no-kill shelter in the United States. There have always been individual shelters and rescue groups that have not used population control killing. What San Francisco did was to institutionalize No Kill on a county-wide basis, guaranteeing that animals would not be killed simply for lack of shelter space. The SFSPCA promised to take all adoptable, treatable, and rehabilitatable pets that came into San Francisco’s municipal shelter, and find homes for them if the city shelter could not.

“If you look at what San Francisco did between 1993 and 1994, the number of deaths…of healthy animals…declined 100 percent. In the case of sick and injured animals it declined by about 50 percent.”

No Kill has worked in a wide variety of communities. Winograd later left California and took over the SPCA in Tompkins County, N.Y., which held the animal control contract for the region and has an open admissions policy. One of the most compelling sections of “Redemption” tells how Winograd walked into the shelter and, literally overnight, ended the practice of killing for shelter space:

“The day after my arrival, my staff informed me that our dog kennels were full and since a litter of six puppies had come in, I needed to decide who was going to be killed in order to make space. I asked for ‘Plan B’; there was none. I asked for suggestions; there were none.”

He spoke directly to his staff, telling them that they were paid to save lives. “If a paid member of staff throws up her hands and says, ‘There’s nothing that can be done,’ I may as well eliminate her position and use the money that goes for her salary in a more constructive manner. So what are we going to do with the puppies that doesn’t involve killing?”

The story of how Tompkins County stopped killing for population control and started sending more than 90 percent of the animals that come into its animal control system out alive may be one of the greatest success stories of the humane movement. It’s certainly one of the most compelling parts of the argument laid out in “Redemption.”

Because, although it wasn’t always easy, these programs worked, and not only in San Francisco or Tompkins County. “In Tompkins County, we reduced the death rate 75 percent in two years. In Charlottesville, Va., they reduced it by over 50 percent in one year. And Reno, Nev. … has reduced the death rate by over 50 percent,” Winograd said.

“If all shelters not only have the desire and embrace the No Kill philosophy, but comprehensively put into play all those programs and services that … I … collectively call the no-kill equation, then we would achieve success.”

The issue of pet overpopulation is only one piece of the story told in “Redemption.” Within its pages, readers and animal lovers can find the blueprint not so much for our failure to save the animals in our communities, but for our ability to start doing so today. It challenges us to demand more of our shelters than the status quo, to insist on an end to the use of killing as a form of animal population control, and tells us to stop allowing our tax dollars and donations to support shelters and animal control agencies that refuse to implement programs that have been proven in communities across America to work to end the killing.

Excerpted from Christy Keith, SFGate

SF Gate article

Nathan Winograd’s blog