See Spot Die
by John Dorschner, Miami Herald staff writer.
There are a hundred million dogs and cats in America. We cuddle them,
talk to them, make them part of the family. Every year we buy them
$5 billion worth of food, not to mention collars, bowls, flea spray,
vaccinations and little pink sweaters...
We love our pets. Except, of course, when we have to move, or get
tired of walking them, or sick of paying the vet bills. Then we abandon
them. By the millions. We tell ourselves they'll find a new home, but
the truth is, when we drop them off at the animal shelter, we drop
them off to die.
So many unwanted pets, so few homes for them. They get handed over
to the dog pound, abandoned in parking lots, let loose in parks, or
simply allowed to drift away from home and never searched for: mangy
mutts, elegant purebreds, pit bull pups, fluffy kittens, dogs that
look like Rin-Tin-Tin, and Lassie, and Toto.
People take their cats to the shelter and say they want to get rid
of them because the pets don't match the colors of their new decorating
scheme. They want a new cat, one thats color-coordinated. Some people
go on vacation and drop off a pet; they don't want to spend the money
on boarding; they say they'll pick up a new pet when they get back.
The result: four out of five pets are left unclaimed. Those unclaimed
are given a lethal injection of sodium pentobarbital. Then they are
thrown into a large plastic hamper, wheeled outside and tossed like
bags of garbage into an incinerator. Nationwide, between 12 million
and 20 million unwanted pets are killed each year. The numbers are
inexact, because this is one subject few want to research. Man's best
friend has become man's biggest victim.
When people get tired of their pets, most don't want to deposit them
at the animal shelter; they know what's likely to happen to them. And
so they engage in a quiet little fantasy, imagining they're a Robert
Redford, climbing to a mountaintop to release an eagle. They're not
abandoning Fido -- they're setting him free. Often they choose parks
or affluent neighborhoods. Perhaps some wealthy family will pick him
up. Or maybe old Fido will revert to the wild, learn to fend for himself,
catching squirrels and whatnot.
But pets are not wild eagles. Animal control officers know that a
roaming dog is much more likely to be squashed by a speeding car than
to learn to live in the wild. The Service has trucks that do nothing
except travel the country, picking up tens of thousands of dead dogs
and cats each year. The animals that survive forage through garbage
cans and alleys, desperately trying to avoid starvation.
In the Dade, Florida, animal shelter, for example, where 25,000 dogs
are killed each year, the situation is typical: the shelter is dreadfully
overcrowded, four or five dogs locked in a run intended for one. It
is primitive -- concrete and wire mesh, with screening on the outside
walls to allow in whatever breeze exists. Each day, the barking of
300-plus dogs reverberates like the pounding din of jackhammers. The
stench of urine permeates everything, despite the dedicated efforts
of the shelter workers.
It is here that most of the dogs and cats of Dade County spend their
last five days. And so the dogs wait. And wait. The hound from the
day-care center spent most of the time lying on the floor, its snout
in a puddle of urine and water from her three cellmates. A few feet
away, Chica, the beautiful vizsla with fleas, was squeezed into a run
with three mutts. She sat by the door, looking expectantly at each
visitor who wandered by. The grumpy chow from Kendall was in a run
with a massive red Doberman that had killed a poodle. The smaller chow
stayed silent at the back of the run, huddled against the wire mesh.
The little bearded Tramp sat at the back of a run, with three larger
mutts, his shoulders bent forward, intimidated by this turn of events.
Max, the boxer, was given his own cage. Boxers are prized dogs, and
it was assumed someone would adopt him. Not so the pit bull pup from
the park: As with all pit bulls that enter the shelter, his card was
stamped NOT ADOPTABLE. It was a death sentence.
The Shelter is always overcrowded, and each morning a sheet is prepared,
a simple white piece of paper. On it is a list of tag numbers -- the
tags the officers put on the animals -- and the notation, ER. ER stands
for Euthanasia Run, the run where the dogs are placed a few hours before
they are executed. The execution chamber is at the end of the corridor,
close to the incinerator. It's the size of a small bedroom. A wall-unit
air conditioner rumbles and rattles, its noise blending in with the
constant yapping of dogs. The bare fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling
cast a raw, stark light. The floor is concrete, sloping toward a central
drain, to collect the urine and water.
Jessica slipped a white lab coat over her red T-shirt and joined Lily,
a feisty woman with glasses and short curly hair. Lily's the vet-tech;
she's been there 14 years. Her job is to handle the needles, Jessica's
to hold the dogs. Jessica began bringing in the dogs, attaching their
leashes to the screens of the cages. The dogs yapped loudly, expectantly.
For the first time in days, something was happening and they were excited.
As the dogs arrived, Lily prepared the tray. It consisted of a half-dozen
plastic bottles, each six inches high, filled with a turquoise liquid.
On the side was the word POISON, printed in red, flanked by two red
skulls and crossbones. Inside was sodium pentobarbital. For euthanasia
of animals. For veterinary use only. The brand name: Fatal-Plus.
Lily filled a series of needles with six cc. of Fatal-Plus and placed
them on the tray. Then she slipped on a pair of thin plastic gloves,
the kind surgeons and dentists use.
When they were ready, Jessica shut the metal doors, so outsiders couldn't
see in. She spread a section of a newspaper on the two-by-four-foot,
stainless steel table. A red pad had been placed under the table so
that the table was precisely the same height as the gray plastic hamper
next to it.
Jessica grabbed the first mutt -- a knee-high gray-black guy -- and
lifted him to the table. She leaned forward, her chest on the back
of the mutt, forcing him down on the table, front paws straight out,
her arm wrapped gently around the dog's head.
Lily took a ragged yellow sponge out of a plastic bucket and sponged
off the right paw, flattening the hair so she could find a vein. "Okay," said
Lily, stepping forward with the needle. She searched for a vein, then
plunged in the needle. The mutt tensed at the prick of the needle,
scanned the room frantically for a few seconds. Then his head slumped
onto the table. Within 10 seconds, he was dead.
Jessica slid the dog back into the plastic hamper. It landed with
a heavy thwupppp. And so it went. Get up on the table, hold tight,
inject, and thwupppp.
Lift up, hold tight, thwupppp.
Lift up, hold tight, thwupppp.
Sometimes, especially with the big muscular dogs, Lily had trouble
finding the vein. Some dogs panicked at the prick of the needle, struggling
desperately in Jessica's grasp.
One large black dog struggled, breaking loose from Jessica's strong
grasp, jumping on the floor. The dog dashed frantically around for
a few moments, then its rear legs collapsed. It rose, took a few steps,
collapsed again as the Fatal-Plus seeped into its brain.
With some of the larger dogs, especially the obedient German shepherds,
Jessica lifted the front paws up, so that they rested on the table,
the rear haunches on the floor. Lily injected the animal, then Jessica
tugged at its leash, pulling it off the table, trotting ahead of it
five or six steps to the outside door. "Come on, boy, come on,
boy," she said, gently, swinging open the door and getting another
six steps out of the dog, until -- a few feet from the incinerator
-- the dog suddenly stopped, falling over on its side, dead. Obedient
to the end.
Meanwhile, next door, in the vet's lab, the vet had the hound from
the day-care center on his scale. He was examining her, but when he
saw her teeth, he shook his head. "Eight years," he scribbled
on the card. "No person is going to adopt a dog so old." An
assistant trotted the dutiful, anonymous hound back to Run 9.
And the vet was right: The hound was too old. Several days later,
she was injected with Fatal-Plus. No new owner stepped up to adopt
the chow. He, too, met with Fatal-Plus. So did the pit bull pup found
in the state park. So did the two black Lab-mixes picked up at the
South Dade nursery. As for Chica, the beautiful viszla with fleas:
She was adopted, but escaped from her new home. She just fled, said
her new owner. "Volo como una paloma." She flew like a pigeon.
Could she still be running the streets, foraging for food, desperately
seeking her original owner? Was she hit by a car? Or was she picked
up a second time by Animal Services and put back in the shelter? All
we know is that for Chica, as with most dogs and cats, the odds are
horrendously against her.
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