December 14, 2023
Common accusation: "PETA kills animals". Any serious animal shelter euthanizes animals with serious health problems, so let's get that out of the way. The real charge is that PETA kills too many animals, not just that they kill any. Do they?
Shelter admission policies can be bucketed into two groups:
There are two mainstream kill policies:
Some local examples:
Most shelters are either open door kill shelters, or limited admission no kill shelters. This is because most shelters have a limited amount of space. A no-kill open-door shelter will fill up and stay full. With limited space, high supply, and low demand, shelters have to choose: limit admission, or kill pets when they run out of space. If they limit admission, the rejects end up going to open door shelters.
PETA runs open door kill shelters. Obviously their rate will be higher than the boutique no-kill shelter that only accepts beautiful healthy kittens, and it'll be higher than national averages that include those shelters. The right thing to do would be to compare their euthanasia rates against those of other open-door shelters, like municipal animal control agencies. These, ballpark, kill 20-40% of the pets coming in. PETA's numbers, 70% ish, appear worse. It's hard to tell how much worse because even open-door shelters hand off pets to other organizations - and because some shelters seem to report their space kills as euthanasia (sometimes because of federal funding guidelines intended to avoid needless space kills). CACC is in some trouble for this right now, euthanizing suspiciously friendly-looking dogs for "behavioral problems".
Here is my theory. I don't see the specifics on their website, but people say that PETA doesn't work with no-kill shelters on the grounds that these are also limited admission shelters, which help only the most adoptable pets. In the bad old days, CACC killed more than 90% of the animals coming in. No-kill was synonymous with selective. But since the 90s, "adopt don't shop" has gotten a lot of acceptance, increasing shelter demand; campaigns to spay and neuter pets seem to have reduced the total number of strays; and some cities run TnR programs for cats that put them back on the street in managed colonies. CACC is down to something like 20% kill rate (though there is probably some number fudging in there). Benefiting and contributing to this reduced pressure, no-kill as a philosophy has gotten much more popular. If PETA refuses to work with no-kill shelters, they may now have significantly fewer options to send animals when they run out of space.
So I think the high kill rates of PETA shelters are probably both (a) taking the "dregs" like they claim (b) an artifact of ideologically locking themselves into the old way of things, reducing their access to shelter space. Most of these attacks seem to come from a restaurant/hospitality industry front group called "PETA Kills Animals". They've got a pretty obvious bone to pick with PETA, when they're not busy opposing the smoking ban in restaurants and fighting minimum wage increases. I was expecting to find some, but actually couldn't find any criticism of PETA's shelters from vegans, who demonstrably care about not killing animals.
Additional thoughts: Chicago's layout, where city provides a single entry point to a number of privately-run shelters (which might receive public funding) is similar to its system for homeless services. Both seem sorely inadequate. For people the shelter system lacks the ability to euthanize; instead, when the allotted three months of emergency housing have expired, it leaves the task of social murder up to the pavement.