Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 12:17:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: Kit Donner
Subject: Stealing animals is not a solution to animal abuse!
I hope others were as outraged as I am about Aurora’s post advocating stealing animals.
I hardly know where to start.
First of all, animal cruelty investigators and veterinarians are trained to recognize animal abuse. There is a reason training is necessary. Because recognizing it is not as simple as Aurora seems to think. A dog can be skinny because it is under veterinary care for a medical condition from which it is recovering with proper care for example, and the thief can kill the dog by depriving it of proper care. For real. Or a skinny animal may be elderly and being maintained in relative comfort by special diets and care, even though it can not maintain a plump body weight, and again the thief can kill the animal by depriving it of care. The casual observer doesn’t know!
Even if the animal is in fact being abused, stealing is not the best way to rescue the animal for several reasons, aside from the risks to the thief. One of the chief reasons is that many animal abusers will simply get another animal and continue the abuse, especially if the abuse is due to ignorance, which it often is. Animal Control Officers, animal cruelty investigators, and veterinarians know how to educate owners in proper animal care, which actually does fix the problem permanently in a lot of cases, and they can make follow up visits to ensure that proper care is given (and they do). If the abuse is deliberate and willful, ACOs, ACIs, and vets can put together a case that can result in the abuser being forbidden to own future animals, as well as removing the abused animal from the abuse. The thief obviously can’t take the abuser to court, since to do so the thief would have to explain how they illegally obtained the abused animal. So the thief provides at best a
temporary deterent even in the rare case that they are right and there really is willful abuse occurring.
In the rare case where there is such immediate danger to the animal that there might possibly be grounds for intervention by a lay person, please, please call 911 first for your own safety. If someone is in the process of shooting, knifing, drowning, hanging or otherwise killing an animal and you intervene, you may just be adding yourself to the victims of the carnage. Much as I value and care about my dogs, I would much rather have you keep your distance and take pictures with your cell phone that could be used in court, rather than come home to find a dead good samaritan as well as a dead dog in my yard.
Call animal control, call the police, call any appropriate professional, take pictures or videos or audio tapes from a safe public place, but don’t be a vigilantee and steal a dog or other animal abused or otherwise. You may need to call several times to get the situation resolved to your satisfaction, you may need to take time to testify in court, but don’t make the situation worse by stealing an animal. You won’t make the situation better by stealing an animal.
And don’t insult the professionals in our community that with great patience and skill deal with this heartbreaking problem just because they haven’t explained the full picture to your satisfaction.
If you really feel a need to do more, get the training to become a professional (paid or volunteer), and make your intervention official and legal. We need more people who care enough to do the job right, but we don’t need vigilantees.
Kit
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