Alley Cat Allies was established as a means of changing the way feral cats have traditionally been dealt with in our society. Considered pests, they are labeled dangerous and a nuisance by most animal agencies and, as a result, are trapped and killed.

Killing feral cats to control their population has not only been scientifically proven to be ineffective but is unethical as well. It has been demonstrated that trapping and sterilizing is an effective means of stabilizing and, over time, reducing their numbers. Further, humanely caring for feral can teach us much in the way of a reverence for all life.

In this article, Craig Brestrup explains unequivocally the importance of reevaluating how we deal with the problem of unwanted companion animals so that there will be a time when we are not killing millions of cats each year - tame or feral - in our shelters and animal control facilities.

Companion Animal Welfare Reconsidered - by Craig Brestrup, Ph.

Whose interests does animal shelter "euthanasia" serve? The traditional answer asserts that animals are the beneficiaries - it alleviates suffering and protects helpless creatures against fates worse than death. Based on this belief between twenty and thirty thousand mostly healthy companion animals daily are ushered out of this life. In the face of these numbers, still alarming even if improved over recent years, the question of whose interest it serves and the validity of euthanasia's guiding assumption deserve reexamination.

We can begin with a point about language. Most of the killing of companion animals does not qualify as euthanasia. Painless though the death may be, it euphemizes and provides only an incomplete definition to consider painless sufficient to earn justification as euthanasia. It refers only to the means of killing, and says nothing about the motivation of the ones authorizing it nor anything of the interests, conditions, needs and desires of the one experiencing its finality.

What would we call it if kin slipped a lethal dose of morphine into granny's IV, delivering her painlessly into oblivion, not because she was dying anyway, but because she had become a burden? Not euthanasia, certainly. So whether the killing of animals can be defended as unavoidable or on some other grounds, it cannot be construed as the good death of one whose life had become unlivable - the victim's primary diagnosis, after all, was "unwanted."

Whose interests? Our culture values nothing so much as self-interest and the commodity-orientated channel into which it strives unceasingly to force that interest. Companion animals, too, are treated as commodities, and like the inanimate one, must be disposable when owners desire, taste, and convenience dictate. Culture conceptions of sacrality or commitment are weak when opposed by notions of human rights and desires. The value of an animal's life has no strong meaning of its own, but only a contingent one related to his or her use to people. If you read the municipal ordinance regarding "animal control" for your community you fill find little or nothing pertaining to the welfare of animals, but only to their disposition when they become, through no fault of their own, troublesome. Clearly then, the interests of a culture of commodity and human convenience are well served by someone's taking the responsibility for disposing, even fatally, of inconvenient animals.

Is that only a coincidence? Are companion animal interests, on balance, still best served by killing their sheltered surplus? When they do not yet suffer do not yet present a picture of clear-and-present danger of sinking into unrelievable suffering, when they arrive at the animal shelter on a leash at the other end of which walks an "owner" - with all this, the assumption that euthanasia prevents suffering seems less then compelling. Furthermore, what is that owner and this culture learning from an animal welfarist about the preciousness of life, and about lifetime commitment, about nondisposability, when the welfarist himself faithfully receives and disposes of inconvenient creatures? Does not the power of life-affirming words collapse under the countervailing weight of such action? How can it be otherwise when those closely associated with the well-being of animals routinely relieve others of their proper responsibilities? And not merely relieve them, but kill their victims?

A few years ago members of another profession faced when I regard as an analogous situation: Foresters and their appropriate relationship with, and responsibilities toward, land and forests on the one hand and society on the other. Forestry has mostly been about harvest, about "resources" and commodities that happened incidentally to stand in tall beauty over land resounding with life and nonconsumer value. The Society of American Foresters' Code of Ethics managed to talk about many things, but not once about their obligations to the forest. In the late 1980's some within the profession began to question its values and priorities. In 1992 the Society adopted a revised Code whose Preamble begins this way: "Stewardship of the land is the cornerstone of the forestry profession." Commodities, employers, international trade - to the extent that forestry carries forward this new ordering of things, every other consideration must change. It is a tradition-bound, typically conservative profession, so revolution may not be expected, but a long step on the way was taken.

Might the field of animal welfare learn from this. Where is its Code of Ethics? What is its cornerstone? Who does it primarily intend to serve? Can't it offer companion animals something better than a painless death? It faces a history and quandaries not unlike those of foresters, who finally confronted theirs. Let the discussion begin, perhaps with these questions: How can animal welfarists best combat, and not facilitate, animal disposability? Is is truly efficacious, for the animals, to continue their non-euthanasial killing? Animal lives and animal welfare's soul depend on the answers.

Alley Cat Allies is Committed to the development of viable no-kill policies - "no-kill" having been defined by Lynda Foro of Doing Things for Animals as the practice of saving animals' lives as the primary organizational function of animal shelters (and other organizations), while allowing for the practice of euthanasia when medically necessary.

This philosophy builds on the important earlier writings of Ed Duvin; his animalines, a grassroots publications he began in the 1980's also played an integral part in the development of the goals and mission of Alley Cat Allies. Duvin has written extensively and convincingly for almost a decade on the tragic plight of companion animals - their subjection to mass slaughter in what we ironically call shelters - particularly in an article title "Getting Out of the Killing Business," which was published by the Animals' Voice Magazine.