Rogier van Bakel posts a bit of a horror story about trying to adopt a dog from a shelter. Oddly, the attendant don’t want to let him visit the kennels, instead asking him to look through a binder and pick a dog for her to bring out. Even after he finds a dog, a big friendly Saint Bernard, the people at the shelter give him the run-around, apparently because they don’t want any of their dogs adopted by families with children.
That post attracted dozens of comments, several relating other people’s animal adoption horror stories. What amazes me is that in some cases the shelters don’t want to give animals to people with undesirable home conditions—children, unfenced yards, too many other pets, living at that location less than a year—even though the shelter kills animals that aren’t adopted.
The people who run these shelters love love animals so much, they’d rather kill them than allow them be adopted by people who might not treat them as well as possible.
I can’t really build a one-to-one analogy, but this kind of thinking is familiar. If these people had medical training, they’d be running organ transplant networks and vehemently insisting that organ donation is so precious that no one should ever be paid for doing it.
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