Death Before Lunch

As a cat sanctuary co-owner, I often have conversations with staff at public shelters. These are the ones that have cement floors and metal kennel doors with cards clipped to the front stating the animal's age, sex, intake date, and whether they were a stray or an owner surrender. During one of these conversations, the shelter's manager told me, "I walk these kennels once a day trying to decide who to euthanize."

Unfortunately, there was no feeling in her voice. She simply said this like she was explaining a daily chore to me – trash on Tuesdays, laundry on Thursdays; death before lunch. This left me stunned. I truly didn't know how to respond, so I listened as she went on, "Most of the animals that come in, especially the owner surrenders, are euthanized almost immediately. We don't have any room." There was no emotion, no anger or cruelty, just logistics.

Here we find the cold, hard truth: A system that was built to shelter animals has become a system that plays God. While people think of euthanasia as a last resort, when it comes to animal shelter overcrowding it's a form of inventory management, population control. Managers don't think about whether an animal deserves to live. Instead, they think about whether they have room to let the animal live. Therefore, 8% of all animals surrendered to shelters in 2024 were euthanized (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal).

This isn't something that's discussed with the public. It's not written in newspaper headlines or shared on the nightly news. It's just a series of daily calculations that are made beneath the fluorescent lights of your local animal shelter. Questions like: Which cat is older? Which one has a cold that could spread throughout the other cats in the shelter? Who's been here too long? Who's the shy one? Who's unlikely to get adopted quickly?

Systems require criteria, which require categories. These are what create thresholds like friendly, adoptable, feral, medical, behavioral, or the one we all hope for: space-available. All of these labels feel clinical, neutral, and necessary, but none of them capture who a cat really is. Are they the ones who press their head into your palm when you open their kennel's door? Are they a bonded pair who curl up in the back of a cage, hiding from visitors?

No Room Left

For any system to work properly, there must be order. When chaos disrupts that order, there must also be a way to restore it.

The same principle applies to animal shelters. They promise safety, intake, and a second chance for a pet who's abandoned because their family could no longer afford rent, an elderly person who dies and has nobody who can take their pet, or even those litters that are born in someone's backyard – whether intentionally or not.

As the co-owner of a cat sanctuary, I live in the gray area – that line that's somewhere between promise and reality. I see it all the time: People believe that if they surrender their pet to a local shelter, they'll be safe. This is what they tell themselves to feel better about letting go. After all, there's a building with staff, and you've signed all the papers, so the system will take care of everything else.

Unfortunately, there's one thing you haven't thought about – the math. It starts long before your pet even arrives at the shelter. The math must account for the fact that there are only so many kennels, foster homes, and staff hours. Nevertheless, the intake process doesn't stop just because there's no more room. This is especially true with how overwhelming kitten season is. During this time, the population seemingly doubles in only a few weeks. At the same time, you must also take into account the fact that shelter funding fluctuates.

You may think that this system can't be that complicated, though. After all, you're just taking animals in and adopting them out. However, what many people don't realize is that "out" doesn't always mean adopted.

The Ground is Collapsing

You may ask, "What about no-kill shelters? Is it better to take my cat there?" Unfortunately, even the definition of a no-kill shelter is conditional. It's a term coined by Best Friends Animal Society in the 1990s and is built around a 90% live release rate — a threshold chosen because animals with irremediable medical or behavioral conditions typically represent no more than 10% of shelter intake. But the label is only as honest as the shelter's intake policies. A limited-admission shelter that selects young, healthy, highly adoptable animals can hit 90% without ever confronting the harder cases. The animals those shelters turn away go somewhere — usually to open-admission shelters like the one where the kennel manager worked.

This isn't something I thought I'd be dealing with when we opened our cat sanctuary. Instead, I thought that I'd be dealing with problems like neglect, irresponsible owners, and the lack of spay and neuter access. While these are real issues, now I can see that there's also something behind all of this. The shelter system isn’t just struggling—it is structurally broken at its core.

The shelter system was never built with the intention to absorb the consequences of larger systemic failures – things like the absence of pet-friendly housing policies (Feilmeier, Kerry. "With Too Many Pets Needing Homes, It's a Good Time to Adopt." Heartland Humane Society, 3 Apr. 2023), people living in poverty, or simply the lack of accessible veterinary care. Shelters were meant to create order, to centralize stray populations, to provide pathways towards adoption, and to reassure the public that abandoned animals are not simply disappearing.

Today's Cold, Hard Truth

With the lack of funding and space in shelters today, we're now in a state of triage. When you watch the intake desk at any shelter on a busy day, you'll see it.

A lady walks in with a box full of kittens that were born under their porch. As she speaks to the intake coordinator, I can hear her saying, "I don't have a choice. I need to surrender them." Staff have no choice but to accept them and assign them a number. After all, they're an "open admission shelter," so they have to take every cat that comes through their doors.

The person says, "I know I'm doing the responsible thing because we didn't just leave them on the street." The system will agree that they're "responsible." However, this is also what they've told around 900,000 pet owners since January 2021 (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). This doesn't mean that the person here is the problem. The real problem is the fact that the shelter's infrastructure was never intended to take this load.

Where Criticism Belongs

Now that you see the real issue here, we must ask if the woman walking the kennels is to blame. Is she really callous and indifferent? Honestly, I don't think so. Instead, what I think we're seeing is the shelter structure placing a huge strain upon the people who work there.

This woman knows she only has a certain number of kennels. She also knows that they have an intake log and an adoption board to work with. Let's say she has 40 kennels, 17 new intakes, and only 3 pending pickups. This means 14 animals can't stay. It's up to her to ensure the system continues operating, that forms are processed, cages are cleaned, and animals moved around properly.

All of this feels orderly, organized, and necessary, but the promise it makes to the public is misaligned. When someone drops off their cat at a shelter, they believe the cat is going to a safe place. They think that there will be volunteers cooing over them, adopters strolling through, and happy endings waiting to happen. What they don't think about is the lady walking the kennels with her clipboard, trying to decide whose existence the building can afford.

Initially, the shelter system was designed to manage a problem, not eliminate its causes. However, today it has to absorb failed housing policy, gaps in healthcare, and economic instability. For lawmakers, it's easier to have the shelters take care of this failure than to build more pet-friendly housing, subsidize veterinary care, or take other steps to prevent an uptick in cat surrender statistics. Until this changes, the walk down the kennels will continue.

The Story Doesn't End Here

In 2024, 4.19 million pets were adopted from shelters, but this number is still low because prior to the pandemic in 2020, there were 4.42 million pets adopted from shelters each year. This means that over 250,000 fewer animals are finding homes today. (Shelter Animals Count. 2024 Annual Analysis: Comparing 2024 to 2023 and 2019. ASPCA, 2024).

Some have also discovered that the pursuit of the 90% metric has, in some cases, led to troubling workarounds. One of which is the reclassification of adoptable cats as community animals and releasing them onto the streets, where survival is unlikely. While this does effectively boost the shelter's live-release rate on paper, it results in early deaths because these cats are not conditioned to live in such environments after being house cats.

While shelters will continue to think of each of their cats as merely a number, sanctuaries like ours know they're so much more than that. They're lives that are meaningful. Thankfully, the cats will also never know that they're part of this system. Instead, they stretch, blink, and ask to be petted.

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