I just got back from a two-day chemical immobilization of animals training in Corona, California; the class was great, but the fact that I was taking it with a bunch of animal control officers, zookeepers, wildlife "managers", and even a pest control guy made it a bit draining. It's hard to spend so much time with a group of people who, to an outsider, appear to be in the same broad field as I am, but when you get a closer look, are doing almost the opposite of what I do. These are animal captors and killers; true, some of them are rescuers as well, but they differ from me in that they're more than willing to kill an animal the moment it breaches some threshold of convenience. They don't rehabilitate -- they kill, and rationalize it by convincing themselves that the animal had no future anyway, and sugar-coat it by calling it euthanasia. Imagine if we treated mentally ill human beings the same way we treat animals with special needs.
Euthanasia is Greek for 'good death', which is open to a great degree of interpretation. In my opinion, for a death to be good, it needs to also be necessary, and for it to be necessary, it needs to be carried out for reasons more compelling than 'we're not sure what else to do with this animal'.
We know the ugly plight of dogs and cats, and we know how the so-called wildlife managers like to kill kill kill, especially when it comes to predators, but I suppose one of the things that surprised me most was hearing how some animal control agencies dispose of livestock when they don't know what else to do with them -- by selling them at auction. How is that any different from selling dogs at the animal shelter? That's not considered ethical, right? So why is it OK to sell a goat or a pig at market value? And what does that do from a management perspective to an organization's desire to see animals adopted? For the shelter's bottom line, adoption suddenly isn't the best option anymore, because selling the animal will bring in more money. So much for ethics.
In a room full of supposed animal welfare professionals, I was surprised at how many laughed when we watched a video of a wolf having a rough recovery from anesthesia. Anti-PETA comments were heard here and there, and the general feeling seemed to me to be one of superiority over those who hold compassion in higher regard than efficiency. I even heard people making quiet remarks about me to each other -- apparently even in 2008, there are career fields where the big guy with the tattoos is out of place. And yet I scored high on my exam, excelled with both rifles and blowpipes, and managed to learn as much as anyone else did. Not to mention I'm very good at my job.
I can't say I was especially excited about it yesterday, though, because I left the training thinking, "These are the other people in my field." But as I've had more time to digest it all, I've realized that they're not. The other people in my field are the directors and animal caretakers at legitimate animal sanctuaries around the country and the world, and there may not be very many of them, but that only gives me a louder voice and a more supportive community to be a part of. Olympic Animal Sanctuary will apply for accreditation this summer, and at that point I'll have even more opportunity to take part in that community of others who understand what I do and why I do it. It won't be perfect; there will be frustrations, and people I'd rather not have to deal with, but at least I won't mistakenly feel that I've fallen into a community of captors and killers, and that goes a long way toward keeping me motivated and keeping burnout off the table. It feels so good to be in a career that I want to stay in for another thirty years, even on the worst days.
