To put this into perspective, about 5 years ago, when I moved to the South and started volunteering at the local animal shelter (dog pound), the kill rate was about 80% (80% of dogs that came in alive left in a trash bag).
Let that sink in for a second. Nearly every dog that came in was killed. The total annual canine intake was around 5,000 dogs -- this is a mid-sized city, not even the biggest one in the state. Add in the other cities, towns, and villages, and we had WAY over 10,000 dogs a year dying in my state alone. Year in and year out, the numbers never declined.
Some days, the intake number was 150 dogs in a shelter that held only 400 -- when they were full, that meant they had to kill that many to make space. Most were killed the minute their 3-day hold was up. Imagine what 150 dead dogs looks like -- then imagine tomorrow is going to look the same. And the day after that. Now imagine that happening in dozens of places.
I started volunteering to walk the big dogs, because a lot of the other volunteers were afraid of them, so they languished in a filthy kennel, with no outside time 24/7 until their appointed hour to die. My heart dropped when I saw GSD after GSD after GSD -- one week I remember there were 12 of them -- I think there were close to 150 that year, most of them young and just normal dogs. Not mixes -- GSDs of every color pattern. Maybe twice as many Shepherd mixes, and few mals, rots and dobes too. There were tiny lap dogs of every conceivable breed -- even a Chinese Crested.
One of my personal dogs was very nearly smuggled out of the euth room by a staff member who called my cell in tears to come get her NOW as a puppy --her mama, a purebred GSD, had just been euthanized in front of the pup because at that time, they had horrible protocols. The pup's reason for being there? Their people moved. Imagine how terrified this pup was...and yet she's the dog who's rehabilitated more foster dogs for me than I can count with her uncanny ability to know what they need -- she's quite literally my partner in rescue....amazing temperament. She has a shining light inside her that's pure devotion. Only in a world gone mad would a dog like this have nearly been euthanized.
Go through enough of that, and the madness of this situation will go deep inside you. At the peak of puppy season in April, whole litters get dropped off and euthanized -- they had to kill 4 litters of perfectly healthy puppies one day I was there. I saw the vet tech who had to do it sobbing behind a dumpster. The reasons for selecting a dog often included "too many of that type" and "no space."
So, yeah, I get why southern shelters are transporting. They're desperate to bring down their kill numbers, because the Powers that Be won't change the social situation that is causing it, in a place with year-round puppy season, cultural aversion to spay/neuter, and too many dogs being born. Good, caring people who haven't lost their sense of decency and humanity yet are trying to be the change.
That said, I'm deeply worried about the way transport is being done. Vet care and temperament testing MUST be properly handled -- and it's not a simple task. There are emerging parasites, bacteria, and illnesses down here that aren't present up North -- and we need to protect northern dog populations. It's irresponsible to expose northern canine populations to this stuff. We have ivermectin-resistant heartworms emerging -- some prevention products are failing. We have rat lungworms attacking dogs, plus chagas, and other things unlikely to be known to northern vets. Our tropical climate puts us on the frontline of emerging diseases coming up from Latin America and the Caribbean. There's stuff I see here that I NEVER saw living out West. Never.
What's more, I know how this shelter in my city vets all the dogs that leave -- I pull dogs from them all the time and knojw the vets and their limitations on resources. I know what extra vetting always needs to be done. I know which people there can't read a fecal float under the microscope properly -- and thus I know to not trust their results. I know that they use the cheapest, least reliable HW test kits, and false negatives are surprisingly common upon retesting with better kits--so we don't assume any dog they advertise as HW(-) is really negative. We have a protocol developed with a rescue-specialized vet to respond to all that. What happens when the transport partners rely on that sub-par vetting though?
I also know which individuals in local shelters can read a GSD, and which ones can't. When one tells me something about temperament, I know not to trust a lot of them. There are a few people who never, ever sugar coat problems, over-disclose issues, and give me good info. Some shelter staff can't read any dogs all that well, or they can only read one common breed but not our breed, which behaves very differently than some other breeds. The temperament testing methodology they use really matters, and you have to be on the ground to know what that is. When you're local though, you just go and spend half a day with the dog to figure it out, or take it home to observe for a week. If I'm pulling a project dog, I know what I'm pulling. Transporter partners sometimes have to rely on what they hear from the shelter staff -- and that worries me, too.
So...it's a complicated problem. I think responsible transporting requires a commitment to excellent vetting and temperament testing pre-transport -- and that's hard for a lot of shelters to manage. It requires time to let disease incubation periods run, and the shelters don't have that time, unless they can find pre-transport foster homes. The FB networkers trying to get dogs out drive me bonkers -- they're invariably clueless about the dogs they're networking -- I've seen dogs with known bite histories being networked on FB as having "good temperaments" by armchair activists who live in the UK and think they're "helping." (Their history is known to me because I've seen the Animal Control report and declined to pull those dogs!) Sending a dog like that to become someone else's problem is terrible. There are SO many really GOOD dogs who deserve that help, I don't understand the need to expend those resources on the ones that have unprovoked bites.
If I had unlimited time, foster homes, money, and help, we'd send good, young GSDs to other breed rescues that could handle placements in places that don't have them. I could literally send the cream of the crop, and even fill a GSR wish list of adopter color requests between May and Sept, and again in Jan when the numbers peak -- we've even had a dad-gum panda come through from a known color-breeder. Want a dark sable? Sure! All black? No problem! White? Okiedokie! WGSL? How about a young red one that came with an AKC pedigree thick with von Arminius and vom Kirschenthal? Seriously, we've had all that. We've even had retired police K9s land in shelters. Dutchies and mals have started popping up more and more too -- they're trendy, and too much dog for the average puppy buyer, so guess what happens?
My city got our kill number down to about 40% locally -- it took five years of hard work by the entire dog community, one dog at a time. They had to go to "open adoptions" to get there -- anyone with a pulse can get a dog from a shelter (homeless, chain in the yard, guard the drug stash, no money for food or vet care, everybody gets a dog -- sometimes for as little as $25). That's brought it's own set of terrible problems.
None of the solutions here is perfect. They're all cost-benefit calculations. No progress whatsoever is being made on spay/neuter, getting people to not let dogs breed indiscriminately, or the mass of BYBs who use their dogs as an ATM, selling as many pups as they can out of trucks in parking lots. I've seen the statistics in my city: intake numbers are going up, not down. It sometimes feels like we're accomplishing nothing.