Dogs Pay the Price for Human Errors
Indifference feels like violence.
Dogs pay the price for human failures
If your dog is missing right now, I hope you won’t read this. it won’t help your current situation, and I don’t want you to feel like I am blaming you. I am blaming society in general.
In nearly every situation where a dog needs help, the root of the problem can be traced back to human failure. Dogs don’t choose to get themselves into bad situations. No dog ever said, “I wish I was in an overcrowded shelter,” or, “i think running on the freeway sounds like fun.” The beginnings of the crisis always start with a human. Maybe it’s a breeder who should not have been breeding dogs in the first place. Maybe it was an owner with good intentions, who really wanted to help a dog but overestimated their capacity to work with a needy dog. Often it is society in general, such as our failure to manage the COVID virus properly, resulting in a wave of people suddenly being at home all the time and wanting the companionship of a dog, not considering how to manage things when they go back to work.
Dogs also suffer when we just don’t give them adequate funding. If the 2 million citizens of King County each gave $5 for a new animal shelter, a $10 Million facility could adequately meet the demands of our current crisis of homeless dogs. I have stood in the lobby of the current shelter when a truck goes by on the main road and the floor bounces up and down because the old building is built on swamp land. They are doing the best they can, getting creative with foster homes and utilizing volunteers, but it is ridiculous that we can’t care for needy dogs properly when it would cost so little if you spread it out over all the taxpayers. $1.2 million could be raised if everyone simply licensed their dogs and cats as required by law.
Certainly my own dogs have been at risk when I have had momentary lapses and failed to ensure overlapping security measures. Viktor escaped when he pried boards off of an old cat door and squeezed out, and his GPS tracker was having technical issues. Sky yanked the leash out of my hand to chase ducks. Fozzie jumped over my arm when I opened the car door, and went running around in coyote territory for five scary minutes. Mu climbed out a basement window, which I didn’t realize was possible. Tino chased his ball toward a road where a large dump truck was coming down the hill and narrowly missed him. Raven backed out of her collar because it loosened over time. Raven only went to say hello to the neighbor’s dogs, and nothing bad happened, but there could have been a car. For all of my failures, I was able to get my dogs back before anything bad happened. It was always my fault. I can’t blame Raven for being overly energetic and enthusiastic. It’s how she was born, and possibly exacerbated by whatever events caused her to be a stray puppy at 3 months old. Raven’s crazy energy will make her a great search dog, and if it sometimes makes her difficult to manage, and could put her at risk, any dangerous situation would not be her fault. If she ever got into trouble, it would be in a situation I could have foreseen and mitigated.
In most cases, the bad situations dogs find themselves in could be avoided with just a small amount of effort on the part of humans. Consider that every single dog currently at a shelter would not be there if the owner had invested less than $50 in a collar with an ID tag and microchip that is properly registered. The King County shelter appears to have 40 dogs, currently, who could have been reunited with their families very easily if they had ID. I have captured hundreds of stray dogs that I would have happily returned to their families if they had had microchips or ID tags. I have picked up the bodies of dogs off the freeway when there were multiple opportunities to prevent their deaths. I was using Calming Signals to try to keep Bella safe when half a dozen people with good intentions came to assist, without using Calming Signals, and they chased her onto the freeway, where I recovered her body a few minutes later.
Our failure to protect dogs is like if we suddenly decided in 2024, after decades of documented proof that seatbelts and airbags save lives, that we just won’t wear seat belts any more and we will disable our airbags because for some strange reason we want more people to die in accidents. Our failure to protect dogs is not because we don’t know how, and so it seems like an act of deliberate cruelty. Everyone knows, or should know, about ID tags and microchips and adequate fences. Not everyone knows about Martingale collars and Calming Signals and protocols for dogs who are newly adopted, but everyone could know, very easily. I have written so many articles about loss prevention. The procedures are not onerous or difficult to understand.
Valentino is a magnificent dog. I love him so much. He does important work and he saves lives. It appears that he was deliberately discarded and left to die. His mother was a stray in the wilderness near a freeway, in a remote area where it appeared she was probably dumped. I trapped her in a humane trap and got her to safety, and Tino was born the next day. I suppose it is possible that Tino’s mother could have ended up alone in the wilderness through some mistake or oversight, but those mistakes could have been so easily avoided or mitigated, like, with a microchip. Also, it appears that no one ever went looking for her, so if she did get into that situation by mistake, her original owner did nothing to correct that mistake. It was okay with them that the dog should pay the price, with her life, for human failure.
It’s not okay with me. Dogs are wonderful people, and they are a great resource for society. To adequately protect them would really take such a minor effort on our part. Stop breeding dogs,for one. Learn about loss prevention. Pay the license fee for your dog because it is the law and because it will help your local shelter. Learn about Calming Signals for if you ever see a stray dog. There are so many easy things people could do to keep our dogs safe. Every day I see a handful of people engaged in heroic efforts to save dogs, volunteering their time, donating to nonprofits, working tirelessly to educate the public, and really giving every ounce of energy for the welfare of dogs. At the same time I see society as a whole turning their backs on dogs, treating them as disposable.
This indifference seems like cruelty, to me, and I don’t understand, with how wonderful dogs are, and how little effort it would take to protect them, why humans are so cruel. I don’t think I’m ever going to understand. My dogs are my family. I would give anything to protect my five mutts. I’m doing all I can to protect every other dog in King County, as much as I can. I need others to stand up and fight the cruel indifference to our dogs, our families. The solutions are so easy, if only we would try.
Amen. Everything you said is so right on. Never ceases to amaze me how many people that get a dog fail to carry through with their commitment to that dog.
Such a great article.