More Cape Breton Fudge

From this afternoon's CBC news website
Decision to euthanize cats with needle upsets Sydney shelter staff
Last Updated: Thursday, March 19, 2009 12:39 PM AT CBC News
The SPCA's new hands-on method of euthanizing cats is distressing some animal shelter workers in Cape Breton.
SPCA animal shelters in Nova Scotia will no longer use carbon dioxide gas, so cats will be injected with a lethal mix of drugs — the same method used to put down dogs.
Patsy Rose, manager of the Cape Breton SPCA branch, said the provincial society that oversees branches across Nova Scotia decided to adopt lethal injection for cats after receiving complaints about the use of gas.
Rose said that means her Sydney shelter's eight staff members will have to hold cats as they die.
"When you do lethal injection, you're holding the animal in your arms," she told CBC News. "It's harder on the staff so it's more stressful on them."
With the old method, she said, workers put the cat in a chamber and leave the room as it fills with gas.
"People think CO2 and gas and it's a horrible thing, but it isn't. It's a quick, fast death for an animal. Not that death is nice, but sometimes it has to happen," Rose said.
Rose said while the carbon dioxide tank is an acceptable way to euthanize cats, veterinarians consider lethal injection to be more humane.
Workers at the Sydney shelter are being trained in the new method. Rose said she doesn't know when the shelter will make the switch, but it should happen by the end of the year.
"They don't want to do it, but they will have to do it," Rose said. "But they're dead set against it."
The Cape Breton SPCA put down more than 1,000 cats last year.
Rose said the shelter will no longer euthanize cats for the public. Instead, people will have to pay more to have it done at a veterinarian's office.


Honestly, this is the best argument that I've heard yet for getting rid of the gas chamber at the Cape Breton SPCA Branch shelter. The very fact that it made it possible for workers to be less distressed about killing cats with the gas chamber should be a red flag.


For the benefit of anyone who still doesn't get it, I have taken the liberty of quoting an article that was published by the No Kill Advocacy Center and is available online at http://www.nokilladvocacycenter.org/pdf/No%20Gas%20Chamber.pdf
Unconventional Wisdom
Every issue we look at a bit of traditional animal sheltering “dogma” and analyze
it to see if it is true. We also offer a No Kill alternative - what we call “No Kill
Know How” to give a different perspective oriented toward preserving and
protecting life. If we accept responsibility for the dogs and cats in our shelter
instead of hiding behind conventional wisdom, we are better suited to meet the
challenges involved with saving lives.


A CALL TO BAN THE GAS CHAMBER


Conventional Wisdom
While sodium pentobarbital injection is the preferred method of killing dogs and cats in shelters, gas systems are acceptable if used correctly or for other species of animals.
No Kill Know How:
Webster’s dictionary defines euthanasia as “the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy.” Unfortunately, in most shelter environments, animals are not solely being killed because they are hopelessly sick or injured, but rather as “population control.”


In this environment, shelter killing—particularly of healthy and treatable animals—raises a host
of ethical questions and dilemmas, many of which are being raised by the public in communities across the country.
At the very least, shelters who kill, particularly those which kill large numbers of animals, are obligated to ensure that employees are technically proficient, competent, skilled, compassionate, properly trained, and doing everything in their power to make sure the animals are as free from stress and anxiety as possible. The use of a gas chamber does not allow this.
A “relatively painless” death can only occur in an environment where sensitivity, compassion, and skill, combine with efforts to minimize distress and anxiety. By contrast, gas systems take time to kill— during which animals experience distress and anxiety, and can struggle to survive.
They can result in animals surviving the gassing, only to suffer even more. And they take longer to kill if animals are young, old, or have respiratory infections, which is common in some shelters. They are designed for the ease of shelter workers, not care and compassion for the animals.
The use of such systems to kill animals is universally condemned by humane advocates and progressive shelters, and has been outlawed for dogs and cats in several states including New York and California.
According to Dr. Michael Moyer, V.M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania College of Veterinary Medicine: "There is no progressive sheltering agency of any scope or stature willing to philosophically embrace gas systems for the killing of any species of animals. Sheltering is deliberately, inexorably, and philosophically moving away from mass killing as an acceptable method of dog/cat population control.
That there are technical features of one system that distinguish it from other such systems is irrelevant. Profit center analysis, head-to-head demonstrations, ease of use, load capacity—none of these are capable of overcoming the
humane and philosophical objection to mechanized death at the core of those who have moved away from this technology.
In short, they should never be used."
From the Euthanasia Facts article on the Animal Liberation Front Website
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/Pets/PetCare/EuthanasiaFacts.htm
California banned the use of CO gas chambers for euthanasia effective January 1,2001. Many injection givers initially resisted the change, because injection requires two workers and extended physical contact with the animal, but once they understood the process, they realized it is better for the animal, and actually less stressful for them. For some animals, the gentle touch of a shelter worker during the euthanasia process may be the only real affection they have ever had. The lethal injection technique allows the worker to comfort the animal and experience closure of the death process. Three states (AZ, SC, TN) specifically allow nitrogen gas, and three (OK, SC, TN) allow carbon monoxide; all of these states also allow lethal injection, with gas as an alternate method. Gas chambers have many limitations which make the method less practical, slower, more dangerous to staff (a shelter worker died of CO poisoning just last year), and ultimately more expensive than lethal injection.
Abuse of the chamber is common. While shelter policies commonly require physical separation in individual cages and close observation of the process, in many cases animals are simply shoved into the chamber, the door sealed, the button pushed, and the employee walks away. The sponsor of the bill in Tennessee that would mandate lethal injection said of the gas chamber that it "results in a slow, painful death." Ronald R. Grier and Tom L. Colvin's 1990 Euthanasia Guide for Animal Shelters recommends that all animals should be tranquilized before placement in the chamber --something that is virtually never done in practice.
So let me get this straight, leaving the room so one didn't have to watch the cats die is not what should have been happening? Hmmm.
I distinctly remember reading in the online minutes from the site visit at the Branch that there was a discussion of a 'properly run gas chamber' and that it was "also suggested was that they go to the media with the changes they HAVE made to make the shelter more humane. "
Somehow I don't think that this thinly disguised plea for sympathy for the workers .... which is in reality actually a gambit to justify past and continued use of the gas chamber .... is quite what the board had in mind for improved media relations.
The suggestion that the society has only recently taken up a position against the use of the gas chamber is hopefully an unintended slur on every other branch in the province. Anyone reading that article would have no idea that the CB Branch has been the lone holdout and would instead think that the CB branch workers are the only ones too sensitive to follow the "new' policy.
No sir... I do not think thats the media blitz the branch was meant to do at all!