The Deal With Animals with Marika S. Bell
Humans interact with animals every day of our lives: diet, wildlife, clothes and even medicines, are all intersections we often don’t think about.
This is a podcast about the interactions and connections between humans and non-human animals.
Our mission is to make research more accessible to the public while sharing the voices and lived experience of our human connection with animals.
The Deal With Animals with Marika S. Bell
78: Speeding Up the System with Kristen Hassen (S8)
It is not about animals. It is not about people. There is not a increase in cruelty and neglect in this country. There is not an increase in horrible dogs. The system is lower functioning than it's been in a long time. It's moving more slowly and it never really worked in the first place. - Kristen Hassen
Episode 6 of Series 8 Transcript
In this episode we dive headfirst into the complexities of animal shelters while also
shedding light on the systemic issues that animal shelters battle. We'll delve into the delicate balance within the shelter system, as the staff strive to serve both the animals and the public.
Guest: Over the previous decade, I’ve led three, large, government animal shelters in major U.S. cities. I’ve demonstrated that effectively leading animal services agencies requires a careful balance among five elements: public health and safety, lifesaving outcomes, community programs, humane care, and cost efficiency. I believe the most successful animal shelters engage their entire community in solutions, opening their doors, making it easy to help, and celebrating every single person who helps lost and homeless pets.
Today, I provide consultation and support services to many of the nation’s largest and most high-profile animal shelters. I also lead projects and provide consultative services to numerous national organizations including Petco Foundation, Pedigree Foundation, Banfield Foundation, VCA Charities, and Best Friends Animal Society.
Book Recommendations: All About Love: New Visions by Bell Hooks and The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals: The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals by Katja M. Guenther
Other Links:
The Netherlands: Worlds First Country with Zero Stray Dogs-
Outcomes for Pets with Kristen Hassen
44: Animals and Domestic Violence with Theres…
49: The Culture of Free Living Dogs wit…
Read the Blog! (Guest profiles, book recommendations, trailers and more!)
What to start your own podcast in he Animal Advocacy or Animal Welfare Space? Check out my Podcast Mentoring Services!
It is not about animals. It is not about people. There is not an increase in cruelty and neglect in this country. There is not an increase in horrible dogs. The system is lower functioning than it's been in a long time. It's moving more slowly and it never really worked in the first place.
Speaker 2:This is the Deal with Animals. I'm Marika Bell, anthrozoologist, cptt, dog trainer and an animal myself. This is a podcast about the connection and interaction between humans and other animals. Welcome to today's episode, which is episode six of series eight, the World of Animal Welfare and Sheltering. First of all, I wanna give you an update about the series. There are just so many topics that I wanna cover in this series yes, I know you've heard that one before, and there's still a couple more episodes that I'm organizing the recording times with my guests for and after all you've heard in this series, I'm sure you will understand, and not at all be surprised, that sometimes it's hard to squeeze in an interview into a busy schedule of saving lives. So for October we're going to be listening to a couple of specials. These are episodes I've recorded recently, but I held them back because I wanted to bring them to you in the magical month of October. So get ready for two that's right, two specials in October. Then we will finish off series eight in November, and even then I'm sure I won't even have covered all the subjects I wanna hit. The problems that shelters face are many, and while I can't get all the topics here, I will provide links in next month's newsletter to a few other podcasts that I know of that are certainly filling the gaps. If you're keen to hear more about what's going on in the world of animal welfare and sheltering and you haven't yet signed up for the Deal with Animals newsletter, go to thedealwithanimalscom and sign up now.
Speaker 2:This episode features an expert with over a decade of experience in managing high intake animal shelters. Frustrated by the limitations, they've embarked on a mission to transform the way we think about and operate animal shelters. Kristen Hassan recently founded Outcomes for Pets to address worsening shelter conditions. They aim to connect people, shelters and academic institutions to save more lives. This episode explores shelter challenges and solutions, from abolishing housing restrictions to securing federal and state funding for animal welfare. And I'm not gonna lie, this episode with Kristen was incredibly thought-provoking for me. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. But one quick thing before we start. There is some discussion about domestic abuse, so please be aware that while this is not a large part of the discussion, it is in there. So thank you for joining me as we ask the question what's the deal with animals? All right, welcome to the podcast. Would you please introduce yourself and share your pronouns?
Speaker 1:Yep, my name is Kristen Hassan and my pronouns are she they.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. And why don't we just start with introducing yourself by telling us a early childhood memory, your first memory of your interaction with an animal perhaps, or something that was really formative for you?
Speaker 1:Okay, I have two, because I think there were two experiences that really brought me to where I am today. One was that I loved pet stores. I don't know, were you a pet store kid, did you love?
Speaker 2:pet stores. I was a freak about pet stores. My first job was at a pet store, because I spent all day there anyway.
Speaker 1:I thought they were just like so amazing. It was like a zoo where you could buy everything.
Speaker 1:And so from very early childhood my mom would like indulge this and buy me some pet that I would keep for a number of months, and then that pet almost always ended up dead. Like I sent my nutes floating on a boat in my pool, I let my frogs go, my bird I tied a string to its leg so it could free fly. It got away, and so it was really this early experience of having the love of animals so connected to how we commodify animals and realizing that at the end of the line, for most of those animals is suffering and death. And I think I got that from a pretty young age because of that. But that also didn't mean I didn't want to consume. It was complicated, right, like I still, when I go to pet stores, I still imagine getting to look at those cool animals every day.
Speaker 1:So that was the first one, and then the second one I was a victim of child abuse and I've talked about this sometimes in talks I've given, because it's really connected for me to why I do this work. But at the time that I was experiencing physical and sexual abuse, my animals were really my protectors and they were the only witnesses and they were my friends and it was really early on that I knew I wanted to do something to give back to them and I knew there was a connection between transparency and bringing bad things out into the open and protecting kids and animals, and so that connection was made really early. So those two, I think both really had an impact.
Speaker 2:I would like to just speak to that for a moment, because we have an episode talking about domestic abuse and childhood trauma in one of the earlier series and it really is this connection that kids have to animals that I kind of wish they didn't have. But I wonder sometimes also if it's one of the reasons why I have such a strong connection to animals, because when I think about animals, they are always the ones that you can trust, right Humans? You can't always trust a human, but you can trust an animal. They're never gonna lie. You might not read them appropriately, but they're giving you all the information you need to have a safe and good interaction with them, and humans just aren't that way.
Speaker 1:I think that's right. It's where the best part of our work comes from and it brings all the worst in us too, and when I first I spoke about it was at a big conference and I didn't tell anyone I was gonna do it. I remember being so nervous and I spoke about just my trauma history and what that meant to me. And afterwards, for about a year after, I was approached by hundreds, literally hundreds of people in the field telling their stories and the connection for them, and I think once we recognize that connection, that can be a superpower too. It doesn't have to be a bad thing, even though it came from a place of trauma and pain. It's like one of the things that I think and hope drives the work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And pet stores, man, Like I said, I could spend so much time in pet stores and totally know what you mean. I came to this realization in my teens that most of the pets that I had did not have a happy life, and it was something I was trying to learn along the way. And I didn't. It wasn't that I blamed myself, that, oh sometimes, but overall it wasn't my fault as a child that I didn't know what I was doing. It was this there was something wrong with our culture that we were giving people lives to just do what we wanted with.
Speaker 2:Like, here's some goldfish, Maybe they'll live, maybe they won't. There's very little information how to take care of it. So I accidentally boiled my goldfish because I put their little tiny, way too small bowl in a window and it was summer and I felt terrible. And I could list at least half a dozen other animals that my family killed because lack of education for what that animal actually needed to survive or to thrive or any of these things. And that's not just your and my story, is it? That's a story for almost everyone who had a pet as a child. So I yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think, like when you take like our experience going to zoos I was in Columbus, ohio, which has a pretty, the famous Jack Hannah zoo, and so when all you see is the animals on the other side of the human gaze and animals able to be consumed by people in one way or another, I actually think it's really related now to how we think about cats and dogs and dogs. I think more and more that really they exist for our consumption and for our gaze and it's a whole lot of pressure we're putting on them to live up to that. It's something I've been thinking a lot about lately, because when we, when they end up in shelters, they had a life before us and we don't know anything about it. We're not able to tell their histories and know what they went through, and then we expect to just be able to re-home them without any carryover from that entire other life they lived.
Speaker 2:We do it. We can make them feel comfortable, but we don't know what happened to them, and it's very hard to to understand someone fully when you don't really know where they're coming from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we had this dog that I still think about who he came. He was on a euthanasial list at a shelter where I was the director and he had bitten someone's ear off and of course, I just about just signed the paper, signed the euthanasia, without really looking at it, and it was one of my staff that stopped me and it turned out that his female owner had been being assaulted in a domestic violence incident and the man had had been beating the woman, almost almost killing her, and the dog intervenes and attacked the man and the man then beat the dog within an inch of his life too. But what was really, I think, just how quickly I was willing to just say okay, whatever, it's a, this terrible thing it's got to go when really like that was potentially and possibly an act of heroism. I don't know how it played out, but there's so much in that situation that I didn't understand and we got that dog out of life.
Speaker 2:And that's right.
Speaker 1:It has a good ending. We sent it to someone who really his story resonated with them and he got longer term rehabilitation and ended up doing fine, but their lives just. I think that, like when I think about animal shelters, the thing that maybe bothers me most is how they render animals lives invisible in every way and totally decontextualized from the places they've lived. And I've been thinking about like that is also true of factory farms and I wonder if there's something we can do to affirm that the animals come from a place and a time and that that may have meaning.
Speaker 2:Let's go back for a second and let everyone know what you do now. What is your organization now and what is it that you're doing at the moment?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so my I ran three large government animal shelters over a period of about 10 years.
Speaker 1:The two I think that were the most impactful were in Austin, texas, and Tucson, arizona, both with intakes between 18 and 20,000 animals a year, and I had enough. I think that I was lucky enough to work for extraordinary local governments, but the whole entire pound system that still governs animal shelters it just wasn't. I really felt like it needed to change and I was limited in my ability to help create that change. So I worked on a couple of projects at the beginning of COVID, one called human animal support services, which was an effort to connect animal and human social justice movement, and more recently, about a year ago, I started a consulting firm called Outcomes for Pets, and I did that mostly because the state of animal shelters is rapidly declining. Things are getting worse and worse very quickly, and so I felt like it was fairly urgent, because of my background in running high volume shelters, to be able to step in and help. There's a lot of new people running these places and it's pretty complex.
Speaker 2:What are you finding that you're doing the most? Is there like one particular issue that keeps coming up that you're having to help people with or that you find is a really impactful thing that they can do? That if they change it like it just helps everything else?
Speaker 1:I think what I'm trying to do is connect the dots between the public, the public, animal shelters and then more academic institutions who maybe can do something to help. And so I think that people there's just such a massive misunderstanding about what's happening to animals when they go into shelters, and so I tend to work at the biggest ones in the country that have very high intakes, and so on any given day, 50 to 100 dogs are coming into care. They're quickly put into kennels. Their stray-hole period starts. That can be anywhere from a day to a week and two things are happening.
Speaker 1:One is that people shelters that are still really committed to maintaining high life saving rates are finding themselves far over capacity, with pretty poor conditions for the animals relative to before the pandemic. And then some shelters are going back to the days of okay, we've got a euthanized 40 dogs today. Who's it going to be? And that's that is often just choosing what kennel that day. It has very little to do with anything about the animal, and so what I'm trying to do is buy animals when I'm in the shelters, buy animals some more time and help shelters orient to getting them out versus euthanizing them. Euthanasia is very fast. It's a fast way to depopulate. But we know that the need in the community is such that we won't euthanize our way out of the problem, and getting the system speeding up again is the heart of my work. The system slowed down a lot during COVID and so most people don't realize that intakes to lower than it was before the pandemic, but that we're moving much slower getting animals out, and I think there's a lot of reasons for that.
Speaker 2:Do you want to go into some of those reasons?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you think about. There's four rules of marketing and I cannot, for the life of me, remember what they are, but we do the opposite of all of them in animal welfare, so we make it really hard for people to get animals out. We put a lot of barriers in place for that to happen, and we feel that we have to let people know every possible bad thing about the animals before they can take them home. And then oftentimes we just tell people no, and so it's really an interesting and distressing psychology to walk into a shelter that is euthanizing 30 to 40 animals a day, but as people are coming trying to take animals home, you'll hear just as often as not them being turned away. The staff will say, oh, no, we don't have.
Speaker 1:I was at a shelter that had I don't know 100 and some puppies not too long ago and I heard a staff member say, oh, we don't have any puppies, and it was this moment of realizing that I think one of the coping mechanisms for shelter staff is that they are tired, they are burned out, and a lot of them are started during the pandemic, and engaging the public takes energy, and these aren't. This isn't to criticize those individuals. I think this is like a phenomenon happening. It's a result of the system, but to engage people takes longer and so it's quicker just to say no, it's quicker just to take the animal in rather than try to help get it home. And at the same time, I think there are probably economic conditions that are resulting in fewer people taking animals home.
Speaker 1:It's risky I think about adopting a pit bull dog and I think I own a home now. I may not in the future and would I be able to find somewhere to live, and I think a lot of folks are thinking about that but really, outcomes the number of animals are getting adopted is staying at about the same rate. What's happened is a big bottleneck in the system, so the average length of stay of dogs is about 80 days now, which is more than double what it was before the pandemic. So they're getting stuck in the system and then even if I think probably better than most people, marika that when they get stuck in the system they can come in perfectly fine, but they can become really unsafe and unwell in the shelter and it puts us in a hard position because then getting them out is harder, it carries more risk and even if we hold on to them longer, they may still end up being euthanized for a behavioral decline at the end.
Speaker 2:Yes, of course I've seen that and this idea that people just don't have the bandwidth to interact with the public in order to get the animals out. They don't as much as they want to and they're doing this job for the animals because nobody does this job, because they hate animals right, they do it because they love animals.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I was at a shelter. I don't think they'd mind me saying it's a little shelter in Michigan called Beringon County and they have five paid staff members and when I was there they had about 200 animals in care, five paid staff members total, and so they're getting there. I have never met harder working people. But they're getting there and they're just trying to meet very minimum care standards for the animals every day, getting their kennels clean, getting them fed, and they are doing everything right and that they are letting volunteers help get animals adopted. But a lot of orgs, especially in smaller towns especially as local funding there's more competition for it they don't have the resources. They need to do much else than react, and reacting means just making sure everybody is fed and that the kennel is cleaned, and in some cases that's not happening either.
Speaker 1:I've been talking more about libraries lately because I was able to meet with someone involved in the change from. Do you remember how libraries used to be all fine based? Yeah, like that was like the nightmare of my childhood. I could have a panic attack thinking about the days when I owed like $60 and fines.
Speaker 2:I was once asked what is my weird fear? Like everybody has a weird fear and mine is libraries. I hate going into libraries Like I love libraries. Libraries are awesome. I love books my listeners know this but going into a library like gives me a panic attack. There were so many times where I would get a library book out and you forget to return it. Or you did return it and they've lost it Right. So now they think that you owe them tons of money and oh my gosh, as a kid it was so stressful and yeah, anyway, libraries, I totally get it.
Speaker 1:Do you remember if you were a book nerd kid too, like I, was just such an introverted nerd that, knowing I owed those fees, couldn't get more books. It was really terrible and I think it's not. It's not a surprise that a lot of people feel that way about animal shelters, because you go in to get your pet and you're hit with fees and fines. It can add up to many hundreds of dollars very quickly. You may be cited with civil or criminal charges depending on the intake. And what libraries did is. They shifted away from that need for localized penalty fine based funding and they actually got line items in the federal budget. There is a line item for libraries of federal money and in states, so there's state funding now that goes to animal shelters. And when we think about animal welfare, I think one of the big changes that needs to happen is we need federal and state funding directed towards animal welfare, both prevention and sheltering services, so that we're disconnecting animal welfare from any one locality and making sure that there's more consistent funding across the board.
Speaker 2:Well, that's interesting. Are there ways that a shelter can just do that? Is there like a practical step that any shelter could take just to get going with that kind of project?
Speaker 1:Probably not, unless they're engaged with the national orgs who are doing legislative work already there are a lot of people and I've been learning in Australia.
Speaker 1:The Animal Justice Party has been one of my beacons of knowledge because they are passing low hanging fruit legislation and really doing just such incredible work to affirm that pets are really our family to people, and they're getting funding. They're getting legislation. For instance, they passed some bill that would ensure that when people go into assisted living, they can keep their pet, and so we need the same thing here in the US, and so what we need is the National Arbs, aspca, humane Society others to start legislating for state and federal funding, and I think that funding is not just needed for shelters but for proactive services like Spayneuter In Austin. We've had free Spayneuter and low cost Spayneuter for 15 years through a mansepet. They're an amazing organization and yet they're operating five to six days a week, 14 years in, and they're still aligned at 6 am every morning, like there are not enough services for the people that want them, and if we could solve some of that, we could really lower the number of animals entering the institution.
Speaker 2:At the Animal Care Expo this year we talked about a few things that you think that animal shelters should be thinking about over the next five to 10 years and kind of where animal sheltering is going. Is that one of them?
Speaker 1:Yes, I think it's part of one of them. I think that when we think about animal shelters, we're looking at a majority of constituents. In any given community, in any given state, 60 to 70% of people likely own a pet. Those numbers vary a little bit, but we know that most people own pets, so it's a majority issue which, as we know, are really hard to find something everyone agrees on. And so we have a responsibility, I think, to start thinking about how the pound, how the shelter model and I call that the pound model because of the roots, where it came from how that impacts and really restricts our ability to think outside of it.
Speaker 1:So an easy example is that we know housing restrictions are a huge problem. Animals over X number of pounds or animals that are one of 20 breeds or animals that meet any kind of criteria that are restricted by any one landlord mean that people cannot find safe, affordable housing and live with their pet, even if their pet is perfectly well behaved Well. So what often happens in shelters is we have droves of people coming in to surrender their, their pets that are restricted because they don't have safe housing, and then we have people not adopting animals because of these restrictions, we are effectively subsidizing those restrictions for landlords, for homeowners associations. If the shelter didn't exist as a repository for animals, it would be much harder and they would get much more pushback for the policies that they have. And so when we think about the pounds and animal shelters of today, we have to start actively pushing back on that, and landlords and homeowners associations should be paying for that if they are going to be restricting pets and people from living somewhere just because of the breeder size of the animal.
Speaker 2:So you're saying that the homeowners association or the government restrictions actually need to be paying in to the shelters in order to house the animals that they're inevitably pushing into the shelter system?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would prefer that the shelter system didn't exist as a repository for those animals. But as long as it does, as long as there aren't laws prohibiting that kind of discrimination, they should be paying for that, because if the shelters didn't exist, they simply couldn't do it. There wouldn't be anywhere for the animals to go, it would create public safety issues, there would be a lot more outcry. But the just the existence of a building where you can't keep an animal, you just bring it in, that existence of that service perpetuates the discrimination itself.
Speaker 2:So what would it look like if we didn't have animal shelters, where people couldn't bring their animals in?
Speaker 1:I get this question a lot and it's a really important one. I don't think that we are facing a future without safe places for animals. If you're familiar with the human safe place project that exists all over the United States, you may have seen their signs or these big yellow signs that hang in windows of different places like fire stations, grocery stores that say safe place. I think we could look at a future and envision a future that's closer to that for animals, where there are places where animals can go to find safe respite, but we don't have them living in institutions over long periods of time. They're just short stopping points for pets. Part of the reason we can't do that now is that we haven't solved the lost pet issue. We still have pretty abysmal return to owner rates. Most animals, if they get lost and go to a shelter, are not going to go back home. There's a lot of reasons for that, but we need to solve for that. So every animal that gets lost, we know who that animal is connected to and we need to create those systems of support for pet owners. Most animals are not coming in because people don't want them. Only about 22% of animals that come into shelters are given up by their owners. The vast majority are still lost. It's 55 to 60 plus percent and so, for the folks that are having to surrender their animal, we need better networks of support and we also we need to.
Speaker 1:People need to have a higher investment in rehoming their own animals.
Speaker 1:One of my colleagues is doing a project now at her shelter where she's charging $100 fee for owner surrenders, and we've been really hesitant to do this because we don't want to have, we don't want to encourage people to let animals go to avoid a fee, and we also don't want to punish people who are already struggling financially.
Speaker 1:But what she did is she's incentivizing their engagement in the process of rehoming their pets. So there's four or five things they can do that are all really simple creating an adoption profile on a self-rehoming platform, posting the pet on social media, helping to market the pet, visiting it while it's in the shelter, and if they do those things, they can get their fee for owner surrender waived. But we've made animals disposable by just having this building sitting here, and shelters are always going to be necessary for lost animals they can't talk, unfortunately and for animals that are truly in danger. There is cruelty and neglect, there is hoarding. There are issues that are caused by our greater or larger social systems, where animals will need a safe place to go, but it should be a very short duration that they are at that place.
Speaker 2:Okay, so completely changing how animal shelters work, so that it's not a place people can go and just drop off an animal and walk away, that they have to actually engage in that system. And there are already platforms where people can re-home their own pet and a lot of the shelters at least I know in my area are engaging those systems and sending people through those systems to help do that. Do you have any idea how successful those are at this point?
Speaker 1:The self-re-homing platforms are really successful. So are re-homing on Nextdoor and Facebook and Craigslist and all the places that people use when they know nothing about animal welfare. Our issues really are, I think, two-fold. One is that there are people that are in immediate crisis. So for those folks who actually really need to bring in an animal and they're like I don't have time to help get this animal re-homes, we're seeing an emergence of Safety Net Foster programs Places where I know one child I'm working with has a hundred animals in Safety Net Foster at any given time and it's basically a temporary holding for that pet while the person gets to a more stable living situation. Typically it's around housing, so they need to find housing where they can keep their animal and all people need is like three months. And when you give people these options, it starts to change our relationship with our companion animals.
Speaker 1:I want to go back in history just a minute to say that the US has, since the founding of the United States, had a war on poor people owning animals, and that's well documented in newspapers and in literature that the idea was that if people who were poor people had animals, that those animals may spread disease, that they were a nuisance that they got in the way of industrialization. And then, of course, rabies came as this great catalyzing force to say all animals need to be rounded up. Since the start of the pound system, rounding up animals, institutionalizing them and then ending their lives has been at the core. And what's really been interesting in this moment is that I work all over the country in all different kinds of scenarios, but I see, everywhere I go, local government pressuring shelter directors to use an ice moor. They're like look, that's the job, okay, that is the job you're here to do. You're going to have to suck it up, be tough enough. This was true when I got into the field.
Speaker 1:This was the narrative we're going back, it's so scary to me that we're going back there and I think we're in this turning point where, if we don't organize and fight against that, we're going to be right back into the days of round them up, bring them in for a couple of days and then mass euthanasia for space. They're not us. They are the most marginalized, they are working class, they are people of color, they are the lowest paid employees and shelters are doing that work and I think it's really a human rights issue as much as an animal rights issue. That I get it. We all know there are animals that are truly medically suffering or animals that are really threats to public safety. But that's not what I think you and I are talking about. We're talking about just okay, the system's got to keep going. We've got a clear X number of kennels right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, making the list for the night. And, to be fair, at the shelter I worked with, it was the managers primarily doing euthanasias, but it doesn't mean that anybody who they could get to do them wasn't doing them right. Anybody would be trained to do euthanasia. Yeah, the idea of making a list every night. So many animals had to be on the list because we had a certain number of kennels that had to be empty by a certain time in the evening so that animal control officers could bring in dogs overnight. People could walk in and surrender a dog at 2 am and there would be a spot for that dog, which wouldn't happen if there were still dogs in some of those kennels.
Speaker 1:I think we need. I feel like listeners may be like geez, this sounds really bleak and it is bleak right now, but we can so easily find our way out of it because we have all this ground like people like us really did lay over the last couple of decades. I think we need a sector union for animal welfare. Our unions have historically been housed in public safety and have not reflected the interests of animals or people as primary. But when we look at things like the cannabis workers' union, I think we need a sector union to come together to say we need to set some basic standards here about what shelter workers should be willing to tolerate and what they should be forced to do, because people like us got into this field because we loved animals. To be forced to eat the nice, healthy and friendly animals regularly is no longer appropriate.
Speaker 1:We keep talking about how pets are family, but that needs to start with putting more investment into their lives. One thing I wanted to ask you about and I've been curious because you've lived in other places outside of the US but whenever I travel, I see dogs in places where there's much higher tolerance for dogs living in communities like cats, and I see multiple people caring for dogs. A neighbor may take care of a dog one day, of course. Here it's absolutely the opposite. People see a stray dog and freak out, and we have to drive them to the shelter as quickly as possible. Do you think that is ever possible here, that we had more of a community-centered model, and if so, is it desirable?
Speaker 2:Yes, I've lived in quite a few different places. The thing that I have seen is this most of the places I've lived in were very westernized. There is definitely this paradigm of having a shelter and having animals go to that shelter. It was particularly so in Singapore where there were a lot of stray cats and dogs. They would be picked up pretty regularly, pretty quickly. There were certain areas of the island where the dogs would just run loose and people just assumed that was fine. There were feral dogs and you just avoided them. In New Zealand I never saw any strays around, and in the UK, again, mostly farm dogs. But if you saw them wandering down the street, definitely somebody would still want to pick one up and take it to a shelter. All of those places were still very in terms of the westernizing of that paradigm, doing the same thing that we do over here. Now I know that there's plenty of places like India and in Thailand there are street dogs roaming around and they are just taken care of by the general community.
Speaker 2:There was one place I visited in Thailand where the hotel actually realized that the dogs were sort of an attraction to their guests. They took care of the dogs on their beach and in their area and didn't really mind if the dogs had a serious medical issue. They would make sure the vet came out and saw to that dog. At least that's what I was told by the hotel staff. That was an interesting sort of dynamic. I thought that was nice because I did see the dogs. They for the most part were just wandering around and they looked relatively healthy, with some exceptions. Whether it would ever happen over here I don't know. I hope it's something that I've been talking to a few of my other guests about in an episode earlier this year with free living dogs in India and this idea that dogs really don't need us as much as we think they do. They can be free living and be perfectly happy to choose to live in somebody's house or to choose to not live in somebody's house and just go through and be friendly with people. Actually, they have a lot less behavioral issues with dogs, where rabies still is an issue occasionally. It's not something that everyone's worried about all the time. The dogs are around all the time. Funnily enough and I think you'll probably remember this as well when I was a kid our neighborhood dogs did just wander around. That was really normal in the 80s, everybody was pretty fine with it. Our dogs all got along really well. I don't think I even witnessed a dog fight until I was an adult and people started having dogs on leashes all the time and they never got out and got to socialize with other dogs in a natural way.
Speaker 2:Dog parks are not a natural way for dogs to socialize, although it is an option and one that people should use if their dog is able to handle that. It's not what dogs would do on their own. They'd be going in and out, they'd have access, They'd be able to leave whenever they felt like it. If they felt threatened by another dog, they could just take off. We just don't do that anymore. I would like to go back to that, but I do wonder if that's possible without a complete cultural paradigm shift, with this idea that dogs have to be on leash and managed and controlled at all times, because when they are managed and controlled at all times, they don't get that interaction. If we were just to suddenly go okay, all dogs in this district now don't have to be on leash anymore, I think you'd have some issues. You'd have issues with dogs not knowing how to navigate traffic. You'd have issues with dogs not knowing how to navigate other dogs or other people. For a little while at least.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you for that. That's what I thought you would say. My colleague, Katja Gunther, who wrote the license of shelter animals. Part of her vision is that we have intentional communities built where dogs can roam freely. It may be that on a community level people can make that decision before moving there and have at least more freedom. I want you to do a whole episode on dog parks because they are just such sad replacements for a dog's desire to go and explore their world. I see what we're doing to dogs and the shelter is probably the most extreme example. When you think about why shelters are built with individual indoor cages versus big outdoor yards, the excuse I get is always disease. But putting 400 dogs in a room in an individual kennel is not helpful to preventing disease spread. I just feel like what we're doing is crazy. It's crazy that we see it as so normal now.
Speaker 2:There are some countries that think we're completely nuts. I believe that I would have to look it up exactly, but there is a is it Norway, one of those countries up there that I was talking to somebody once and they were asking if it was true, if we had shelters for animals, and when I explained to them what the shelter did, they just thought it was completely insane. Like people just drop off dogs there. They don't just keep their dog, no, they just drop their dog off and to them it just it blew their mind.
Speaker 2:I found an article on LinkedIn about the Netherlands that was titled World's First Country Zero Stray Dogs, how it Was Achieved, and from this article it said the Dutch government tackled the issue of stray dogs head on by implementing a range of measures. Some cities imposed high taxes on store-bought dogs, prompting more people to adopt from shelters, which in turn created space for stray dogs to be taken in. In addition, the government launched a nationwide initiative called CNVR Collect, neuter, vaccinate and Return, which provides essential veterinary services such as neutering, spaying and vaccination to stray dogs. This government-funded program has been crucial in ensuring that the Netherlands maintains its status as the world's first country without any stray dogs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my wife is Mexican and we spent about three weeks last summer driving around to town after town in Mexico, just all over the place, and it was. I had been to Central America a number of times. I've seen plenty of free-roaming dogs. Usually when you're in places like Costa Rica, everyone says well, it's Costa Rica, they just do a really good job. But being in Mexico, it was fascinating to see that the biggest concern I had was just that some dogs needed more preventative medical care and sterilization. It wasn't the fact of them being free-roaming, that was the problem.
Speaker 1:And I think a lot about when people come here.
Speaker 1:I might've been working on or near the border the US-Mexico border for a long time, but I think about how we expect people to come into this country with their animals, follow a set of rules and laws that they're probably not aware of but also don't necessarily really make sense.
Speaker 1:It's not like our system's so much more humane than what's happening in Mexico and then punish them and take their animals away when they, for instance, allow their pet to roam freely and we're really doing a.
Speaker 1:Not only is that, I think, morally wrong, but there's so much we could be learning from people coming from Mexico and Central America, like they could be teaching us about a better way to care for animals, and I'm really hoping on the border we start to see more of that by national work happening we're not just doing. I think on the border may be a place that we could actually experiment with something different, because the situation is so dire there and animals really don't have a chance when they go in the shelter and there aren't the issues with, I think, confinement and, to your point and I think you and I are both like you're a real behavior person, I wanna be one but when you think about what has happened to dogs, you certainly couldn't let our current population go right. We've created these problems, these mental health problems in dogs, but there, where it's closer to their reality, it would, I think, be more feasible with less public safety concerns.
Speaker 2:I like the idea of neighborhoods that are happy to let dogs free roam. I don't know how that would work exactly, other than when I moved into the neighborhood I'm in now, the neighbors approached me and just said look, our dogs are out all the time. It's fine, let your dogs out all the time too. Because we were back in the woods a bit and everybody was on the same page and I said that's great, I'm fine with that. Your dogs free roam all you want. I've got one dog that has a bite history with humans and one dog that hates other dogs, so I'm gonna keep mine in my yard. Thank you for the heads up, though. We're good, don't worry about it, I'm not gonna be calling the pound. So it was funny to be suddenly thrust back into this 1980s sort of situation, though, where my neighbors were all like, yeah, our dogs just run loose.
Speaker 1:I love that. I loved those days. I had a dog that used to walk herself to the park playing. Come home like their life, world were so much richer.
Speaker 2:My dog used to bring friends home, like he would come home with other dogs and they'd play in our yard. And my mom I remember once one of the dogs, bonzo, was his name, he was a yellow lab that showed up with my dog one day and they were so muddy Like they had been playing in the mud for hours and she felt so bad like just sending this dog home, so she bathed him in her strawberry hair soap or her shampoo her own personal shampoo and sent him home like gleaming. And we didn't even know who owned him. Like we had no idea. He just would show up at our house we knew his name cause he had a tag and then he would wander home again. To this day I never met who owned that dog. He was so sweet, he was such a great dog and one day he came home smelling of strawberries and they must have been confused.
Speaker 1:I wanna make sure to touch on something during this podcast that I think is really an issue that people who aren't directly involved in shelters need to understand more, which is that the shelter, as part of the intaking process this has been true from the beginning too it extracts value out of the population almost immediately. So there will always be the 20% of animals that are going to be the subject of fights among rescue groups, adopters and humane societies. There are going to be animals that are a litter of docks and puppies comes in. Everybody's gonna be fighting over them, and that is more or less true depending on if you're in a very high population area, like I am here in Texas. In Texas, some of those animals are still at risk.
Speaker 1:But then you get the 10% of animals that are really are problematic, and those are the ones that the shelter system, I think, does figure out. Can we safely place this animal? Does it medically have a chance of recovery? Is it going to be safe in the community? And you get this other 70%, which is the bulk of animals, and they're the ones getting sick and they're getting stuck in this system and they're like the collateral of the whole system.
Speaker 1:So you extract the valuable animals and then you've got government shelters with animals that don't have any obvious economic value, and that's really the problem, and that's why big dogs are stuck in shelters right now and there's nothing about them that's getting them stuck. It's just that economically they don't really have value and I don't know how to solve that. I worry a lot that we're gonna keep just when we share all the discourses about pit bull dogs and we hear about how ever know what the dogs in shelters are behaviorally terrible. No one wants them. This is all just justifying what we're doing and I was wondering your thoughts on how we do you think we need to add more value to that population or do you think we need to change something else?
Speaker 2:I say that's a really good question and I don't know how we change the value of big dogs without changing how easy it is to have a big dog.
Speaker 2:We can't take big dogs as many places for the reasons we just talked about Little dogs, so much easier to carry around. We also have neotenized little dogs so they look like cute little baby puppies their entire lives. So there's this sort of innate genetic pull we have towards having these tiny little, cute dogs rather than big dogs that used to be valuable in terms of what they could do for us. They were our hunting dogs or they were our herding dogs. Now they're just either really high energy or sitting around your house being board's dogs, and so we've changed culturally in the United States to much smaller dogs being the ideal dog.
Speaker 2:I think that's the wrong word, but you know what I mean. Like those are the dogs that other shelters pull from the municipal shelters. They'll pull the small dogs, the puppies and maybe the most AKC looking bigger dogs that are completely behaviorally sound, and those are the dogs that they're pulling and then leaving all the other ones back in the municipal shelters that are potentially quite good dogs that maybe not have any issues at all. But they don't fit into people's lifestyles as well because of their size or energy level, and that is it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know how we solve this because it is. I was at the shelter a couple of months ago where I had paired all the dogs and I paired them because they were euthanizing for space every day and they had never paired dogs before. They were really afraid to. But here in Texas you can throw most dogs in a kennel with other dogs are totally fine. So I paired the dogs. Three or four days later they I find out that they're actually euthanizing those because both of them and they're euthanizing both parts of the pair because they need to euthanize both to clear the kennel and it's like that to me was really disturbing and I think those dogs were easy. They're all under a year.
Speaker 1:Most dogs down here that are in some of these more rural shelters young, lovely dogs that are being euthanized for no other reason than they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Actually, in this case, them being even greater pets, being able to live in a cage with another dog was an additional liability and that I don't know why. We haven't figured out transport yet, because that's simply a result of that there being a regional overpopulation over supply issue and I think shelters some of these shelters not having a commitment to getting the animals out, and I feel like this supply and demand issue is really for the next, if we're thinking about the next five years. If we could solve that, everybody in the North who can't get their hands on a dog would have as many as they wanted, but I don't know why we haven't solved it yet. Except for that, those animals may not have enough economic value to warrant transport.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, so let's take this area that I'm in as a kind of medium space, because we're not in the place where a lot of some northern states are, where there's just no dogs to be found. Right, there are plenty of dogs around here. There are plenty of small rescues and small shelters, as well as your bigger high capacity shelters. And I'm talking in this space, I'm talking about the Seattle area, but I also talk about Yakima and western Washington too, which is a lot more rural, and we've got plenty of dogs in our state and we aren't clearing the shelters. People don't feel like they're in a place that they can go to Texas or Arizona or some of the southern states and pull dogs up, because, again, it's not economic if there's already dogs here that need to be placed. And yet I have been having trouble finding a dog to adopt.
Speaker 2:I'm actually looking for a dog to adopt right now and I've been looking at the shelter I work with. I've been looking on Pet Finder and primarily looking at shelters in my area, so that I'm not having to put this burden on another shelter or even on my own family to fly a dog up to north when I know that there's lots of dogs here and yet it has still been hard for me to adopt a dog, because the dog I want either goes too quickly, somebody else gets them first, or I try out a dog with a foster to adopt sort of situation and that dog just isn't the right fit for our family, gets adopted by somebody else really quickly. That's fine. But what's going on that we still have so many dogs overflowing in shelters and yet it's still not easy to find the right dog?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I did think when I first started looking it would be like oh, I'll find a dog in a week. There's so many dogs out there that would fit into our family.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is the problem a lot of folks are having that if they, a lot of people need a dog that can live with cats, one that or one that can live with dogs, or one that can live with children, or one that can live in a small apartment and the shelter system is just terrible at helping people identify those things Like where. I think I started out this conversation talking about how we're like reverse marketing, and that's exactly what I mean. We're not helping people and we don't know we're not helping, we're not learning those things about the dog. And this is again. I think it goes back like my, my kind of.
Speaker 1:What I hope listeners take away is that the system itself is producing all of this. It is not about animals, it is not about people. There is not an increase in cruelty and neglect in this country. There is not an increase in horrible dogs. The system is lower functioning than it's been in a long time. It's been working more slowly and it never really worked in the first place. So right now I think we still have a really good opportunity to experiment with alternatives, and I don't think we can even imagine what those can be until we just start trying things. We have to start new things and not relying on the same system. It's going to keep failing us and failing animals in the same way.
Speaker 1:I just realized it's getting late. Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to continue this. I just I can't miss this one. It's actually it's about adding value to big dogs. We're working on something Did you ever see the thoroughbred or the retired race horse stuff, where they take retired race horses and they train them, and we're trying to do something similar with big dogs. It for exactly the reason you're saying like I want to. I want to know that when I take home a dog, it's not going to come home and kill my dogs.
Speaker 1:It's not I want to know that it's just has general soundness about it, and I think so we're working on a few projects like that.
Speaker 2:So, as you heard earlier, kristen had to go. She did not have time to answer the last two questions, so it took us a little while, but we were finally able to reconnect and I was able to get those last two questions for you. So here they are. So let's get right to these. Okay, so, kristen, if there was a book that you could gift to all of the listeners, what would it be?
Speaker 1:I have two. One is an animal book and it is the lives and deaths of shelter animals by my dear friend and colleague, katja Gunther, and I think that it's a if you want to understand what's happening and government shelters.
Speaker 1:It is a crucial read because it's her it's in ethnography or anthropology book that is accounting her time in a government shelter in California and just talking about what actually happens. And I think we have so many misconceptions about what happens in shelters so if you're not a person that's worked in a government or open admission shelter, it's critical read. And then the second one is a book called all about love by Bill Hooks. Bill Hooks has been an inspiration to me and gosh, I don't know so many people for so long, and this book.
Speaker 1:She at one point wrote a book called killing rage, just about the anger about injustice and racism and what, in poverty and near the end of her life, in her late career, she really turned to love as a framework and so I love that book because she thinks about love as a philosophical framework in the social justice framework, like how can we central, centralized love in our fight for justice? And so that book really has. I think it's funny because love for her is really political and she says this quote that I love, which is love is an action, never just a feeling, and that just to me says so much about how we think about animal welfare. It's like we can feel sad about what's happening. We can feel sad about factory farming, we can feel sad about environmental destruction, but it doesn't. That's not love. Love is when you go do something about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really like that. That's it's really profound in making me feel, at least, that if there's something I really care about that I need to take action. That's it's not just good enough to think about it and click like on Facebook.
Speaker 1:I've been practicing it. You know this book really did change my life and I've been trying to practice it and it's like almost become a framework for life. I stop and pay attention now. One quick example is that I was reading a book about homelessness and isolation and loneliness. People experiencing homelessness often feel like I've just stopped what I'm doing when I run across a neighbor who is experiencing homelessness and talk to them and not alone those little actions we can take in our lives. They makes a difference to people and it's made my life a million times better. So really recommend that. It's all about love by Bill Hooks.
Speaker 2:I love that. Thank you so much. I said I've been reading amazing books this year and that sounds like one that I would fit right there on the list of things to read that Feel like they improve my own life. Yeah not just entertain.
Speaker 1:But it's also really awesome books to read. I mean, I have my mom read it and she was like couldn't put it down, and so I think it's like also a book that it's not so heavy, that you're like I gotta put this thing, that it's a pretty easy read to.
Speaker 2:so that's great, awesome. Well, thank you for that. Now the hard question, right? What's the deal with animals?
Speaker 1:Okay, I would have answered this totally differently two days ago, but I had this really profound experience that made me think a lot about what we don't know about animals, which is that my one of our dogs. My wife and I have six dogs they are our whole life and one of them died unexpectedly on a couple days ago and it was an awful, awful death. She was a young dog and it was a spinal cord injury that wasn't treatable, but we were able to get her home and euthanize her at home, and so I really wasn't sure if I wanted the other dogs to be in the room. I was on the fence about that and I actually never done home euthanasia before and so we did let them be in the room, and their behavior during and after the process was just a lesson in presence for me. They, during the time the veterinarian was euthanizing her it was about 15 minutes Two of them sat at prompt attention.
Speaker 1:Our little young dog came and brought her bone and dropped it on her right before she was sedated. And then her sister, who we have laid kind of away from her but almost went into like a meditative state. She looked like she was sleeping but she wasn't. And after a year passed they all approached her in a very like ritualistic way, like they all touched their nose to her and so we were all kind of like euthanasia, and so they were all kind of over the period of a half hour and then when she was gone they just kind of were very chill. But they had just processed it, like they had absorbed all that grief and this really tiny amount of time. And it is not that they did not feel great, they were like they were still alive. And everybody's been a little bit low the last couple days, but there are. So there are so many lessons they can teach us. For me this one was about presence. I think every day.
Speaker 1:I see environmental destruction and animals living among it within that, and their resilience, the lessons that they teach us. If we'll just stop and pause, from little tiny insects to coyotes, to every animal we think is creepy and hate, to snakes, they all have these lessons to teach us and I think, like I'm just in both the books I'm reading and the moment I'm in with the animals, I'm just stopping and slowing down a lot more and the world just completely transforms before your eyes. When you do that, so I'm, I'm just, in every single day, so grateful that animals are here and that we're one of them.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful. Thank you and I'm sorry you had to go through that and it sounds.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, but I'm really glad to have gotten to talk about all of this. I've been thinking about our conversation a lot and hopefully can continue it because there's a lot to talk about. I just think that we are at a point now, if we don't change the system of animal sheltering that we have, we're looking at mass euthanasia again and we're seeing that already and we've got to make changes, like we've got to make bold, radical changes now. And I don't know that I know the answers, like I didn't know what.
Speaker 1:I was like I really appreciated our conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I did too. It was really great and I really appreciate your taking the time. I think through talking through all of this and hopefully getting this information out to people so they can start to think about it. Maybe we'll come up with those answers.
Speaker 1:When you think about what's the deal with animals for in your own life. What is your answer?
Speaker 2:I have a lot of different answers to that one, especially since I've heard so many other people answer that question, and it does change day to day. I really think that we can learn a lot from animals, but I don't think that's their purpose. I think their purpose is to be themselves and to do their own thing. I think they actually have nothing to do with us on a grand cosmic scale, other than that we're happened to be related to them, that if we are paying attention, we can learn so much, but if we're not paying attention, we're going to miss it. The deal with animals is that I want to know more about them. I think that we can learn about ourselves and we will, by watching and interacting with animals, but it's not what they're here for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really appreciate that. I think that's right and I was reading. I'm a WASP fan. My Instagram is WASP garden. I think they're just like those misunderstood creatures. They are the predecessors to bees. They actually came way before bees. I have been learning a lot about wasps and bees. There's a podcast called Allergies that I really love.
Speaker 2:I love Allergies, yeah, but they.
Speaker 1:I just listened to an episode of bees and they were. The speaker was talking about how 98% of bee species are solitary and the vast majority of bees are ground dwelling and that they need bare dirt a lot of them and so I knew this and I have. We stripped our entire yard of any sod and now I have tiny little holes all over my yard that little bees live in and we have, I we've found more than 50 species of bees and wasps in our tiny little yard in Austin and they live all over. They live on our house, on our walls, in the ground, and just not alone like that. It's just magnificent to me, like you just have to create a little space in the world for them and get rid of your damn lawn.
Speaker 2:They'll fill it yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's. They're just so cool.
Speaker 2:I think, the more we know. Whenever anybody's like says something like oh, I found a mole, or I found a wasp or one of these species that we we tend to consider as nuisance species, and their immediate reaction is I better kill it. I always want to think, you know, I feel like that's a red flag, if there's any. When somebody says we have to kill something like, that should be a red flag to everybody. Maybe we should take a step back and think about this a little bit longer. First, let's find out what that animal is for. Why are they here? They weren't. They're not in this world because they have no purpose. They have a purpose.
Speaker 1:Let's find out what that is. I mean, the thought is lanternfly. I think Nancy Lawson actually has a great blog. The Humane Gardener about it and like this whole, like all of New York, is killing them and the their biggest harm that they cause is leaving sappy poop everywhere, which is a nuisance. But Nancy's blog on it's really important because she's just like killing it, Like mass killing doesn't, has never solved any problem of a species. It just doesn't work. And just seeing how people are talking about them they're such a beautiful little creature too, it's it's really heartbreaking.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for joining me today, and is there anything else that you would like to to leave people with? I know it's it's hard to know what we remember when we discussed specifically a few weeks back, but if if there's anything that you've discovered in the last few weeks that you'd really want to share in the short time we've got left.
Speaker 1:Just that the people who have run animal shelters have not fixed the problem. It's a little bit like our political leaders haven't fixed the problems of capitalism. So I think that for people who are like on the fence or wondering where they fit in because cats and dogs feels like this niche, it's not. There's no training, there's no education. We need people from all fields, all disciplines, people who come out of farmed animal advocacy, wildlife advocacy. We need those people to start getting involved in cat and dog welfare. It's headed in the wrong direction and we need systems thinking approach. So if you are on the fence, I will offer. Anyone can reach out to me to ask. There are so many great jobs in this field. It's a high paying field right now because there is a desperation for leadership, but this is a great time to get in it and you can make a real difference, because we're all looking for answers and none of us exactly know how to navigate through this.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you so much for that, and if anyone does want to reach out, how can they find you?
Speaker 1:So my website is outcomesforpetscom. I'm Christian Hassan. I'm on all the social platforms you can connect with me there. Check out my website and, yeah, I'm happy to talk with anyone about this. It's crucial that we have hard conversations about what the future looks like for cat, frogs and other companion animals.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. That was Kristin Hassan, founder of Outcomes for Animals, providing assessments and audits, program evaluation recommendations and animal management consultations and so much more. Basically, everything a shelter needs to make sure the animals are getting what they need and everything is running smoothly. She's worked with Petco, love, pedigree Foundation, best Friends Animal Sanctuary and Jackson Galaxy, among many others. You can reach out to her at outcomesforpetscom Links in the show notes and, of course, hit that follow button or plus button or heart button or wherever you're listening to your podcasts. Thank you for joining us as we tried to answer the question what's the deal with animals? I'm your host, marika Bell. I'd like to thank Kai Straskov for the theme music and Natasha Matzart for sharing her skills to help grow the podcast. You can see links to the guest book recommendations, as well as their websites and affiliated organizations in the show notes and at the dealwithanimalscom. This podcast was produced on both historical tribal land of the Snoqualmie and Kunal Indian Nations. The deal with animals is part of the Iroh Animal Podcast Network.
