You know, I can barely stand to read Yes Biscuit! these days, because all the Memphis Animal Shelter webcam pictures of dogs being dragged to the kill room gut me.
But this afternoon I was thinking about how people say those webcams make doing their jobs so much harder for the staff at the facility, and make them worry about their personal safety, and give Memphis a bad name and could be taken out of context and all the other things they say about the webcams.
I typically responded to that by saying, “Yeah, well, at least you’re not being dragged to your death under horrible circumstances,” but you know what?
What we’re seeing on those cameras is cruelty to animals, but it’s also cruelty to the people who work at MAS. If it’s not making them wake up screaming every night with terror-filled dreams, then it’s eroding their compassion and deadening their empathy. It’s consuming their humanity, one needle full of Fatal-Plus at a time.
We know this because we’ve been told again and again by people who do it what the effect of shelter killing is on them. We can see it right in front of us when we look at those webcam shots, and imagine how the shelter workers have to shut their eyes to the terror of the dogs they drag down that hall.
Have to watch a garbage can full of squirmy puppies grow still and stop moving.
Have to see the rigid terror of the cat at the end of the catchpole relax into death.
Have to do it over and over again, hundreds of pets a week, an avalanche of death and fear and piss and shit. It never ends. Three out of four dogs and cats who come in the doors of the building where they work are going to be fed by them and watered by them and then dragged or carried down that long hallway, step by fearful step, until they’re killed.
And one day, they just can’t care anymore. And that’s the day a part of them dies, too.
So even if you think that Memphis is doing the best it can for the animals — which it’s not — tell me, do you think it’s doing the best it can for the people who work there?
Imagine for a few minutes that instead of experiencing this:
… the staff at the Memphis Animal Shelter, like their counterparts at the Nevada Humane Society, could feel like this:
It’s not impossible. It could happen.
Photos: Top, a MAS staffer and a terrified dog. Bottom, two Nevada Humane Society staffers celebrating an adoption.
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