Those who kill the pets

Cover The May cover of Los Angeles pushes 52 Dream Weekends, but the talker story of the month is Jesse Katz's piece on the pets we kill and Ed Boks, newly installed at the top of Animal Services (and blogger) whose mandate is to reduce the kill rate. Katz explores how difficult the whole subject is, especially for those who work in the shelters, and he begins the story with a dog called Roy: "He is old and skinny, the color of faded cinnamon. He has a wrinkled brow and flabby jowls, a face that is weary but earnest. Whenever a stranger enters the kennel, Roy springs to his hind legs, pawing at the metal grate that covers his cinder-block cell. He wriggles his snout between the gaps, sniffing and snorting, his tongue a gush of sloppy kisses...Nobody comes for Roy." Excerpt:

Los Angeles fusses over its pets. We primp them and we perfume them, we drive with them in our laps and we sleep with them in our beds, we deck them out in jogging suits and we doll them up in diamond collars, we soothe them with massages and sedatives and psychotherapy. We also kill them�or rather, we do it by proxy, leaving the job to our government. The animal control agencies of L.A., including those of the city, the county, and two dozen smaller municipalities, put to death 104,841 animals last year, more than any other metropolitan area in the United States. About 35,000 of them were dogs, 55,000 were cats, and the rest a miscellany of rabbits, roosters, snakes, and guinea pigs. That is the good news. For decades the number has been so outlandish�250,000 a year in the 1970s, 150,000 a year in the �80s, 125,000 in the �90s�that even a decline this monumental somehow feels hollow. In 35 years Los Angeles has exterminated more than 5 million animals. The toll is at once appalling and abstract. �I call it every community�s dirty little secret,� says Ed Boks, the new chief of the city�s animal shelters....

The department�s workforce is largely blue collar and, by necessity, desensitized. They are trained to move animals through the system, not to ponder the ambiguities of their mission. What this lumbering bureaucracy is being called on to do, though, is just that�to stop the machinery of the shelters, to consider the sanctity of each life inside. Such a radical turn would require a rethinking of ethical questions, of emotions, of biases, of habits, that we are rarely consistent about ourselves. Most of us recognize the wisdom of Gandhi�s proverb, that a nation can be judged by its treatment of animals. We do not, as a rule, condone their suffering. Still, we make exceptions all the time, for food, for entertainment, for clothing, for science, for tradition. Few of us have the zeal to lead purely vegan lives, rejecting every product that relies on the sacrifices of a nonhuman species. When it comes to the animals that serve as our pets�our best friends, our surrogate children�we profess a special affection. But we do not apply it equally. We romanticize some breeds and write off others, often on the most superficial of grounds. If the animals being killed in our shelters were shih tzus, the practice would have already come to a halt. But they are not. They are Roys.