From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2010:
 
Priorities

I believe the animal welfare movement has lost its compass.
In its quest to “save” individual animals, the movement has lost
sight of what’s best for dogs and cats as a whole. What used to be
called animal shelters now offer no shelter unless there is room or
the animal is especially adoptable. The quest to become “no kill”
has created untold cruelty and suffering for animals turned away by
organizations who proclaim that their mission is to protect those who
cannot protect themselves. All too often, animal care and control
facilities, both private and public, no longer accept animals
surrendered by their owners, with the inevitable result that the
refused animal winds up dumped on the street or comes back to that
same facility, this time as a “stray”.
In the early 1970s I wrote an allegory about endless dogs and
cats floating down a river. Let’s get out of the river, stop
trying to save one in a thousand, I opined, and instead go upstream
to find out how and where they are falling in. We did that, and to
a great extent pet sterilization has reduced that flow to a
comparative trickle. But rather than see this strategy through to
conclusion, the movement is now back in the river saving one while a
hundred suffer. The movement has gotten misdirected on adoptions,
often to the exclusion of spaying and neutering.
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