Please kick this OP if you love animals:Animal Deaths Down,Adoptions Up Amid Reforms at NYC Shelters [View all]

[restorefreedom]

Animal Deaths Down and Adoptions Up Amid Reforms at New York Shelters

By ANDY NEWMAN and JESSICA NAUDZIUNAS on Publish Date January 20, 2016. Photo by Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times.

For a place often associated with confinement, suffering and death, the city animal shelter in Manhattan was a pretty happy spot last Friday afternoon, at least in the backyard.

A half-dozen pit bull mixes chased one another across an asphalt run behind the shelter, a cinder-block bunker on East 110th Street in Harlem, dancing and wrestling in midair.

Euthanasia rates dropped sharply in 2015, down 36 percent for dogs and 25 percent for cats, according to statistics the agency plans to release at its annual board meeting on Friday. Adoptions rose by 17 percent.

In 2003, the shelters killed more than 60 percent of the dogs and the cats they took in. That number is down to 13 percent now.

Still, last year, over 3,000 cats and nearly 1,000 dogs were put to death at the overcrowded shelters. And private rescue groups, which adopt more than half of the shelters’ animals, say that all too often, animals that are brought in healthy get sick and either die or saddle their rescuers with high veterinary bills.

But there is fresh hope on that front, too: A design firm the city hired last year is scouting sites to build full-service shelters in the Bronx and Queens, something advocates, lawmakers and Animal Care Centers itself have long urged.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/nyregion/animal-adoptions-rise-amid-reforms-at-new-yorks-shelters.html?_r=0


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for my 10,000th post, i wanted it to be something very near and dear to me. i have worked for years in animal rescue, including working to get animals out of these very nyc facilities. i have seen too much suffering and heartbreak. i and an army of dedicated others have had too many tear filled days, seeing healthy animals be killed and knowing that we could not get them all out. we, and more importantly, the animals, have waited far too long for these types of reforms. there is still much to be done, but this is a major step forward.

please kick if you love animals, and remember: adopt don't shop.

and for all of our disagreements in politics, i enjoy "talking" to all of you

thanks, everyone. namaste