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I don't think you're appreciating the sheer volume of animals that end up shelters yearly. Looks like it's 6.3 million companion animals per year in the US. Ope

I don't think you're appreciating the sheer volume of animals that end up shelters yearly. Looks like it's 6.3 million companion animals per year in the US. Open ended sanctuaries don't make sense unless time and money and labor are free. Especially once you consider how destructive a single dog can be in your example. And once your 100 acre utopia parcels out the land for a fraction of the animals that need sanctuary to live out their days, what do you do with the rest of the animals? Frankly, PETA shelters are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to optics. It's easy to criticize them without offering a better solution to the ugly reality of mass scale animal dumping beyond naive suggestions like "how about all shelters just become no-kill shelters." I think we should reserve more of our anger for people who breed animals into existence, not the people trying to handle the glib externalities.

barbarr 3y ago
Agreed. And honestly, even if PETA got out of the shelter business, anti-PETA folks will just find some other marginal edge cases dismiss them entirely. [0] I'm glad they are sticking to their principles and doing the right thing. Listing to popular opinion never works since people will always hunt for reasons to criticize. If popular opinion had its way with the animal rights movement, there would be no animal rights movement. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24386195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24386195
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arp242 3y ago
To put that in perspective: PETA's revenue is about $66 million. So they've got about $10 per animal per year. Even if PETA would only take care of 10% of animals, that means $100 per animal per year. It's hard to say how much an "average dog" would cost to feed because there is so much variety, but ~$25/month seems like a minimal baseline. So that's $300/year in food alone, for a small dog with cheap food. Larger dogs can easily be $600/year. And that's just food, not counting vet costs, housing, cost of things like toys and whatnot, staff costs (this sort of thing can't really run on 100% volunteer work), etc. etc. "PETA has a lot of money, they can just set up a sanctuary" is one of those arguments from ignorance that only makes sense if you spent less than 10 seconds looking at it.
- huytersd 3y ago
  There is a case to be made if you would rather kill them or let them live literally feral on a large enough plot of land with no labor/food/medication provided. Sort of like a wildlife reserve.
  - cloverich 3y ago
    Dogs are domesticated animals though. Can they actually survive in that scenario, in general? I would expect most of them would end up starving to death, or escaping to the larger area.
    - huytersd 3y ago
      Yeah that’s the question I’m posing. In a fenced area they can’t escape. I presume they will default to dog behavior like in some urban parts of India (where killing dogs is considered cruel and not done). They form packs and hunt together. Is that better than killing them outright? I think so. They quickly default to killing birds and other small animals for food.

barbarr 3y ago

Agreed. And honestly, even if PETA got out of the shelter business, anti-PETA folks will just find some other marginal edge cases dismiss them entirely. [0] I'm glad they are sticking to their principles and doing the right thing. Listing to popular opinion never works since people will always hunt for reasons to criticize. If popular opinion had its way with the animal rights movement, there would be no animal rights movement. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24386195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24386195

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arp242 3y ago

To put that in perspective: PETA's revenue is about $66 million. So they've got about $10 per animal per year. Even if PETA would only take care of 10% of animals, that means $100 per animal per year. It's hard to say how much an "average dog" would cost to feed because there is so much variety, but ~$25/month seems like a minimal baseline. So that's $300/year in food alone, for a small dog with cheap food. Larger dogs can easily be $600/year. And that's just food, not counting vet costs, housing, cost of things like toys and whatnot, staff costs (this sort of thing can't really run on 100% volunteer work), etc. etc. "PETA has a lot of money, they can just set up a sanctuary" is one of those arguments from ignorance that only makes sense if you spent less than 10 seconds looking at it.

huytersd 3y ago
There is a case to be made if you would rather kill them or let them live literally feral on a large enough plot of land with no labor/food/medication provided. Sort of like a wildlife reserve.
- cloverich 3y ago
  Dogs are domesticated animals though. Can they actually survive in that scenario, in general? I would expect most of them would end up starving to death, or escaping to the larger area.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    Yeah that’s the question I’m posing. In a fenced area they can’t escape. I presume they will default to dog behavior like in some urban parts of India (where killing dogs is considered cruel and not done). They form packs and hunt together. Is that better than killing them outright? I think so. They quickly default to killing birds and other small animals for food.