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Pound Seizure: The Shame of Shelters

U.S. pounds and animal shelters were established for the purpose of taking in homeless animals in order to improve animal welfare and protect public health. Some animals are taken to animal shelters by guardians who can no longer keep them. Others are strays who are taken in by concerned individuals, police officers, or animal-control officers. While animal shelters take in many kinds of animals, most of the animals they take care of are dogs and cats (including puppies and kittens), almost all of whom are former companion animals or their offspring.

What Is Pound Seizure?
If an animal shelter or pound is located in a state or county that has a pound-seizure law, it means that animal shelters must turn over animals who are not claimed by former or new guardians within a certain number of days (typically five) to laboratories that ask for them. The animals are then used in experiments.

Pound seizure is illegal in Denmark, England, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In the U.S., there is no federal law regarding pound seizure, but Washington, D.C., and 17 states—California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia—forbid it. Most other states have no law regarding pound seizure, preferring to leave it up to county or town governments, but two states—Minnesota and Oklahoma—require government-run facilities to submit to pound seizure. Several bills seeking to ban pound seizure have been introduced in Congress, but none of them has been enacted. Please visit banpoundseizure.org/home.shtml for more information.

In states that allow pound seizure, Class B dealers can buy animals from pounds and animal shelters.(1) According to a recent government report, in a one-year period, 20 percent of dogs and 60 percent of cats acquired by Class B dealers came from animal shelters.(2) A PETA undercover investigation at a University of Utah laboratory revealed that all the animals confined to the facility were kept in miserable conditions and endured terrible suffering. Cats and dogs who were purchased from local animal shelters had holes drilled into their skulls, medical devices implanted in their chests, and chemicals injected into their brains. For more on this undercover investigation, please visit PETA.org. Shortly after the findings of PETA's investigation were made public, Utah legislators voted to overturn a law that required animal shelters to provide animals to laboratories upon request.

Pound-Seizure Problems
Animal protection organizations object strongly to pound seizure¯and for good reason. Animals who were once loved companions suffer the double blow of losing their human friends and being confined to a laboratory cage. Families experience the anguish of knowing that a lost animal or an animal they have given up may have been killed in a painful experiment. In communities that allow or mandate pound seizure, people who are unable to keep their animal companions often choose to abandon them on the street or in a field rather than send them to an animal shelter and take the risk that they could end up in a laboratory. This adds to the problem of homeless strays. To make money, some disreputable shelters have been known to quickly sell their healthiest and most adoptable animals to a laboratory rather than find them a new home.

Cheap, Easy, and Cruel
By providing an inexpensive and easy source of animals, pound seizure allows experimenters to continue using animals rather than switching to superior, humane alternatives that may require an upfront financial investment. For decades, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center purchased cats from a local animal shelter for $15 each and used them in cruel and deadly medical training exercises. Even though sophisticated simulators were available, animals used in the exercises had tubes forced down their throats and needles stabbed into their chests.(3) After PETA launched a campaign that exposed the unsavory relationship, the school severed its ties with the animal shelter and ended the use of animals in the course.(4)

What You Can Do
If you live in a state that mandates pound seizure, learn as much as possible about the subject. Talk to the managers of local animal shelters and pounds to see what they have done or are doing. Find out whether any town or state officials are interested in the issue and whether any are working to repeal pound-seizure laws, either locally or nationally. Start a petition campaign, find opportunities to talk about or debate the issue in public as well as in private, and organize a letter-writing campaign. Try to arrange a public viewing of PETA’s video of a medical-school dog lab or write to PETA for an anti-vivisection action pack.

If you live in a state that leaves the decision up to local authorities, you can work to ban pound seizure in your community, or you can campaign for a state law banning the practice.

If you live in a state that already forbids pound seizure, you can guard against efforts to change the law and work for federal legislation to ban it. Because it's easy to transport animals across state borders, companion animals in every state will be at risk until there is a federal law against pound seizure.

References

1) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, “Title 9—Animals and Animal Products,” Code of Federal Regulations, 1 Jan. 1999.
2) Committee on Scientific and Humane Issues in the Use of Random-Source Dogs and Cats in Research, “Scientific and Humane Issues in the Use of Random Source Dogs and Cats,” The National Academies (2009).
3) City of Odessa Animal Control, receipt to Texas Tech University, 8 Oct. 2008.
4) Halie Hartman, “TTUHSC No Longer Performing Medical Tests on Cats,” TexasTechToday, 16 Dec. 2009.