All around the world, animal shelters have become positive and highly looked upon way to save animals. If you find an animal on the side of the street, you can simply call up the animal shelter and they take care of them. Although this may seem like the perfect thing for animals that are homeless or injured, it is not at all as glamorous as it seems.

Animals that have been found on the sides of the street are limited to a small amount of space for obvious reasons. They need room for all the animals that need care. However, some animals go above and beyond this, making it almost impossible for these animals to survive in such conditions. Not only this, but some are left neglected, starving to death in a small compacted space. “It’s a pretty good donor grab if you say we only euthanize 6 percent of our animals. The sad part is the number of animals that died in their cages — long, painful, horrible deaths — to obtain those numbers,” Marcie Laking, a worker at the Toronto Humane Society points out. Imagine being in a tiny cage starving to death hoping that someone will adopt you.

Many animal shelters, however, do euthanize animals that do not get adopted after a certain time, which is a cruel thing to do to dogs who could have been adopted the next day. These rates are so high, that anyone that hears this information would be furious. According to American Humane, “roughly 64 percent of the total number of animals that entered shelters were euthanized — approximately 2.7 million animals in just these 1,000 shelters.”

While these statistics may be true, according to most shelters including the Etowah Valley Humane Society, there are only certain cases in which they euthanize animals. On the EVHS FAQ’s they stated, “We are as close to a no-kill shelter as we can get. The only time we euthanize is when an animal becomes aggressive or has a medical problem that is untreatable and extremely painful. At that time, it is actually more humane to have that animal euthanized.”

In all, animal shelters nationally are a great way for sick animals to recover with the help they need, but there are times when it isn’t always the best thing. Euthanizing animals who have not found a home should not be allowed as many people a day are looking for an animal to keep as their own.