The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals : The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals

A behind-the-scenes examination of how a high-intake public shelter asserts control over human and animal populations, how those humans and animals respond to and resist such control, and what the consequences of these dynamics of domination and defiance are for impounded companion animals and for all animals. Can we save America's homeless animals? "In 2014, shelters across the United States put to sleep 3 million companion animals that were deemed unadoptable, and each year an average of 1 million meet the same end. A small portion of these animals are euthanized due to untreatable health conditions, while the vast majority are killed because staff at the shelters determine that they've been there too long and have little to no chance of finding a home. Animal rights activists have long protested kill-shelters, but often their voices are shunted to the side to make room for other, more pressing social concerns (i.e., those centering human experiences). In this book, Katja Guenther enters the charged atmosphere of a high-kill shelter in LA in order to find out what logics are at play in the decisions about whether and which animals should die. She challenges readers to consider the evidence she unearths, showing that what happens at these shelters has everything to do with human systems of oppression. Drawing on three years of ethnography, conducted while serving as a volunteer at the shelter, Guenther unlocks the hidden world of shelter politics to examine how power is exerted, not only over the animals, but also over the human volunteers, and the surrounding urban population. She decodes the language shelter staff use when discussing "irresponsible pet owners;" illuminates the internal hierarchies that marginalize the voices of the largely female volunteers; and analyzes the dynamics of race, class, and gender that lead to breed discrimination, interpretations of animal behavior, and, ultimately, the decision of who deserves to live and die. What happens at PAW, she finds, is the outcome of everyday and sustained collisions of capitalism, anthroparchy, white supremacy, and patriarchy, collisions that reduce companion animals to expendable commodities, and allow the shelter to shift responsibility for the deaths of shelter animals onto the low-income minority community it purports to serve and onto the animals themselves"-- Provided by publisher “By investigating the . . . connection between the . . . shelter and the community . . . vastly expands . . . notions of intersectionality, democracy, and inclusivity.” —Leslie Irvine, American Journal of Sociology Monster is an adult pit bull, muscular and grey, who is impounded in a large animal shelter in Los Angeles. Like many other dogs at the shelter, Monster is associated with marginalized humans and assumed to embody certain behaviors because of his breed. And like approximately one million shelter animals each year, Monster will be killed. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals takes us inside one of the country's highest-intake animal shelters. Katja M. Guenther witnesses the dramatic variance in the narratives assigned different animals, including Monster, which dictate their chances for survival. She argues that these inequalities are powerfully linked to human ideas about race, class, gender, ability, and species. Guenther deftly explores internal hierarchies, breed discrimination, and importantly, instances of resistance and agency. “Powerful and timely. . . . Katja M. Guenther unlocks the shelter door and eloquently explains this complicated and contested multispecies space, as she reflects on issues such as witnessing, vulnerability, advocacy, grievability, compassion, and animal resistance.” —Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat “In this compassionate, incisive ethnography . . . Katja M. Guenther illuminates the entangled injustices that shape human relationships with other animals.” —Lori Gruen, author of Entangled Empathy “With the perfect balance of intimacy and analytical depth, the author reminds us of how messy things can get when caring and killing become one, or when the value of the animal companion's life is measured by the race, gender, and zip code of the owner.” —Bénédicte Boisseron, author of Afro-Dog