Dear Friends, 

I woke up on an April morning to thoughts of Gunner. His bright eyes and smiling face lit up by the simple joy of a yellow tennis ball in his mouth. The young woman with a heart tattooed on her cheek walking him in the shelter yard in a poor Southern state. Her words expressed his loneliness and neglect as a black dog, and her sadness that he had no one save volunteers caring for his beautiful young existence. I stroked my Teko’s face. He, too, had been in the path of death-by-shelter before helping hands reached out and transported him and his brother to Colorado.

But thanks to people at a Georgia shelter where he should have been cared for until he found his forever home, Gunner will never know the softness of a connection between a dog without a past and no future to be had, and a woman wanting to stroke his pains away.

Thanks to human stupidity, inertia, the trappings of poverty, lack of education, or maybe some malice to deprive a young back Pittie mix of his deserving life, I’ll never know the joys, love, challenges, harms, gratitude, or pure innocent expression of his playful self. As I was working on his rescue plan to bring him into my home, his advocate texted of his sudden death-by-shelter.

Why? I ranted to the Cobb Co. Shelter Supervisor. To clear a kennel for an incoming dog, she quipped. Another dog is likely to suffer the same fate. The outdated and inhumane practice of dogs suffering death-by-shelter is a hardship on the human heart. Crisis of overwhelm and inability scream in loud defense for their lethal acts. 

The quieter whispers in the dark of night can be heard by beleaguered shelter workers burdened with these responsibilities. From a 2005 study cited in Jacki Skole’s “Dogland”: “The Journal of Applied Social Psychology reported that shelter workers engaged in euthanasia suffer higher levels of job-related stress, work-to-family conflict, sleeping problems and substance abuse than their fellow employees, a strain referred to as the caring-killing paradox.” 

Despite such awareness, high-kill shelters once employing lethal gas chambers now find it more acceptable to kill healthy, adoptable animals by lethal intravenous injection. Normalizing the lethal practice doesn’t address the root problem for the endless flow of incoming animals. In 2024, the US death-by-shelter rate was 425,000 (Best Friends Animal Society). A year later death rates increased to 757,000 (Shelter Animals Count). 

The answer is as axiomatic as it is difficult to tackle: Prevention of dog births. One example: Fix Georgia Pets, which provided 4,575 spay/neuter surgeries in 2025, prevented an estimated 64,051 births). On the supply side, animal rescues exist nationwide to pull dogs from shelters before their last sunset, founded by people devoted to the idea that all lives are worth saving. 

Death-by-shelter is a morally reprehensible practice that must end, for the harm it causes to animals deprived of the lives they deserve. Killing them is a lazy, unimaginative, and godless approach to the problem of space for them to live. Still in all, animal welfare is as overwhelmed with swollen shelters as it is politically divisive. In this time of crisis, it is not just the people suffering, but the animals alongside. 

Many are trying to remedy the problem through:

• community-funded spay/neuter clinics, 

• license plate programs, 

• nonprofit organizations, 

• county or state-funded veterinary service programs and grants reducing costly alterations, 

• expanding access in rural communities, 

• mandatory spay/neuter laws, 

• banning of backyard breeding, or simply,

• education on exponential growth of intact dogs.

All of it gives rise to the belief that the problem can be overcome through community involvement, widespread support, and increased exposure of homeless dogs in need of forever homes. Keeping shelter doors open to expand access, staffing with volunteers, cultivating foster programs, bringing adoptees out on trails and into parks, and increasing adoption events, all can provide the chance a dog needs to live its right life.

For the willing and true animal lovers, it is time to change the system for the betterment of the animals. Humanity, by extension, will be far more peaceful and compassionate for it.

In honor of Gunner…

Denise Boehler

Tungsten Valley