KILLING WITH KINDNESS

The first dog I held while it died was a soft brown dog of indeterminate breed which had been hit by a car. One of the most common injuries is the bursting of the diaphragm muscle that makes a seal across the inside of the body just under the heart and lungs where it both helps to pump air in and out and keeps the intestines and liver, etc., down where they belong. The impact of the car pushes the abdominal contents so hard against the diaphragm that it tears. Then the intestines and so on crowd into the chest. There are no outward signs of injury but even surgery to sew the tear closed is very expensive, risky, and maybe not likely to succeed because of the need for constant movement.

I took this dog in the back door to Dr. Plamondon’s clinic where he explained all this and we decided to euthanize the dog there rather than making it suffer until I got to the shelter. It carried no sign of ownership. It’s strange that we make soldiers wear “dog tags,” so we can identify their bodies later, but so many refuse to put any dog tags on dogs, where they can identify and return dogs -- dead or alive.

The dog was tame and trusting, looking up in our faces with perfect faith that we would take care of it. I put my arms around it and talked to it. Dr. P. shaved a spot on the dog’s leg, tied on the familiar rubber tube scrap to raise a vein, slipped in the needle, and the dog melted. It didn’t “go to sleep” which would have meant a bit of muscle tension and the subtle rhythm of breathing. The dog simply relaxed into a warm fur rag on the cold stainless steel table.

The fact that humans routinely kill animals is very disturbing to most people, even though they eat and wear and medicate with the results all the time. We’ve managed to separate ourselves from animal death even as we watch the news depicting and ennumerating human death over and over in quantities -- keeping score. We seem to have an endless need to know exactly how they died, to depict it in detail, to wonder how they felt. People go to the Internet to view the graphic photos the newspapers won’t print.

The average animal control officer, I once read, impounds five dogs a day. Portland when I was there had about a dozen officers in the field daily. The shelter capacity might have been a little over three hundred. Sometimes older kids whose parents or teachers brought them to “see the dogs,” would suddenly realize that the dogs were going to be killed if no one took them. (Certain kids like to make sure other kids know.) They would beg to take them home in that natural generosity of young people who have enough that they have no sense of limitations. We’d say gently, “Is your bedroom big enough for sixty new dogs a day?”

One of our shelter attendants loved dogs so much that he finally had to quit. He’d adopted the limit and was unable to accept the killing of individual animals to which he’d attached more than the others. Once I came through the back door and found him with tears streaming down his face while a fuzzy white Samoyed puppy in his arms licked them off. There’s a name for this now: “Compassion Fatigue.” It can destroy your life. But no one wants shelter attendants who are robots or deliberately cruel.

One of the “pry” issues humane movement people use to separate themselves from animal control is the killing of animals. Some claim they “never” kill any of their animals, though some might mysteriously disappear to another shelter or pound -- quietly in the night. If they can portray animal killing as grim, unjustified and cruel, they gain in sympathy and donations.

In the Seventies the point at issue was a method of killing based on hypoxia. Animals were put in a big steel drum capable of holding a vacuum once it had the air pumped out of it. The idea came from “the rapture of the blue,” a dangerous phenomenon among World War II pilots who had no oxygen masks and flew too high. The effect is exactly that of getting drunk, which interferes with the absorption of oxygen into brain cells. I’ve forgotten the specifics of what the altitude equivalent was, but we discovered it wouldn’t kill a boa constrictor. (Their heads had to be cut off and even then they took a while to die.) Often it wouldn’t kill newborn kittens or puppies, so that Dr. Watts had to inject drugs directly into their hearts. (Their veins were too small.) This was one of the few jobs he complained about.

There was no question the extra animals had to be euthanized, but the trouble with this method (which was supported by one national humane society) was that it looked so horrible -- like a Nazi death camp machine. I suggested that we ought to paint it pink and put butterfly decals on it -- which almost got me slapped. The animals were put into a little cage on a dolly and slid in on a track. One hit the switch and a pump went to work evacuating the tank. Ten, fifteen minutes later, the air was let back in to break the seal so the door could be opened and the trolley came out with bodies in it. Sometimes there would be a little drop of blood on the end of the noses. The experts said this came from the repressurizing, not the dropping pressure, but those against the machine claimed the lungs were burst. The machine needed constant monitoring, recalibrating, and maintenance.

What most people in the humane community wanted was to medicalize the death by giving the animals shots as Dr. P. had done for my street dog. It didn’t occur to them that some of the dogs were pretty vicious or they wouldn’t be there. The shelter attendants would have to hold down the animal, have the skill, focus and training to get a needle into a vein accurately, and somehow keep their objectivity while imposing death over and over, personally, hands-on. Then there was the problem of controlling the drugs themselves, which were very appealing to addicts and worth much money.

Now the whole issue, thanks to human capital punishment, has been very much reopened in terms of its humaneness. One bit of animal research was done on the killing of pigs, which at one point were conventionally killed with succinylcholine, the paralysis drug. It made the pigs look very peaceful, but someone thought of using brain-wave detectors on them and inside they were rioting with terror they couldn’t express. The suggestion is that the same thing is happening to criminals being killed.

For a while there was a promotion of carbon monoxide cabinets which had nice transparent doors so they didn’t even scare the animals inside. But they were never entirely leak-proof and since shelter attendants did their killing in small rooms, there was a real danger of killing the attendant as well. A guaranteed-to-work detector alarm had to be installed as well as the presence of another person at a different location who could respond in case the attendant were unconscious. Some low-budget pounds turned out to have been using this method all along, simply attaching a car exhaust to a small space. It was another Nazi method we’ve seen in movies, used to kill truckloads of children. A car exhaust, of course, is hot and laden with other nasty chemicals.

One quiet afternoon I called every county in Oregon to see what their kill methods were. (We stopped Latinizing the procedure into “euthanasia” as a blow for honesty, but I’m not sure it wasn’t a sign of compassion exhaustion: forcing our reality onto others.) Most often the southeast counties, cowboy country, said something like what one sheriff told me, “Look, lady, if they’re good dogs we take them back home. Otherwise we just shoot’em.” One county had a possibly apocryphal history about shooting dogs and throwing the bodies down an old mine shaft. Then it occured to someone that just throwing them down the mine shaft would save bullets. That worked until there were enough bodies on the bottom to cushion the fall of the dogs, which began to survive, barking and howling mournfully down there in the dark as they explored the passages for a way out.

Another sign of stress: “Hell, I know a worse one than that!” Like cop or doc black humor. For some people, it propelled them into animal rescue work and spay/neuter programs. For others, the thing to do was to get the heck out. The search for a “perfect” method of killing goes on. The ones that are best for the entity being killed (cutting the heads off lab mice with scissors) are not the best methods for the person who must repeatedly impose death. (A dog guilliotine in the back of every shelter is simply unimaginable.)

A few people were able to find a moral justification -- maybe as simple as feeling that doing the job oneself will at least guarantee it’s done right -- that let them go on with the work. Luckily, there are areas of the country now where much less killing is necessary. The feverish drive to get people to think has been effective. Beyond that, economics have meant that a dog is an expense that can be avoided by simply not having one.