David Cutler
Professor Claxton
English 367 – 01
Friday, April 11, 2014

All Animals Have Rights

Over the past two weekends I volunteered at an Animal Hospital for seven hours and a Humane Society for five. Hearing about what good one does when volunteering is one thing but actually going there and doing it is another. I will never find a more grateful and accepting comrade than an animal that I comforted. Just doing this allows one to join a network of hundreds of thousands of people that work to make the world a lot more humane for all animals. This makes the jobs of everyone working for animals a lot easier and helps educate one on the responsibilities of owning a pet. A Humane Society’s function in society is to provide a temporary home for unwanted or lost cats and dogs. For every person on the planet there are 45 cats and 15 dogs also born. In order to keep up with this large population each person would have to adopt about 2 dogs and 6 cats for his/her life. Imagine a family of 5 with 10 dogs and 30 cats. This is why it is very important to spay or neuter pets. The increasing amount of displaced animals is overwhelming. It is a constant problem everywhere from Appalachia to China Humane Societies obtain animals from owners who give up their pets because of lack of time, untrainable, behavior problems, sick, insufficient room, lost of interest in pet, etc. Often lose or stray animals are also turned into the shelter. In Appalachia there are many pet and farm owners. Just like everywhere else in the world that has a lot of spread out land. Farm owners tend to lose their pets. Appalachia has one of the highest lost pet rates in the United States. Nonetheless, excluding then the spread out land their are many theories to why these pets are lost including; malnutrition because the owners are poor, runaways because the owners are always working, or on the other hand the owners have a lot of land and they just simply don’t pay attention to the animals. This gives them the idea that the place they are at isn’t their home so they go looking for their home. Whilst Humane Societies only shelter dogs and cats Animal Hospitals shelter both pets and other animals. I volunteered at both because I wanted to better understand the effects of stray animals in Appalachia. While I was there they told me that Hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers money are going to funding Humane Societies and Animal Hospitals. When I was in the Humane Society I saw about a hundred dogs in about four acres of space. They seemed crammed and ironically it almost seemed inhumane. I talked to one of the workers that have been working there for about twelve years about how I thought it was humane. After a long debate with her she finally convinced me that