oobh I got plany off time

I did not work at an open intake shelter. I worked at a very well funded limited-intake shelter.

But i am a huge supporter of open intake shelters and their staff. They do extremely vital and often heartbreaking work while getting shit on by lots of people. I will defend them and what they do to my dog breath.

I don't know often animals have to be euthanized for space. It's going to vary based on time of year, shelter size, funding, foster programs, etc.

The shelter had two main sections, the back, where the animals were either on stray hold or quarantine, and the front, where the adaptable animals were. Once an animal "made it" to the front they were very rarely euthanized except in extreme cases (i.e Parvo outbreak :c ) if the front got too full, we would call "no kill" shelters and fosters in the area to come pick up animals. Caveat here that we have a lot of other shelters in the area, and it may be different for places that only have 1 shelter.

Meanwhile in the back, we had to legally put animals that had been found or abandoned on "stray hold" for two weeks. After that we could choose to euthanize or move the animal to the front. During those two weeks, it usually became apparent what would happen to the animal. Some simply would not be adoptable (constantly shaking in fear, could not eat, could not use the bathroom, bite risk, etc) and it was considered more humane to euthanize. If the back got too full, well, we had to find creative solutions becuase we legally could not move animals until the 2 weeks were up. (BTW Quarantine time can vary greatly from "this cat needs to recover from its spay" to "this dog may have been exposed to rabies and needs to be under observation for months). So to answer the question: it happened less to make room, and more often because it was time to euthanize an animal we knew we were going to anyway.

The other scenario I want to mention is that many people surrendered their old and sick pets to the shelter specifically to be euthanized because they could not afford to do so at the vet. We also had to perform court ordered euthanasias and rabies tests (which requires the animal to be killed, unfortunately). Please keep in mind that when you see high euthanasia stats at open intake shelters, it is including these cases.

Side note: if someone surrendered an animal for euthanasia and we did not believe it should be euthanized, we had the right to refuse to do so.

This question seems like it was asked it good faith so I will give it an honest answer. I will admit that there were times when I wished I had more time to work on behavioral issues with an animal, or that we had the resources to treat an injury or illness. The busier the shelter was, the less time and resources we had to work on "special cases." I guess you could see that as "making room" but it was more like weighing if our limited time and resources were better spent on 1 bite risk dog who could potentially be rehabilitated with lots of hard work or a litter of 8 puppies. We often chose the puppies. I wish we didnt have to make these hard choices, but somebody had to. Working in the shelter often felt like being the sin-eaters of the animal world. Some of those no kill shelters would come gladly take our animals then turn around and call us all murders. Meanwhile our staff would give up our breaks to try and rehabilitate as many animals as we could. Shelters weren't getting any bigger, we weren't getting any more staff, and it is inhumane to let an animal starve to death on the street. I will always believe that there are many things that can happen to an animal that are worse than a dignified death. I've seen them.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

A ban on international collaboration with a list of the "scary" countries (like China, one of the US's strongest research partners despite It All), and a presumptive ban on ALL OTHER international collab.

An end to any binding peer review process in funding. All review will be by Trump stooges, deciding what has scientific merit. This isn't the top headline evil thing about this rule change, but it means that even well-meaning, very careful scientific review boards can't try to evade censorship. JD Vance is essentially in charge of deciding whether your metabolic enzyme computational model can exist or not.