This past week, the Animal Rescue League made the difficult decision of humanely euthanizing sick cats. These cats were either not responding to medication to battle feline calicivirus, had secondary illnesses, behavioral challenges that made treatment highly stressful for them, or a combination of these issues. 

This year at the ARL, we saw an unusually high rate of illness coming into the shelter: Parvovirus, Ringworm, Feline Panleukopenia, and Feline Calicivirus. We managed to treat and control these contagions with the help of foster families and our medical and animal care staff. However, since we have limited medical isolation spaces in the shelter, as the number of ill animals increased, calicivirus in particular, put a heavy strain on our capacity for care because sick animals require much more time and resources. Even though calicivirus is not necessarily a lethal virus, it is a highly contagious and very painful one with no cure that requires supportive care to help animals to overcome it while trying to prevent transmission to healthy cats. 

Besides this, the post-pandemic shelter crisis of 2022 is real. Pet adoptions have declined, fostering has decreased, animals are pouring through shelter doors faster than they are leaving, and we have hundreds of animals waiting for help behind the ones we are caring for with numerous cat-hoarding cases that we are juggling with very sick cats living in very poor conditions.

Desperate pleas from overtaxed shelter workers have made headlines across the nation and people are just at their breaking point because we can only do so much. We only have so many staff and only so many hours in a day to fit in all the care that needs to happen every day. We are just one organization with tangible space limitations, and it takes a village to make this all work.

The ARL considers itself a “no-kill” shelter, yet we really do not like to use the term as we feel it’s a misleading label that gives people the impression that we never euthanize an animal, ever. Unfortunately, that is not our reality. We make extremely thoughtful, difficult, painful, and socially-conscious decisions about euthanizing animals who we consider to be too unsafe to place back out into the public or who are too sick, too injured, or too costly for us to treat without a good prognosis.

We haven’t had to euthanize pets due to “capacity for care” strain since 2018, before our model change. Still, we have to make decisions in the best interest of the thousands of animals who depend on us and that sometimes means having to shoulder the burden of making heartbreaking decisions about very sick animals that we don’t have the capacity to care for properly at this moment.

We made this decision for the greater good because we can’t afford to have intake grind to a halt – we just have too many animals and people depending on us. In some shelters, when they have illness outbreaks like this, entire rooms of animals get euthanized. We’re not doing that. But we are making the call for the sickest animals who are not responding well to treatment or who have compounding issues.

It takes a concerted community effort to care for the thousands of animals in need in our community. By adopting, fostering, donating, volunteering, or even sharing adoptable pets or content on social media, the community can help us improve the chances of these animals getting a second chance in life.

To learn more about our no-kill model, please visit berksarl.org/about/#policies.