Roswell Animal Services in New Mexico killed Giles, a 2-year-old dog, despite a rescue commitment

This is another disturbing story from Nathan Winograd, one of America's greatest animal advocates and the founder and campaigner for the No-Kill movement which has already saved countless thousands of lives in animal shelters.

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He reports that a two-year-old dog named Giles was killed by Roswell Animal Services, New Mexico despite a commitment to rescue the dog. In other words, there was somebody there to rescue this dog and to give them a good home. Despite that for some reason the dog was killed by the agency.

Nathan Winograd reports that, "The only excuse the City of Roswell could offer was that the staff had a busy day and accidentally killed Giles with a bunch of other dogs."

He provides a quote which I believe comes from the agency's administrators:

"Monday at the animal shelter, there was staff training taking place, rescue groups coming in to retrieve multiple animals, and a number of new animals coming in. As some of these things were occurring simultaneously, the busyness resulted in some confusion and a lack of the standard communication among staff and between staff and rescue groups. Unfortunately, that resulted in the dog in question mistakenly being taken to a veterinarian’s office as part of a group of several dogs to be euthanized."

As he says, the pound described the killing as a mistake but Nathan Winograd rejects this excuse. He rejects it because this kind of accident happens when the systems (MO) in place are poor. And they are poor because of bad attitudes leading to poor management, which leads to many mistakes occurring.

They happen every day across the US he says. And to highlight this he says that if you Google the search term "shelter mistakenly euthanized a pet" you will receive 177,000 search results. He makes the point cogently that far too many mistakes occur at animal shelters resulting in the unnecessary death of the animals in their care.

Nathan Winograd is a very particular and precise person. He is a former lawyer. He wants animal shelter administrators to be as precise as him and as caring as him to find ways to save lives. He believes that many shelters are simply too sloppy and don't employ enough systems and methods to save lives and rehome their animals. And he's correct. Nobody knows the American animal shelter system better than him.

He believes that this particular shelter and others should be held accountable to prevent these so-called "accidents" from happening again.

He believes that administrators of animal shelter should be high quality people and that the administrator of this shelter should be fired. And he wants legislation in place in America I presume at either the state or county or even federal level to "legislate away their power to kill" in order to achieve the goal of a No-Kill nation. And when that happens you will not get such a huge number of Google search results when searching for animals mistakenly killed at shelters.