WACO, Texas -- While this planet's children continue to die from starvation and disease, soft-hearted Americans are pouring millions into an effort to ensure nutritious meals, loving homes and litter-to-grave health care for every dog and cat in this nation.
That's unfair, of course, but it's also true.The hypocrisy of animal rights extremists has always been great fun. Animal rights activists will splatter red paint on the mink coats of startled rich women but ignore the leather work boots worn by construction workers across the street.
Or they will protest the raising and killing of livestock for human consumption while feeding their carnivore pets food processed from those same animals.
Activists who force vegetarian diets on their dogs and cats should be cited for animal cruelty.
Over the past several years, animal-rights fundamentalists have honed their doctrine so thin that they have declared a jihad against America's greatest protector of animals, the Humane Society of the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the American Humane Association and the thousands of small, nonprofit animal shelters across the nation.
It started in California, which should surprise no one. A gathering of animal-rights ayatollahs in San Francisco decreed that it is morally indefensible for animal shelters to be involved in the euthanasia of any animal that has any chance of being adopted. Period.
No slack is given due to lack of funds, space or people willing to adopt. Also no credit for the millions of animals that have been saved or the passage of a long list of significant legislation that promotes the humane treatment of animals.
Never mind that every humane organization and animal shelter in the nation has worked for generations to educate the public to spay and neuter their pets to reduce the number of animals dropped off in animal shelters.
The first "no-kill" animal shelter in the United States was completed last year by the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. No animal that can be nursed back to health, trained and adopted will be killed.
That's great, except hypersensitive animal lovers now use the abundantly funded luxury adoption facility in San Francisco to attack animal shelters that also do not have "no-kill" policies.
More practical animal welfare officials, such as Roger A. Caras, president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, have called "no-kill" more a hoax than a fact.
The hoax is that San Francisco SPCA officials can only claim they are a "no-kill" facility by turning away animals they deem not adoptable. The city's animal control officers now offer all the strays they pick up to the "no kill" facility but still have to destroy nearly 6,000 animals annually.
According to a recent article in the Dallas Morning News by special contributor Jane Meredith Adams, an animal-loving California billionaire has plunked down $200 million to promote no-kill animal shelters nationwide. David Duffield, co-founder of PeopleSoft software, and his wife, Cheryl, established the $200-million foundation in memory of Maddie, their miniature schnauzer.
If enough billionaires, millionaires and just plain folks kick in enough money, it's likely that America will become the first nation to come close to guaranteeing a long and healthy life for every dog and cat.
U.S. animal shelters receive more than 5 million dogs and more than 4 million cats each year, according to the American Humane Association. Only a third of those animals find homes. The remaining 6 million are euthanized.
No-kill is a wonderful goal. Next we can work on the starving children.
Rowland Nethaway writes for the Waco Tribune-Herald in Waco, Texas. He may be reached by e-mail at RNethaway@wacotrib.com New York Times News Service