American news media inaccurately report on animal shelter intake rates

Nathan Winograd, a major animal advocate in the United States of America, tells me in his newsletter that "We are seeing something we've never seen before".

Image: Nathan Winograd's newsletter.

He has accused the online news media of America of "spreading alarm" about the very high animal intakes into rescue centres and shelters in America. He blames them for inaccurate reporting. He should know best and he says that the facts on the ground do not mirror the news media stories about high intake rates.

He claims that "while intakes are higher than at the height of the pandemic when many of these facilities were closed, they remain below pre-pandemic levels."

He claims that there has been an "epic failure of journalism to accurately report on this topic".

And this is the problem as he sees it: these stories have allowed shelters to avoid their responsibilities. It's allowed them to continue with, in his words, "shoddy practices by pointing the finger of blame outward".

In other words, the shelters can blame a mythical super-high intake of animals to cover up their inadequacies.

But the truth, he says, about shelter overcrowding and killing shelter animals unnecessarily lies in the fact that the shelters are "making pandemic-related closures permanent". And there are no "offsite adoptions [and] appointment-only adoptions."

In addition, he blames the shelters for a "lack of public access hours (evenings and weekends, and [a] failure to implement robust volunteer, foster, and rescue partnerships."

As I say, Nathan Winograd, is America's best expert on animal shelters in America and he is the number one exponent of the no-kill shelter policy.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.