Is this illegal? I have read about several cases where rangers have entered people’s back yards and taken their dogs. http://bit.ly/9Z5ND6

Under Common Law, which supercedes all other forms of law in Australia, NOBODY can enter your premises unless you give either implied or explicit permission.

Look at what the AWL in Queensland have managed to achieve: http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2010/10/04/3028861.htm

And not only are they doing it for themselves, their “Getting to Zero” program is reaching out to other pounds and shelters and offering to help them achieve the same result.

I hope that rising community awareness of alternative solutions will force legislators to rethink their approach. However, there is also a resourcing issue … reducing the killing will take time, new skills, different approaches and changed legislation and those things require resources. So the community will need to be willing for governments to spend money on doing it better.

In the longer term “getting to zero” is probably a net cost benefit; in the short term it will require allocation of cash.

This clearly demonstrates the power we have to spread our ideas. We don’t need to defer to the high priests and pen pushers of our animal welfare system who don’t know (or don’t care) what’s best for our cats and dogs.

It’s time to put our democracy to work! Is it too soon to be thinking about a town hall meeting?

So what is an underperforming organisation to do? Lobby for laws which mandate the killing of pets. Mandatory desexing laws which drive the pets of disadvantaged owners into already crowded shelters; breed specific laws which give Councils a free pass to kill anything ‘bully'; and programs which encourage the community to target free-roaming cats for impoundment. All of which determine that shelters will always be full, the situation desperate and the kill rates high… because big pound contracts get paid more than small ones.

Groups often claim to be working “to put themselves out of business” – unfortunately in Victoria this is a misnomer. Those groups who keep their statistics under close guard from the public don’t want less pets in pounds or they would be doing everything they could to keep animals out of pounds! Instead they want a monopoly, to maintain the right to decide on arbitrary criteria that a pet ‘must’ be killed, to be able to kill without accountability and for the next decade to look exactly like the last.

We will not stand for it.