Looks like our experience with the Ottawa Humane Society is indeed not an outlier. There appears to be some outrage over the Arizona Humane Society’s decision to euthanize a recovering addict’s 9-month old injured cat, after he was unable to come up with $400 on the spot. (Ironically, the same Humane Society had no trouble finding the money to hire a professional publicist to deal specifically with this case.)
I understand that shelters, especially municipal shelters, must make unpleasant decisions every day about animals that cannot be rescued or are unadoptable. But these decisions should not be made callously and heartlessly. What is appalling is that in all these cases, there were people able and willing to care for the animal that was killed, but the humane society in question never gave them, or the cat, a chance.