Today I received a very insightful and interesting response from Tamira Thayne, Founder and CEO of Dogs Deserve Better [located at Good Newz Rehabilitation Centre]:
" Hi Jordan,
In answer to your question, yes, I do believe that the current shelter environment is horrible for dogs. But the problem then becomes, how can we do it better without having dogs kill each other.
A large part of why shelters are the way they are is for dog safety. I have learned a lot about working with groups of dogs in the past twelve years, and I’ve learned that any dog can fight at any time given the right stimulus. All it takes is a wrong flick of the tail, and a fight breaks out. The better people you have in place to manage the dogs the better, but even then it is still possible for fights to break out at any moment.
So we have to ask ourselves, how do we do it better but still safely for the dogs? And the staff tasked with caring for them?
I’m afraid I don’t have a great answer for that. I have reached out to many of the folks who are touting open sheltering to ask them to come to our facility and help us design a better plan for our addition. But they don’t even respond.
I think when people don’t work with dogs daily, it’s easy to say they should all be together. That’s what I want too.
But I also have an obligation to the dogs and my staff to keep everyone safe. If I have all my dogs together, then someone is going to get hurt.
We pull dogs from chains, dogs that have never lived with other dogs. Each day can be a risk. We keep our big group to 8 dogs max, but all our dogs sleep and eat in crates for safety.
I understand why shelters are the way they are, but I think we need to do better. I just don’t have the solution for what that can look like to keep everyone safe AND make everyone happy.
I hope this helps.
Feel free to respond with further questions.
Tami "
(Tamira Thayne (tddb@dogsdeservebetter.org), 2014. Dissertation and Final Project Research. 20th October 2014. Email to: Jordan James-Bruce (jordan.james-bruce@live.co.uk).)
The response gives great information in why shelters, the way they are, are positive in the fact they promote safety for unsocialised dogs by securing them in individual pens. As stated, Good Newz rehabilitates dogs from chains, slightly different circumstances to which I am investigating, yet vastly similiar nonetheless in the fact these dogs are also traumatised and need readjusting to be a friendly, safe dog.
The facilities idealism for an 'open' shelter, allowing all dogs to run freely is intriguing, nonetheless as stated, there are great limitations to circumstance to whether this is a viable / safe method of doing so, especially whilst working with such vulnerable animals.