Letters to the Editor
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Not a hard decision
It's not clear why so many people regard municipal pounds as a "last resort" for adopting animals. Pound animals generally have much shorter lifespans owing to the combination of limited resources and open-ended obligation to take all comers inherent in a civic service. You're not rescuing a pound animal from a sorrowful life in a cage — you're rescuing it from certain, scheduled death.
Something about the obsession with private animal shelters reminds me of the way people buy their water in bottles now, as if public services are somehow suspect simply by virtue of ... what? Being public? Not being run by precious staffers anxiously wringing their hands and charging you for the privilege of going through them?
I've never gotten a pet from a shelter, always the pound. The folks there have their own kind of insensitivity — as Heather Havrilesky points out, it's not like the system is conducive to a lot of optimism about human nature — but the animals are just as real and the experience hugely less stiflingly bourgeois.
Unless, you know, bourgeois pet shopping is your thing, in which case quit your crying.