The Anti-Heroes

Katja Guenther and Kristen Hassen betrayed animals for self-aggrandizement. They now want to abolish animal shelters and leave animals to fend for themselves on the streets.

After being tortured by Michael Vick, Mel continued to suffer trauma even after his rescue by police — every time he “meets a stranger, he goes into convulsions. He staggers back into a wall for protection. He lowers his face and tries to hide.”

Seventeen years ago today, police raided the Virginia home of Michael Vick. What they uncovered was ghastly and would cast Vick as one of our generation’s most notorious animal abusers. 

Michael Vick is a sadist who took pleasure in torturing dogs and killing them by:

• Hanging: “by placing a nylon cord over a 2 x 4 that was nailed to two trees located next to the big shed.”

• Drowning: “by putting the dogs’ heads in a 5 gallon bucket of water.”

• Beating: “by slamming [dogs] to the ground several times … breaking the dog’s back or neck.”

• Shooting: “by shooting the animal with a .22 caliber handgun.”

And when some dogs did not initially die, he further brutalized them: “Vick took down one of the dogs that would not die from hanging and tossed the dog to the side. He later hung the same dog until it died.” Police brought almost 70 dogs into protective custody, preventing them from meeting similar fates. 

As one of the rescuers later wrote,

Everyone we worked with was deeply affected by the case. The details that got to me then and stay with me today involve the swimming pool that was used to kill some of the dogs. Jumper cables were clipped onto the ears of underperforming dogs, then, just like with a car, the cables were connected to the terminals of car batteries before lifting and tossing the shamed dogs into the water. Most of Vick’s dogs were small — 40lbs or so — so tossing them in would’ve been fast and easy work for thick athlete arms. We don’t know how many suffered this premeditated murder, but the damage to the pool walls tells a story. It seems that while they were scrambling to escape, they scratched and clawed at the pool liner and bit at the dented aluminum sides…

I wear some pretty thick skin during our work with dogs, but I can’t shake my minds-eye image of a little black dog splashing frantically in bloody water… screaming in pain and terror… brown eyes saucer wide and tiny black white-toed feet clawing at anything, desperate to get a hold. This death did not come quickly. The rescuer in me keeps trying to think of a way to go back in time and somehow stop this torture and pull the little dog to safety. I think I’ll be looking for ways to pull that dog out for the rest of my life.

It has been roughly 17 years since dogs who came into this world ready to learn, love, and find their place in a caring family were instead horrifically abused and killed in some of the cruelest ways possible. Vick has never taken full responsibility for what he did to those dogs. He was allowed to plead to only one count of “conspiracy to travel in interstate commerce in aid of unlawful activities,” allowed back into the NFL, given an endorsement deal by Nike, and a job at Fox Sports. Instead, he laments what he lost after getting caught — the largest paycheck of any NFL player and, as he said, “Shit, it hurt [my chances of] going in the Hall of Fame.” For this, he blames others, saying those “who didn’t have my best interests at heart” were the ones “to take all that away from me.”

He is not alone. Others also cast Vick as the victim rather than the perpetrator. In her book, “The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals,” Katja Guenther, a race and gender professor at the University of California at Riverside, says Vick was targeted because of his skin color, not because of his crimes. In a staggeringly racist screed, she wrote that black people should not be held responsible or even judged because how they treat dogs is inherent to black culture, which views dogs “as resources, whether protective (as in guarding) or financial (as in breeding or possibly fighting).”

She further argues that those who condemn this abuse and want dogs to live with “those who will treat their dog as a family member” and will “care for their dog at a high level for the duration of the dog’s life” are using dogs “as instruments for reproducing whiteness.” To quote one of her fellow professors of race and gender, when the police seized all the Vick dogs who were still alive and then placed them with families who would not abuse them, they “effectively segregated [the dogs] from Blackness.” 

This week, on the anniversary of Vick’s arrest, Guenther is back with more apologia for dog abuse and more condemnation of those who want to protect them with the publication of a journal article — co-written by Kristen Hassen, another apologist for animal abuse and one who bears much of the blame for the rise of regressive practices nationally that lead to more strays.

A revisionist history

Animals 2024, 14(9), 1254; https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14091254.

In “Coming to Terms with the Legacies of the Pound Model in Animal Sheltering in the United States,” Guenther and Hassen call for abolishing animal shelters and leaving dogs on the streets. To make this case, they offer a revisionist account of the humane movement’s founding in the U.S., which they blame for the continued oppression of black people and other “marginalized communities.”

Guenther and Hassen argue that 19th-century reformers, like Henry Bergh — who founded the first SPCA in North America to protect animals from cruelty — and Caroline Earl White — who founded the first animal shelter to offer animals for adoption — were really racist capitalists, intent on doing the bidding of bankers and financiers by oppressing people of color “who used animals, such as carriage horses, cart and plow oxen, and other ‘beasts of burden’, for labor.” 

In this account, Bergh and White’s founding of the humane movement was a,

[W]ay for the state to try to fix a crisis of capitalism, namely the ongoing displacement of people and companion animals and the continued maintenance of a surplus underclass essential to keeping wages low. People who are not housing-insecure or incarcerated are disciplined into ways of living and thinking that certain forms of protection and security are legitimate. Unhoused animals, like other so called surplus populations, including unhoused people and carcerally impacted people, are spun into gold through what abolitionist and disability justice scholar Liat Ben-Moshe refers to as “clever capitalist alchemy”. This happens when capitalism extracts value from the abandonment of entire populations, such as disabled people, unemployed people, poor people of color, and unhoused animals. Unhoused animals who have been displaced through the routine processes of capitalism have given rise to an entire industry of shelters, humane societies, rescues, and philanthropies of all sizes. 

On top of ignoring that many early humane activists were black, this view ignores that reformers such as Bergh fought bankers and financiers, like the Vanderbilts, who owned horse railway lines. He fought wealthy sportsmen by trying to ban hunting. He sought to take animals out of the capitalist economy by fighting:

• P.T. Barnum, who exploited animals in circuses;

• The medical establishment by trying to ban vivisection; and,

• City aldermen by arresting and prosecuting their dog catchers.

He also fought on behalf of poor children, creating the first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Not surprisingly, Bergh was often seen as a traitor to his class. And White herself was an abolitionist (as well as a vegetarian).

To Hassen and Guenther, every humane society that stands up for animals, every animal protection group that gives voice to the voiceless, and the millions of animals who have been saved thanks to the legacy of the first Americans to weave the ideals of animal protection into our jurisprudence, the American psyche, and the fabric of American life are not to be celebrated. They are tools for capitalist oppression.

A defense of abusers

Saint

Though no less tragic because of it, that Hassen and Guenther hold these views should not come as a surprise. Like Guenther, Hassen has also embraced animal abusers. After a staff member at the Philadelphia Pound physically abused a dog named Saint, the injured dog was placed in a kennel “with a jaw broken so badly that [he] couldn't close his mouth.” Instead of providing veterinary care, Aurora Velazquez, the pound’s director, “instructed staff to kill Saint by the end of the shelter's operating hours that day.” After being killed, Velazquez quickly disposed of Saint’s body, refusing to return it to his family. 

Following Saint’s killing, the state conducted an inspection of the facility she oversaw and uncovered other neglect and abuse: extensive filth and feces and dogs not being treated for medical emergencies. In a rare action reserved only for the most extreme cases, the Pennsylvania dog warden ordered Velazquez and her staff to provide immediate care for dogs and “made a referral to law enforcement authorities for animal cruelty charges,” the second criminal referral in as many months and a devastating indictment of Velazquez’ failure to protect and properly care for the animals in her custody.  Under a cloud of ethical and criminal misconduct and the chorus of dog lovers nationwide demanding accountability, Velazquez resigned.

In addition to making several comments in defense of Velazquez (“It’s such a difficult time for shelters and shelter workers”) and reprimanding animal lovers who called for more humane practices (“it’s really disheartening this is how you are spending your time”), Hassen heaped praise on Velazquez. She said nothing about the filth the dogs were forced to live in, the lack of veterinary care, the suffering, the abuse, the killing, or the fact that her staff broke Saint’s jaw and then Velazquez had him killed to hide the evidence, leaving his family in tatters. 

Instead, Hassen called Velazquez the true “victim” and likened the public demands for accountability to one of the darkest days in the animal protection movement: “the likes of which we haven’t really seen.” Of course, what Saint went through was demonstrably worse. He was physically abused, allowed to languish in pain with no care, subsequently killed, and turned to ash. But most striking of all was Hassen’s attempt — like Guenther about Vick — to portray the public outcry, criminal referrals, and penalties as a defeat. 

Blaming others for her own failures

Hassen and Guenther might care little for animals and, conversely, care more for their abusers, especially if they are people of color, as sacrificing animals on the altar of critical race theory is the cause du jour in academic circles, but they don’t really believe capitalism and racism are to blame.

For Guenther, this type of rumination allows her to stand out from a crowded field of academics preaching ideologies that are having their moment, even though they undermine moral and social progress by fostering the very racist outcomes they hypocritically claim to oppose. Guenther’s stab at professional notoriety also comes at the expense of the welfare, rights, and lives of animals. 

For Hassen, blaming capitalism, an amorphous villain that offers an easy target for every imaginable social ill, allows her to deflect blame for its real cause — people like herself who once championed proven alternatives to killing in animal shelters (alternatives that caused a dramatic decline in killing in our nation's shelter between 1995 and 2019) but who abandoned those principles for power and the limelight. In doing so, Hassen gave shelter administrators who once felt public pressure to reform, the excuse to close their doors and leave needy animals on the street. 

Rather than attribute the reversal to policies she began championing as a leader of Austin Pets Alive and a Board member of the National Animal Control Association (NACA), Hassen argues, without any evidence, that humane organizations and animal shelters were founded on racist principles and because of that, they will always be racist, an unsubstantiated phenomenon which she attempts to give legitimacy by using academic jargon to define it: “path dependency.”

To Hassen, “path dependency” means there could never be lasting progress because organizations will always revert to their founding principles. It is why Hassen now argues that shelters must be abolished.

The facts, however, tell a very different story, one that demonstrates why Hassen feels compelled to find scapegoats (It's capitalism! It's racism! It’s path dependency!) — it is Hassen and her ilk who are responsible for the recent erosion of a safety net that was to credit for a 95% nationwide decline in pound killing. 

Coming to terms with Kristen Hassen’s betrayals

Despite a long-term trend of declining intakes and killing, shelter dog killing increased in 2022. Specifically, shelters took in 17% fewer dogs than in 2019 (pre-pandemic) but killed 2.3% more than the prior year. The killing of rabbits and other small animals increased, too, despite similar decades of declines. Death rates in 2023 were even higher with double-digit increases: up 33% for both dogs and cats since 2021 — an 85% increase just for dogs. 

Shelters seeing killing increases have not fully opened post-pandemic to the public and are doing so by choice. These shelters refuse to re-launch the No Kill Equation programs and services they scuttled during the pandemic. Why have they stopped embracing these programs? Hassen and the colleagues she works with, lauds, and promotes — including directors of the most regressive shelters nationwide and organizations like the California Animal Welfare Association, Austin Pets Alive, Best Friends Animal Society, NACA, Maddie’s Fund, and the ASPCA — urged or defended their doing so.

For example, embracing a program called “Human Animal Support Services,” these shelters have closed their doors and stopped taking in strays, including kittens, telling people to handle it themselves, turn them loose, or simply leave them on the sidewalk — with deadly consequences.

Nesa, a victim of Hassen’s policy recommendations

Microchipped and wearing a little pink harness, Nesa should have had her whole life ahead of her. Had El Paso Animal Services taken her in and scanned her for a microchip after she was found roaming the streets, she would have been reclaimed within 15 minutes. Instead, she was turned away by the municipal shelter; her finder told to release her back on the street. She was subsequently found dead.

Though Nesa died in an El Paso alleyway, her death had its genesis over 500 miles away in the headquarters of Austin Pets Alive (APA). There, Hassen and others — including the director of the El Paso pound — hatched a plan to manipulate intake and placement rates by abandoning the fundamental purpose — indeed the very definition — of a shelter: to provide a safety net of care for lost, homeless, and unwanted animals. Under the policy, “Intakes of healthy strays and owner surrenders doesn’t exist anymore,” and there is “No kennel space for rehoming, stray hold or intake.” 

Cats are abandoned across the street from a Los Angeles shelter after staff members turn away people trying to bring in stray cats.

Nesa is not the only dog to die. In addition to other deaths, directors have told rescuers to let dogs drown or to leave them tied up and abandoned with no food or water. And it is not just dogs. Under HASS, cats and kittens suffer, too. In Salt Lake City, UT, a couple was told to re-abandon a blind, pregnant cat found walking in circles on the street: “It was just heartbreaking... They told us to release the cat.”

In the City of Los Angeles, cat rooms are mostly empty and, in some cases, entirely empty, while staff at the pound turn stray cats away, leading to mass abandonment. Across the street from one of the shelters, volunteers are forced to care for many of those abandoned cats. Many of these directors admitted they were following the advice of APA and NACA, on whose Board Hassen sits.

None of this was pre-ordained by “path dependency.” Reform could have continued until we reached a No Kill nation. Indeed, we were very nearly there. No Kill reforms were responsible for a 95% decline in U.S. killing from its high-water mark of 13 million yearly to less than one million. By some measures, it was as low as half a million, being called “the single biggest success of the modern animal protection movement.” 

So when Hassen writes that she and Guenther penned the article “as a call to action at a time when rates of shelter killing have markedly increased and the gains of recent decades are stalling and even reversing,” it is a craven ploy to deflect attention.

Hassen intentionally or ignorantly gets other things wrong. She writes that “adoptions and transfers to rescue groups remain significantly lower than before the pandemic” but fails to explain that the organizations and shelter directors she publicly lauds as “rock stars,” which she works with as a conference speaker or works for as a consultant, are the ones discouraging adoptions by closing their doors to adopters without an appointment, offering fewer adoption hours, making adoption difficult, and even spending tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers and lobbyists fighting lawsuits and legislation against their often illegal attempts to kill animals despite rescue groups ready, willing, and able to save them.

It is so much easier to blame capitalism, racism, path dependency, and Bergh and White, who have been dead for over a century, than to point the finger of blame at herself and those who sign her paychecks. (In this way, Hassen, who is now a paid shelter consultant, appears to be sacrificing animals to the almighty dollar and, therefore, can perhaps be labeled as the stereotypical capitalist “villain” she decries.)

We need to reform, not abolish, animal shelters

But even as the proverbial broken clock can be right twice a day, Hassen (almost) gets one thing right. She writes that the problem with the status quo in sheltering today is that its embrace of the Five Freedoms model — freedom from hunger/thirst, discomfort, distress, pain/disease, and freedom to express normal behavior — ignores an animal’s right to live. As I wrote years ago in an argument she now plagiarizes,

Not only is the freedom to live the most important freedom, but none of the other “freedoms” are possible without it. How can you ensure that animals can express normal behavior if they can be killed? How can an animal have any freedoms — including the safety of being sheltered when they get lost — when any or all of them can simply be taken away by killing? 

I say she “almost” gets it right because Hassen ignores the seventh freedom — freedom from danger when it is within our power to protect animals against it. While closing one’s door to an animal in need, as Hassen’s HASS model does, may not undermine an animal’s right to live — although it doesn’t count animals who may get hit by cars or otherwise die from environmental hazards — it ignores an animal’s right of rescue.

The No Kill Equation’s success at eliminating the killing of healthy and treatable animals means that shelters can be fixed and animals can be rescued without subsequently being killed. But Hassen’s solution is not to continue reforming these pounds, as the No Kill movement has done — indeed, she partners with those fighting these efforts — but abolishing them and instead leaving animals on the streets.¹ She and Guenther lament that,

Although somewhere between 50 and 75% of the world’s nearly 1 billion dogs are free-living (with and without caregivers), the idea of dogs living among us, in communities, is almost unimaginable in most of the US.

There’s a reason for that. Unlike the “typical modern suburban or urban dog” living in a home, free-living dogs suffer from a “lack of sufficient and adequate food” and a “lack of veterinary care.” Consequently, puppy mortality is high (as much as 70%), and life expectancy is low (3-4 years, on average). Tragically, they also face human hostility. Female dogs are subject to targeted killing to prevent maternal aggression, mating, and the birth of more puppies.

By contrast, 

[T]he typical modern suburban or urban companion dog experiences good welfare in a number of respects. This is especially the case when it comes to security, satisfaction of nutritional needs (though companion dogs have problems with a high prevalence of obesity), and proper veterinary care.

Their average lifespan is north of 10 years.

Free-living dogs may be free to choose when and with whom to interact, as Guenther gleefully proclaims, but they are also chronically hungry, suffering from treatable conditions, and have a lifespan one-third that of homed dogs. Of course, we can do more to improve the lives of street dogs, including veterinary care, food, and other protection, but the most important thing we can do is find homes where they can join a loving family and enjoy the same safety and comforts we demand for ourselves.

Thankfully — try as Hassen and Guenther might to convince us otherwise — leaving the welfare of dogs and cats to chance and whatever fate befalls them on the streets or impounding and killing them are not the only two choices presented. As the No Kill movement proved before Hassen helped dismantle those reforms, there’s a third option: a nation of shelters grounded in a reverence for life.

We do not need to abolish animal shelters; we just need to continue reforming them. Why destroy with a hatchet what can be fixed using a scalpel? We did it before, and — by ignoring Guenther and Hassen — we can do it again.

1. Although Hassen and Guenther say that a full exploration of the alternative vision they espouse is “beyond the scope of this paper,” Guenther has spelled out that vision in her book and Hassen is an architect and promoter of the HASS model.