The Associated Press State & Local Wire
October 14, 2007 Sunday 1:14 AM GMT
New NY-based Web site hopes to save dogs slated for death
By VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press Writer
Sweet William: Young black Labrador retriever in Illinois with 2 days
to live.
Sandy: Golden female Jindo in Brooklyn, N.Y., also with 2 days left
to live.
Kate Hepburn: Tan female boxer in California with 18 days to live.
On Saturday, these were some of the dogs in shelters across the
country slated for euthanasia their fate posted on a Web site that
aims to save their lives by offering them for adoption.
Each is tagged with a death date set by a shelter and a countdown
clock showing the days, or hours, until the animal is destroyed.
About 4 million dogs are put to death each year in the United States,
by injection or gas.
Dogsindanger.com works with more than 120 shelters nationwide that
destroy dogs. How much time the dogs get before death varies from
state to state. In New York City, a stray dog must be kept a minimum
of three days, while a shelter has the legal right to immediately
destroy an animal that is abandoned there by its owner.
In the three weeks since the site has been up, dozens of dogs have
found new homes. Their photos are posted on a section of the site
marked, "Success Stories." The images of dogs that didn’t make it
adorn the site’s "In Memoriam" wall.
"It’s not the fault of the shelters," said Alex Aliksanyan, a pet
adoption advocate who made money in the Internet travel business.
"They don’t like doing this, but they have to abide by the law, which
requires a shelter to control its animal population."
Aliksanyan spent a half million of his own dollars to start The Buddy
Fund, Inc., a nonprofit organization that operates the site (named
after his miniature American Eskimo dog). The site works mostly with
government-funded shelters.
"I’ve done well, and it was time to give something back," said the
50-year-old Istanbul-born entrepreneur of Armenian heritage. "So I
thought, let’s bring the story of these animals dying quietly in
these shelters to the public and say, ‘Can you do something?’"
He hired a half dozen staffers to manage and market the site from an
office on Broadway. Shelters post information about each dog
directly, with daily updates and information on how each shelter can
be contacted. Aliksanyan ships out free digital cameras and software
for the task.
A shelter can sometimes delay a dog’s death date, if it has room in
its kennel and few new stray dogs coming in. A euthanasia date can
get moved up too, if the shelter becomes overcrowded.
The adoption service is free both for shelters and people looking for
pets, allowing users to search by location, breed, or time until
death.
The in-your-face site, Aliksanyan said, "is not a place to sit with
your 6-year-old and say, ‘This one’s going to die, that one is going
to die.’"
He said he’s driven by the philosophy of the Indian spiritual leader
Mahatma Ghandi, whose words are posted over the "In Memoriam" page:
"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by
the way its animals are treated."
On the Net:
Dogs In Danger:
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
