EDITORIAL - Legality cannot sugarcoat cruelty

The city veterinarian, Dr. Alice Utlang, wrote in to react to a page one photo in this paper last January 25. The photo was titled “Official Cruelty” and it showed three workers of the City Pound in the act of catching a stray dog and loading it into their vehicle.

Since pictures do not lie, we will just let the public, or at least those who saw the picture, decide for themselves whether the manner in which the dog was being caught and loaded into the City Pound vehicle was cruel or was the epitome of kindness.

We do apologize to Dr. Utlang for taking personal offense. But there is nothing to apologize for in the picture and accompanying caption, which said dogs caught by the City Pound are disposed of by gassing, using fumes from the exhaust pipes of motor vehicles.

Sounding like a lawyer, Dr. Utlang ticked off a litany of city ordinances to prove that what the City Pound is doing is legal. For the record, legality was never the question here. We called it “official cruelty” precisely because we believe the whole thing is legal.

Dr. Utlang said the dogs are not disposed of immediately. Owners are given the chance to redeem the dogs. And some of the dogs are opened for adoption. Again, we never said the city didn’t do that. All we said was that dogs are gassed for disposal, and that is cruel.

Dr. Utlang insists what they are doing is in accordance with the law. Amen. A careful reading of the caption will show we never questioned the law. We just said it was cruel. Just because a harsh law is still the law doesn’t mean we can no longer criticize it.

It would be a better idea, she said, if we ask her office first before we proceed to feed the public with wrong information. But pray tell where the wrong information was. Again, pictures do not lie. And we already know for a fact that dogs up for disposal are gassed.

Just because catching stray dogs is, without doubt, for the public good, and disposing of dogs by gassing is in accordance with the law, doesn’t mean we should all stand up and applaud.

The beauty of life (even at the expense of dogs) is that hope springs eternal and that somehow, sometime, a better way may be found to do things in a less cruel (if legal) way. But until then, neither silence nor metaphor can gloss over or disguise what is patently unkind.