licensed hereunder, from the available impounded animals seized by lawful authority, such number of animals as the institution may request, provided however, that such animals shall have been impounded for not less than five days or for such other minimum period of time as may be specified by municipal ordinance and remain unclaimed and unredeemed by their owners or by any other person entitled to do so. If a request is made by a licensed institution to such supervisor for a larger number of animals than are available at the time of such request, the supervisor of such establishment shall withhold thereafter from destruction, all such unclaimed and unredeemed animals until such request has been filled, provided that the actual expense of holding such animals beyond the time of notice to such institution of their availability, shall be borne by the institution receiving them.11
Other pound seizure laws such as the one above were enacted before the Animal Welfare Act, so there were no restrictions or rules concerning anesthetizing or treating animals humanely while subjecting them to experimentation.
The practice of pound seizures allowed shelters to monetize their animals in two ways. A shelter could sell a live animal to a research institution rather than pay to house and care for it until an owner claimed it as a lost pet, or an abandoned animal found a new home. Or a shelter could euthanize a pet sooner rather than later, as dead pets could also be sold to institutions. When word got out about these practices, some members of the public who knew and disapproved of them would release or leave strays to suffer and die on the streets rather than turn them into pounds. This fundamentally gutted the primary objective of shelters and deprived the animals of any solace.
It was not until 1993, almost fifty years after pound seizure laws were passed and more than thirty years after the label of a class B dealer was established, that a five-day holding period was enacted, as an amendment to the Animal Welfare Act, ostensibly to allow families to reclaim their lost or stolen pets before it was too late. During this period, laboratories (who sold to other institutions such as laboratories and schools), institutions, and shelters were prohibited from selling pets to a dealer. Such a provision might have saved Pepper the Dalmatian thirty years earlier. The following is the USDA summary statement:
SUMMARY: We are amending the regulations under the Animal Welfare Act (Act) to require that dogs and cats acquired by pounds and shelters owned and operated by States, counties, and cities, private entities established for the purpose of caring for animals, such as humane societies or contract pounds or shelters, and research facilities licensed as dealers by the United States Department of Agriculture, be held and cared for at those establishments for at least 5 days before being provided to a dealer. We are also amending the regulations to require that dealers provide a valid certification to anyone acquiring random source dogs and cats from them. These amendments are being made pursuant to the most recent amendment of the Act. The amendment to the Act was enacted to prevent the use of stolen pets in research and to provide owners the opportunity to locate their animals.
EFFECTIVE DATE: August 23, 1993.12
As of this writing, lest you think that pound seizure is a dead issue, only eighteen states and Washington, DC, have prohibited the practice. Thirty-one states leave the decision to local cities and counties, and Oklahoma still requires that animals be handed over for testing. California, considered the most enlightened and progressive state in issues of animal welfare, did not ban the practice of turning over live animals to research institutions until 2016. However, California shelters may still turn over dead animals for research, if they post a notice informing the public that they do. (The notice requirement used to apply to live animals as well.) The State Humane Association of California, now the California Animal Welfare Association, of which I am currently president, sponsored a bill to ban turning over animals, both dead and alive, to research facilities (Assembly Bill 2269). The part of the bill protecting live animals became law, but the part intended to protect dead pets and let them rest in peace did not prevail.
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