The True Costs of Euthanasia in Animal Shelters: A Comprehensive Examination

http://lawlib.wlu.edu/lexopus/works/487-1.pdf

This paper is a detailed look at the true cost of euthanasia in our shelters.

An excerpt:
While a high kill volume keeps individuals from donating money to kill shelters, it also keeps them from adopting animals from these shelters, thereby depriving these establishments of another regular source of income...

Successful no- kill movements do not bloom and thrive on their own, however. What first is needed is a mental shift from a defensive, hopeless point of view – the one currently lauded by most high-kill animal shelters and augmented by breeders and their big business counterparts – to one of hope, where death is no longer an option, and where programs are framed with the assumption that killing is failure – and that failure is not an option. What is needed is a novel infrastructure that combines several potential assets into a single, life-saving entity. Shelter workers and managers, communities, appropriate use of fiscal resources, and a mental shift that considers the animals themselves as contributors to the no-kill movement need to be combined into a multi-faceted being with a single mission: to save the lives of every healthy animals that comes through the doors of an animal shelter. After all, shelter deaths negatively impact all these entities. At the very least, each should be concerned with the kill solution in animal shelters from a perspective of self preservation...

The great paradox of the pet overpopulation problem is that the predicament is less one of excess numbers of dogs and cats and more one of the public‘s general disdain toward shelters, and consequent aversion to adoption. And shelters do little to dispel these myths, nor to accommodate the public. 

The True Costs of Euthanasia in Animal Shelters: A Comprehensive Examination