February
2001
Some
Thoughts on The Center for Animal Care and Control
By Claude Matthews
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I
don’t believe that the wish of the citizens of New York City is
for their municipal government to permit, let alone to be itself in
the business of, the killing of healthy or medically treatable cats
and dogs, animals once members, with humans, of families. Yet for decades
that is precisely what has been happening. In continuity with the shameful
record of the ASPCA, the answer of The Center for Animal Care and Control
(CACC) to the problem of homeless animals has been massive and systematized
violence. To kill a dog or cat with years of healthy life ahead of it
is indisputably an act of violence. But it is not called “violence.”
The facilities which perform the killing are called “shelters,”
the killing itself is called “euthanasia,” and this ghastly
charade goes on year after year, more or less immune to the efforts
of people who challenge it.
With respect to the values and the will of the communities upon whom
its authority is imposed, the CACC is a rogue agency, and so its odious
mission hinges on the preservation of a lie—that its regime of
triage, its choosing of who will live and who will die (and most die)
is in some way a necessity, a regrettable but ultimately inevitable
accommodation to a resource-scarce world—rather than what it really
is, a wholly contingent and avoidable choice of death over life. Understand
too that “the system” of which the CACC is a component is
a rigged one, structured in such a way as to facilitate denial of or
at least a diffusion of responsibility for what is in fact a premeditated
policy of cruel austerity. The CACC is not meant to “solve”
the problem of dogs and cats without homes. It is meant to dispose of
the problem. Within this system the CACC performs its assigned role
of executioner and, if need be, can play scapegoat or “fall-guy”
for the public anger at the austerity which the CACC has been charged
with implementing. (Actual ineptitude, inefficiency, or malfeasance
within the CACC itself could even function to abet this scapegoat role.)
In turn, the CACC can always blame external budgetary and other artificial
constraints that supposedly hinder it from doing the work it would do
“if only it could.” But because the CACC is a puppet operation,
because the externality of its alleged constraints is a theatrical fiction,
its “real” intentions, if it has any, mean nothing. The CACC
is structured to fail, that is, to be the failing part of the structure,
that is, to do the system’s “dirty work.” The majority
of animals entering the CACC do not have, and never had, a chance to
leave—alive. But the system accepts this, indeed is this, and therefore
by its own sinister logic is not “failing” at all. That some
individual workers at the CACC and comparable organizations may wish
it were otherwise, may struggle against this grim reality, does not
substantively alter the facts. And likewise, that none of this “makes
sense” is an irrelevancy, even if a very interesting one.
A Test of Will
The masquerade of choice as necessity might best be seen at points
of challenge to this system, at moments of threatened perturbation of
the status quo. In 1998, repeating in writing what I had verbally suggested
in 1995, I presented the CACC’s executive director with just such
a challenge. Taking the maxim “where there is a will there is a
way” as the tersest refutation of fake-scarcity being used to legitimate
violence, I would like now to posit a corollary, that the provision
of a way should count as a good test of will. The “way” for
the CACC that I proposed, to quickly, substantially, and inexpensively
reduce its kill-rate, was as follows: that the CACC would establish
its own website, which would be searchable and updated daily at minimum.
Each animal in all of the CACC’s adoption wards would be represented
with both text describing its basic characteristics and, most importantly,
a photograph. Properly designed and promoted, this website would save
thousands of animals annually, and inaugurate a new type of relationship
between the public and New York City’s companion animals. The labor
and expertise to design such a site and to integrate it with the CACC’s
own database for automatic updating was also offered, free of charge.
It was instructive to watch what then happened. The proposal was accepted.
And then for nearly a year it was stymied at every turn, through an
ad hoc smokescreen of endless delays, deceptions, and bureaucratic flim-flam,
the full chronicle of which would run to dozens if not hundreds of pages.
That one week’s excuse contradicted the next, that none were plausible,
that all belied the central fact that the CACC had outwardly embraced
the website proposal, bothered only me. It is as if the only constant
thread running through this ordeal, indeed the only real “will”
of this organization, were a ghostly organizing principle of obstructionism
and negativity. Keep in mind here that we’re talking about saving
puppies and kittens, cats and dogs! And even if it’s possible that
the thwarting of the website could be accounted for by some undisclosed
directive from higher-up, for example, to keep the CACC off-line or
to maintain more generally a lower media profile, for whatever reasons,
that in a sense only begs the question as to what’s really going
on and in furtherance of what agenda such a directive would be given.
In summary, I believe there was never an intention to implement the
website proposal. The real expertise of the CACC is in just such mummery—the
presentation of a simulation of interest in reform while in reality
blocking it.
If the real spirit, the deathly orientation, of a system has been flushed
by this test from behind its rhetoric of compassion, the imperative
remains for the public to examine and understand just what spawns that
spirit and what sustains it. To those questions I don’t have answers.
What I do believe is that the grotesque concept of “surplus life,”
the one thing the CACC and places like it, in their concrete practices,
seem determined to keep alive, is a danger to everyone, human and non.
Presently, the CACC has the power to do what it is doing. It does not
have the right.
“Overpopulation” can sometimes be a shorter way to say “more
life than there is the intention to keep alive.”
From July 1995 to June 1996 Claude Matthews took photographs of animals
at the Manhattan 110th St. CACC facility, to produce his own color-xerox
adoption signs. During his final session of photography he covertly
made a two-hour audio recording inside the dog adoption ward, with the
intent of releasing it as a double-CD. That CD, “DogPoundFoundSound,”
is available free of charge at brdm.org.
