Oct 13, 2007 9:25 pm US/Eastern
New Web Site Hopes To Save Dogs Slated For Death
NEW YORK (AP) ―
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Dogs in shelters across the country that are slated for euthanasia will have their fate posted on a Web site that aims to save their lives by offering them for adoption. (File)
CBS
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."
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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