| Summary: | "In 2014, shelters across the United States put to sleep 3 million companion animals that were deemed unadoptable, and each year an average of 1 million meet the same end. A small portion of these animals are euthanized due to untreatable health conditions, while the vast majority are killed because staff at the shelters determine that they've been there too long and have little to no chance of finding a home. Animal rights activists have long protested kill-shelters, but often their voices are shunted to the side to make room for other, more pressing social concerns (i.e., those centering human experiences). In this book, Katja Guenther enters the charged atmosphere of a high-kill shelter in LA in order to find out what logics are at play in the decisions about whether and which animals should die. She challenges readers to consider the evidence she unearths, showing that what happens at these shelters has everything to do with human systems of oppression. Drawing on three years of ethnography, conducted while serving as a volunteer at the shelter, Guenther unlocks the hidden world of shelter politics to examine how power is exerted, not only over the animals, but also over the human volunteers, and the surrounding urban population. She decodes the language shelter staff use when discussing "irresponsible pet owners;" illuminates the internal hierarchies that marginalize the voices of the largely female volunteers; and analyzes the dynamics of race, class, and gender that lead to breed discrimination, interpretations of animal behavior, and, ultimately, the decision of who deserves to live and die. What happens at PAW, she finds, is the outcome of everyday and sustained collisions of capitalism, anthroparchy, white supremacy, and patriarchy, collisions that reduce companion animals to expendable commodities, and allow the shelter to shift responsibility for the deaths of shelter animals onto the low-income minority community it purports to serve and onto the animals themselves"--
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