This story has about a million different things in it that I want to fight about.
To be clear, it's almost never anyone else's fault when someone commits suicide, and it's not the AC officer's fault that this woman did. But the whole story is just a big, tragic clusterfuck.
Obviously, there's not much detail in that story itself, so I can't say whether it applies in this case, but it's not at all uncommon for animal control to casually overreact and end up doing more harm than good. And it does point up how important pets are to a lot of people's general well being. Which is something those animal hoarding shows do too. They go all scorched earth on them and take away all or most of their pets, and then gloss over what happens to the animals. Even for non-hoarding people with pets, it can be miserable and depressing to live without them. With animal hoarders, that's obviously only going to be amplified. It'd have to be pretty traumatic to lose them all so suddenly like that.
Yeah, her pets shouldn't have gotten out, and it's troubling if the house really was unsanitary, but if the house was actually unsafe, and had two humans and eleven animals, how does it help to just remove all the animals to an overcrowded, high kill shelter rather than offering some kind of help or at least some time to improve their situation? (Their municipal shelter kills 16,000 pets a year, and they've
already killed at least one of the dogs.) Why remove the animals and leave the people there? Why not call Adult Protective Services if it was that bad? And how does it make any kind of fiscal sense, even, to be so zealous about confiscating animals in an area where animal control and sheltering is so overextended already?
It's just a fucked up notion of animal welfare, and no notion at all of human welfare.
Oh, and apparently, Memphis' mandatory spay and neuter law is just a few months old, too. And it's even stupider than a lot of stupid MSN laws, in that you can pay $200 for an exemption, so it's pretty much only applicable to poor people. In low income areas, the biggest obstacle to speutering is usually that it's expensive, so people who can't afford it will often either surrender their pets to the shelter, or just not license them or take them to the vet, hoping they don't get caught. It'd be far more effective to just start up a voucher or other low cost spay and neuter option, and it'd probably be cheaper than it is to enforce that law.
I know people are always saying that the animal welfare problem in the south is a cultural thing, but it's a bad, stupid cultural thing that needs to be fixed.