I was surprised, as I'm sure many people were, to read that public health centers dispose of unwanted and lost animals so quickly. According to the Nov. 26 article "Was wrong bureaucracy targeted?," a pet owner can bring a pet to a public health center and the animal will be put down within a day. That's much faster than we can get rid of most trash such as plastics, cardboard or tin cans.
And lost pets are euthanized within three to four days, so that if an owner doesn't go straight to the center after losing a pet, chances are he or she will be too late and the animal will be dead. Such places, where an animal's life expectancy can be measured in hours, can hardly be called "shelters," yet that term was used twice in the article.
Surely unwanted and lost animals can be kept for longer than three days. A more reasonable length of time would be two to three weeks while efforts are made to find owners or new homes for the pets.
At a time when local governments are creating slush funds of taxpayers' money to buy TVs and Play Stations for their offices, they can surely afford a few cans of dog food and a can opener, can't they? This is a terrible state of affairs and I hope more is written about it in the future.