Anisa Jibrell – News Writer
Starting this fall the Humane Society, a club dedicated to animal rights and welfare, is now considered an official club on campus.
The club is directly associated with the Humane Society of America, the nation’s largest animal protection organization that provides service to more than 100,000 animals each year, according to HumaneSociety.org.
“That means we get their literature for our tabling events and we get them as a resource and they are so helpful and they’re wonderful,” said Mary Rudzis, sophomore and president of the Humane Society.
According to its website, the organization complements the work of local groups by focusing on national-level issues like ending the puppy mill industry, strengthening cruelty laws and eliminating large-scale animal abuses.
Typically adopting from a kill shelter can range up to $300, but the base fee for an animal that is fixed, has all of their medical work done vaccinations, and that has micro chip (to keep track of them in case they get lost) is $150 if you adopt from a local, no-kill Humane Society shelter, said Rudzis.
“It’s incredibly affordable especially in regards to people who want to make an effort or save some lives and give animals their forever homes, but also don’t want to break their budget,” said Rudzis.
The Humane Society of the United States has a “no kill” policy meaning its local shelters may not kill healthy or treatable animals even when the shelter is full to capacity, and reserves euthanasia for terminally ill animals or those deemed dangerous to public safety.
“They go through so many precautions and even boils down to—if you decide as the owner that you either can not care for the pet anymore, or situations come up in which you just can’t have an animal, you have to bring it back to the humane society,” said Rudzis. “That way it can’t get stuck in the shelter system again. It always has a home to go back.”
Rudzis said the club plans to have monthly tabling events to get their name on the map. Rudzis said the one in November will focus on poultry welfare and there will be a battery cage on display to spark conversation and discuss nonexistent poultry laws.
Right on time for Thanksgiving.
“Every month we’ll have a theme so to speak, and sort of use that as leverage to make the reality of what we’re doing easy to connect with,” said Rudzis. “If we say here are all these pamphlets of information a lot of people naturally, would just be overwhelmed—so by focusing on a topic a month, it’s a lot more effective in a sense that it’s easier to grasp especially if there’s a physical visual of a battery cage.”
A battery cage is a small wire cage where laying hens spend their entire lives and are given about 67-76 square inches of space, according to humansociety.org. A sheet of paper measures about 94 square inches.
Last semester, during the earlier stages of the club’s development, the club held a tabling featuring a human-size gestational crate—a metal enclosure used in intensive pig farming, in which a female breeding pig may be kept during pregnancy and for most of her adult life.
“A lot of people are visual in general in their normal academics and it kind of hits home for a lot of people.”
“We focus on animal rights and animal welfare of all kinds and so we get a mishmash of different people who have shelter animals, and we have the dog lovers, the cat lovers and when you get them together we bounce so many different ideas off of each other,” said Rudzis. “All of us have different information tailored to what our love for animals means to us.”
Photo Credit: Mary Rudzis, sophomore journalism major