Where Man’s Best Friend Finds a Friend of His Own

3,700,000

That’s approximately the number of animals euthanized in the United States each year.

They come to that end because of broken homes and busted dreams; because too few animals are spayed or neutered and because too many are deliberately bred; because their owners are completely out of options or simply out of patience.

It’s a shockingly high number. More than 10,000 every single day. For the most part those killings are conducted by shelters trying to free up room for the steady stream of new animals that come through their doors. The old, the sick and the unwanted are euthanized to give those animals more likely to be adopted a space and a shot. But the volume of new arrivals is so large that a typical shelter puts down 60% of the animals it receives.

If killing six in ten animals seems like a strange form of rescue to…