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I’m watching the responses to my foreclosure pets piece, both public comments and private emails, and still seeing the exact same pattern that drove the article in the first place.

On one side, people like Cheryl Lang and Bonney Brown who are actually trying to show some compassion for people facing hard times, and give their pets a hand.

On the other side? Blame, blame, and more blame, wrapped up with judgmentalism. “I’d never abandon my dog! Never!” “Anyone who abandons their pet should be put in jail!” “I was in an abusive relationship/lost my home/was on the streets and I still kept my dog!” “I’d live in my car before I’d give up my pets!” “I work/volunteer in a shelter, and people come in and dump their dogs and cats all the time. Of course it’s their fault, although I guess if someone was being beaten daily by their spouse it might be okay if they had to put their pet in a shelter.”

As Gina said to me the other day, if that’s your attitude, “Why are you calling it a shelter?” She pointed out that when shelters don’t want to help people who walk in their doors, they’re justifying their actions with a circular argument:

Responsible pet-lovers don’t take pets to shelters no matter what. So by definition they’re not helping anyone who was responsible, because if you take a pet to a shelter you’re a bad pet-owner.

So who IS allowed to take a pet to a shelter without being ripped a new one? Are you granted a pass only if you drop dead without family?

I suspect even then, Gina, you’d just be blamed for not making better plans.

I particularly loved what Petfinder.com’s Betsy Saul had to say in my interview with her:

Someone like that has clearly not had a sick child or has not been in real trouble; it must be a wonderful, wonderful place. But we’ll all be there at some point in our lives. We shouldn’t be that naive. And God willing, we could all be there, in that space, right? But usually life touches us, and we’re humbled, and we realize that there but for the grace of God go I, right?

I’m the president of Petfinder.com. And I have been so fortunate to never have been in a situation where I had to make that decision. And yet, I’ve had enough craziness in my life, and I’ve been touched by things that are not in your control, that I know that moment where you sit up in bed and you think, I can’t handle any more responsibility. I have to get rid of the responsibility. And I’m always surprised to meet adults who haven’t done that.

I mean, I think it’s great and amazing, to never ever feel that way. But haven’t you had those periods in your life? A lack of humility in someone I think, who doesn’t get that sometimes life gets out of control. And that being said, I’ll also say that I’ve known homeless people who I think were better pet parents than some of the richest people I know.

And one final point is that I always like to point out to people on that front is that you look at my dog, one of the best dogs in the universe, you look at your dog, all these rescued dogs out there that have great lives, and how can you think anything other than thank God someone gave you up, so I could have you?

I used to spend a lot of time hating on whoever stuffed my beautiful dog Colleen in the night deposit box at the Peninsula Humane Society. But like Betsy, now I’m so grateful that they did, because that dog? She was everything to me.

More to the point, I guess, is simply this: Lack of compassion and empathy, lectures, and being judgmental don’t work. They simply do not have the effect you think they have, that you want them to have. As I said the other day, you catch flies with honey, not vinegar.

And as Nathan Winograd points out in his public presentations on creating no kill communities across America, irresponsible people will always be with us. They’ll fail to pay child support, drive drunk, cheat on their spouses, and not help their kids with their homework. They’ll also be irresponsible with their pets.

That’s what shelters are for. That’s what they should be for. That is what animal control policy should be based on.

Of course we need to reduce the upstream flow of unwanted pets, but we’ve very nearly done that. Almost all owned dogs and cats are already spayed and neutered. Kill rates at shelters have plummeted in the last 20 years, down from 27 million a year to around 4 million a year, a huge percentage of which are the offspring of unowned cats. Richard Avanzino of Maddie’s Fund has calculated that just by nudging shelters as a source of pets up from 23 to 25 percent, we will get every pet in every shelter in America into a home, every single year, instead of killing them for shelter space.

This is in our grasp, folks. If we just have the will to do it, and stop pursuing pointless, self-defeating policies based on our judgment that some people just don’t love their pets the way we want them to.

It’s not just the compassionate thing to do. It’s what works.