Pound Seizure in Minnesota: Sixty Years is Enough

Minnesotans surrender pets to animal shelters for a variety of reasons — financial insecurity, divorce, illness, relocation, and even death. They believe animal shelters are places where adoptable animals find loving homes and lost animals are reunited with their families.

Most Minnesotans do not know that under a 1949 law, animals surrendered to publicly funded shelters may be sold to laboratories for experimentation.

Under Minnesota's "pound seizure" law, any animal in a publicly funded shelter for more than five days can be claimed by a licensed institution for experimentation purposes.

Minnesota is now one of only two states in the nation (the other state is Oklahoma) that requires publicly funded animal shelters to surrender unclaimed animals for experimentation. (On March 27, 2010 Utah eliminated mandatory pound seizure when Utah's governor signed a bill into law that animal shelters in that state were no longer required to turn over animals for experimentation.)

Animal shelters serve the public good by caring for lost, injured, abandoned, and surrendered animals. Lost or homeless animals should either be put up for adoption or humanely euthanized, not released to institutions for experimentation.

Pound seizure jeopardizes public trust in shelters and places an unfair burden on animal control officers whose duty it is to safeguard human and animal life.

Sixty years is enough.

We need your help to end pound seizure in Minnesota. We believe every individual can make a difference and help in some way — whether by signing our petition, talking about this issue to family and friends, or contacting their legislators. Please take some time to explore this web site and learn more about pound seizure and what you can do.

• For more details and a history of pound seizure in Minnesota,
  visit issue.
• For updates on legislation, visit legislation.
• For what you can do, visit action.
• For what others have to say about pound seizure, visit supporters.
• If you have questions, ideas, or want to volunteer or donate, visit about.