Bedeviled by the Burden of a Most Thankless Task : Euthanasia: The staggering number of animals they must kill takes a heavy toll on O.C. shelter workers.

Sharon Linsmeier kills for a living.

Often, she kills 100 times a day. Not long ago, she took 31 lives before breakfast, including one elderly victim whose attempt to befriend her made the task particularly grim.

“You never look at their eyes,” she says. “If you do, it’s like this bond, this connecting thing, and then you can’t kill them.”

Linsmeier sometimes sobs on the way to work, dreading her daily duty of euthanizing unwanted dogs and cats at the Orange County Animal Shelter, one of the largest animal shelters in the West.

Like thousands of shelter workers throughout the nation, she suffers year-round from public taunts and private remorse, but never more so than now, when springtime’s mating frenzy begets litter upon litter of kittens.

Though people often vilify shelter workers and dismiss as self-inflicted their job-related stress, a growing number of psychologists say euthanasia can wreak havoc on the human psyche, triggering anxiety, depression, substance abuse and even post-traumatic stress.

“I think some of the pressures are equivalent to child abuse or family violence investigators, law enforcement people and emergency medical technicians,” says Randy Lockwood, a psychologist and euthanasia counselor with the Humane Society of the United States.

Not all shelter work is gruesome. More often than not, shelters reunite pets with owners, and provide compassionate care for animals that eventually get adopted.

Euthanasia is reserved as a last resort for sick and surplus animals.

But knowing euthanasia is necessary doesn’t prevent the task from taking its toll.

Bill Hurt Smith, founder of the Alabama-based Mazer Guild, a new national support network for “euthanasia technicians,” spends 12 hours a day running group therapy and counseling sessions for shelter workers who report feelings of revulsion and shame.

“I had people in my Los Angeles classes who put down 250 to 300 animals a day,” he says.

Many shelter workers, Smith and others say, have personalities ill-suited to destroying animals. Because shelter work requires no special degree and little training, it often attracts animal lovers who tend to be naive about the need for euthanasia.

“Here we have a lot of people who have gotten into animal care and control primarily out of a love for animals,” says Lockwood. “And for many of these people the bulk of their job is killing animals.”

Of course, many workers quit, but some feel bound to stay by a sense of obligation to the animals.

“I know whenever I do have to euthanize them, they’re being held, they’re being loved on, they’re being petted and crooned to,” says Deidre Young, a $20,000-a-year “kill master” at the Animal Control and Adoption Center of Benton, Ark., which several years ago launched a 24-hour hot line for stressed-out workers. “My face is the last face they’re gonna see, and I want it to be a nice face, not one screwed up in anger. . . . I’d rather have me do it and give them a peaceful, calm death than have somebody jerk them up and stick a needle in, and that’s it.”

The same goal keeps Linsmeier at her $14-an-hour job, despite nightmares and terrific bouts of guilt. Recently, a Smith seminar in Chicago offered some comfort, she said, because met many shelter workers more anguished than she.

“You can’t believe the stories people tell,” she says. “The stress about what they do, it was unbelievable. There was this Vietnam veteran, and he said he liked his job, he liked killing. By the end of the session, he was bawling his head off like a 4-year-old baby.”

While most experts agree that animal overpopulation makes euthanasia unavoidable, the numbers are still unsettling.

At 5,000 animal shelters nationwide, between 8 million and 10 million animals are destroyed each year, according to Humane Society statistics.

At the Orange County shelter alone, roughly 15,000 animals will be lethally injected in 1995.

“I’ve heard the numbers of animals that are killed in shelters,” says Teddy Lowe, who worked at the Orange County shelter from 1977 until 1992 when, she says, nightmares, hallucinations and stark episodes of panic forced her to resign. “The numbers are nothing until you see it. You’re walking over the dead to get to the next animal so you can kill it.”

The room has a name like something out of George Orwell.

Station Three.

Some shelter workers avoid it. One writes poems about it. Linsmeier spends much of her life there.

“They pick the ones they’re going to kill,” she says of her supervisors, “and me and a health technician sit back there and euthanize them all.”

Exuding a heavy musk of medicine and wet fur, the room sits at the center of a large compound where 400 yelping dogs and meowing cats are housed at any one time.

With its rotating population of 30,000 animals annually, the Orange County Animal Shelter is believed by national animal control experts to be the busiest west of the Mississippi.

But the shelter is never more chaotic than now, the birthing season for cats.

“A guy calls in and says he found eight 2-week-old kittens,” says Brian Frick, an Orange County animal control officer. “It’s automatic, they’ve got to go down.”

Frick pantomimes the standard operating procedure for receiving a box of kittens, and his face scrunches into a look of disgust.

“You hold these little guys, and you’ve got to euthanize them,” he says, grabbing the imaginary scruff of a kitten’s neck. “That sucks.”

Technically, cats are easy to kill. One worker stretches them like taffy while another administers the lethal injections to their abdomens.

Dogs are more difficult, because they often fight back.

Doing mortal combat with a dog not only heightens the horror for some workers, it leads to nasty injuries.

“I have tendinitis so bad I can’t pick up my kids,” says Linsmeier, who typically holds the animals still while another worker does the injecting.

But the mental trauma haunts workers long after any physical wounds have healed.

“The decisions I had to make--who could live, who could die, let’s play doggie God--they just play on your mind,” says Lowe, who calculates that she alone has killed more than 30,000 animals in her 15-year career at the Orange County shelter.

After successfully suing the county for disability pay earlier this year, Lowe now is suing for worker’s compensation. Meanwhile, she swallows large doses of antidepressant medication and tries to stave off the next anxiety attack.

For many traumatized shelter workers, psychologists and counselors often recommend a treatment plan that includes group therapy, stress management classes and strengthened relaxation skills.

But some shelter workers complain that mental health professionals are not equipped to cope with the unique dilemma posed by euthanasia.

“You can’t just go to a psychologist and say, ‘I kill things for a living, help me,’ ” says Linsmeier.

“Part of the problem is that therapists expect to see closure,” says Karen Stickland, a former euthanasia technician in Denver who recently established support groups for 50 Colorado shelter workers. “When you’re talking euthanizing of animals, there is not going to be any closure until the day we stop killing animals.”

But that day is nowhere near.

“We’re a very throwaway society,” says Charlene Douglas, a psychologist in Pullman, Wash., who studies stress among shelter workers. “We throw away anything that causes us problems, including living things.”

Someone has to euthanize society’s old, diseased and unwanted pets, experts say, and it’s unfair to demean those who do.

“We basically become the executioner,” says Alan Paton, executive director of the Lee County Humane Society, one of Florida’s largest animal shelters. “But we certainly aren’t the judge and jury.”

With big black eyes and long ears drooping from her head like silk stockings, she was once the spitting image of the lead in “Lady and the Tramp.”

But today she is abandoned and beset with every imaginable malady. Cataracts. Tumors. Tooth decay. It is time for her to go down.

As the dog begins to tremble, an Orange County shelter worker gently slips an arm around her neck. In one smooth, practiced stroke, he jabs a needle into her front paw. Bright clouds of red blood spurt into the syringe, and a dark blue barbiturate solution called Fatal Plus shoots into the vein.

“OK, pooch,” says Dr. Richard H. Evans, the Orange County shelter’s chief of veterinary services. “It’s all over now.”

A calm puff of breath, a sideways collapse.

Evans scratches the dog’s chin while the shelter worker considers the floor.

The procedure is fast, clean and painless, and this is the 32nd time it is performed this morning.

“I don’t have a problem with this part,” Evans says. “I have a problem with how the dog got like this. I’m not responsible. I’m not to blame. But I’m left holding the bag.”

Evans detests media coverage of euthanasia. Focusing on Station Three, he says, makes the shelter seem a barbarous place, when in fact its animal care is top-notch and its staff places thousands of healthy animals in good homes each year.

If Evans and other shelter officials seem testy, they acknowledge it might be because of growing competition from so-called “no-kill” shelters. Nauseated by euthanasia, many cities and counties throughout the nation are shying from their contracts with shelters like Orange County’s, exploring the “no-kill” option.

But Geoff Handy, editor of Shelter Sense magazine in Washington, D.C., says the roughly 300 no-kill shelters now open are not solving the animal overpopulation crisis, only sidestepping it.

“They are selective in which animals they accept,” he says. “They’re really adoption agencies, not true shelters.”

Reminding the public about spaying and neutering has reduced the number of dogs euthanized each year. Cats, however, continue to be a problem, so Humane Society officials have refocused their efforts, trying to spread the word about the feline’s alarming reproductive capacity.

“You have to find a way of educating that person who brings in a box of kittens . . . as if they’re giving you a gift,” says Lockwood of the Humane Society. “My God, now it’s six more babies we have to destroy.”

In fact, most shelter workers say the public’s ignorance can be more difficult to stomach than euthanasia.

“I have people say to me they want their cat to have kittens so the kids can witness the miracle of life,” says Evans. “I tell them, ‘Oh, really? Will you come back here in six months to witness the miracle of death?’ ”

Often, a shelter worker’s outrage is aggravated when public indifference turns to animosity.

Michael Horn, a kennel attendant at the Orange County shelter, says people who come to the shelter in search of a pet will sometimes walk behind him, whispering “murderer” under their breath.

Recently, Horn composed a poem about Station Three, which he declines to share. Like most shelter workers, he prefers inducing a painless death to letting an animal rot in a cage, and he doesn’t want his poem to make people dwell on the sometimes violent process of euthanasia.

But, reluctantly, he cites one line, to suggest the crushing guilt that awaits many workers who step into Station Three:

“And though society’s weakness has decided who will die/They are my hands alone which will force these souls to submission.”

Rather than poetry, Linsmeier’s stress inspires her subconscious to concoct surreal nightmares.

“I had a dream one time that the animal shelter was for humans,” she says. “It was funny, I was trying to euthanize these two guys, these two criminals.”

She laughs grimly.

How did the dream end?

“I finally got ‘em.”

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Pet Euthanasia

About half of all dogs and cats taken in by the Orange County Humane Society are killed. The record:

RECEIVED EUTHANIZED 1994 26,263 12,961

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Ultimate Fate

Nearly equal proportions of cats and dogs received are either reunited with their owners or adopted. The breakdown for 1994, which mirrors each of the previous four years: Reunited with owner: 22% Adopted: 29% Euthanasia (unadoptable): 24% Euthanasia (owner request): 25% Source: Orange County Animal Control