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Charlie can barely contain himself. At seven months old, the caramel-swirled Pointer and Staffordshire Bull Terrier mix trips over his paws, clamoring across the pavement. “C’mon Charlie,” his owners call out. Charlie listens, unaware that on this overcast Los Angeles Sunday, he’s not going to the park or on a short walk, but through the doors of the East Valley Animal Shelter in Van Nuys, with a fate teetering on a new beginning or an end.
Charlie is aggressive; he’s fought with small dogs, they say. It’s made clear by staff, that should he get into a fight with another dog at East Valley, it would most likely spell a quick death sentence; but their minds are made up. Charlie, found in a park at three months old, will be calling the shelter his new home into the unforeseeable future. His crime? He grew up, and like most dogs of his breed, grew big. Charlie will now play the waiting game. If he’s lucky, he’ll get adopted or perhaps even rescued. If he’s not, he will die by a lethal injection of sodium pentobarbital, the industry standard, making room for another animal to take his place, at least for a short while.
Charlie represents one of over 50,000 cats and dogs that were taken in by Los Angeles Animal Services (LAAS) in the last year. Of that number, 20,000 animals have been euthanized, many times due to overcrowding and lack of space, and that’s just within the city. Los Angeles County took in over 81,000 animals with close to 50,000 being killed.
Despite Mayor James Hahn declaring that Los Angeles would only euthanize animals either too sick to be treated or too aggressive to be adoptable within five years in 2003, the kill rates haven’t disappeared, in fact, they’ve been rising steadily. In 2008, 54, 191 dogs and cats entered the shelter system and 20,000 didn’t make it out alive. The trend repeated in 2009. Almost 15,000 cat and dogs have been euthanized this year, according to cat and dog outcome totals from January to September.
The reasons, depending on who you ask, range from the crippling economy and foreclosure crisis, to the city’s mandatory spay and neuter law, to responsible pet ownership and overwhelmingly, the shortcomings of an unregulated and allegedly indifferent department plagued by the unfavorable administration of then-General Manager Ed Boks which was left directionless for one year after he was pressured to resign.
Boks, the fourth person in four years to hold the title was accused of fabricating euthanasia numbers, criticized for spending time writing in his blog, alienating rescues and committed his most condemning offense by canceling a spay and neuter voucher program for low-income residents that caused an outcry in the community. He also planned to make L.A. no-kill by 2010. He also failed.
Canceling the program, according to animal activist Daniel Guss, was one of the most outrageous and destructives behaviors a general manager could have done.
Guss, whose organization, the STAND Foundation helps the animals of L.A.’s homeless population as well as enables unincorporated rescuers to operate under his charity’s status has written several op-ed pieces that criticized Boks’ failures.
“Ed Boks is a charlatan who wanted to be a guru to write and lecture without ever having achieved,” he says.
Guss wasn’t alone in his characterization of Boks.
At an L.A. City Council meeting last March, in which council members grilled Boks on his decision to cut the vital spay and neuter voucher program, council man Dennis Zine held up a moving box full to the brim of complaints about Boks that he had received from employees and animal activists.
Shortly after, the program was reinstated and Boks resigned. Now, Los Angeles is left struggling to fulfill its goals of becoming a no-kill city once again.
“Ed left things in such shambles, and Villaraigosa took so long to replace him, that nobody knows what’s going on, especially now that we have a downturn in the economy,” Guss said.
Boks was replaced by Brenda Barnette who made her way to L.A. from the Seattle Humane Society to take on one of the city’s toughest, and unforgiving positions.
Just a few months on the job, she’s been criticized for inexperience with open-admission shelters, law enforcement and linked to breeding and being an American Kennel Club (AKC) Representative, an accusation which she says is a total exaggeration.
“I was in a local kennel club and I wasn’t a rep,” she says. “An AKC rep actually goes to meeting with AKC has a vote, represents the club – I have never done that,” adding that she thinks it’s a very big stretch of anyone’s imagination to call her a breeder.
Barnette is confident that things in Los Angeles can get better.
“Nobody wants to unnecessarily euthanize animals, that’s just a given,” she says. “From my perspective, people haven’t broken the problem down into smaller and more manageable parts.”
Barnette says that it’s just a matter of finding good adopters within L.A.’s sprawling population and making sure they have the tools necessary for responsible pet ownership, like training classes after adoption that can reduce the return rate of animals and redirecting people to animals that are more appropriate for them.
Despite a change in leadership, the mandatory spay and neuter law is another point of disagreement, especially among no-kill advocates who say that the policy has led to the increase in impounds and subsequently high euthanasia numbers.
Enforced in 2008, it requires all pets in the city to be spayed or neutered by four months of age, with a few exceptions. Violators are subject to three levels of increasing fines, which start at $100. After the third violation, failing to spay or neuter your pet will result in a misdemeanor.
This policy hit hardest for low-income residents. While the department issued out vouchers, in $30 and $70 amounts to low-income residents, a report from the Spay and Neuter Advisory Committee found the number of spay/neuter surgeries LAAS subsidized decreased by 25 percent for pets of low-income residents.
The Committee provided recommendations in reports to LAAS, including partnering with council members, who could then reach out to the community through schools, churches and veterinarians, opening a Spanish/English hotline for questions about responsible pet care and increasing its efforts in recruiting volunteers.
According to its final report, “LAAS missed every high-impact recommendation made by the Committee.”
The shortcomings of the program and department were also discussed in a 2008 Performance Audit by California’s Inspector General Laura Chick.
“The Department is not adequately prepared to advertise or enforce the new spay and neuter ordinance,” the report said.
Many in the no-kill community correlate the mandatory ordinance to the increase in pet intakes in city shelters. The argument goes that pet owners in L.A.’s poorest communities, who can’t afford to pay for surgery or incur fees imposed by the city if they don’t, find the most cost-effective option to be handing over their pets to shelters, which must accept any animal that comes their way.
Nathan Winograd of the No-Kill Advocacy Center believes mandatory spay and neuter laws are set up to fail.
One of the pioneers of the no-kill movement, Winograd says forcing people to sterilize pets is the wrong strategy, because those who are not sterilizing belong to the lowest income bracket.
“If you reduce the cost or make it free, you increase the people who will voluntarily sterilize their animals by 70 percent,” he says.
He argues that the voucher program is horrendously under funded, citing the $30 and $70 amounts as abysmally low when you add up the pre-surgical visit, possible vaccinations and blood work, in addition to the actually surgery the pet must have.
Many years ago however, L.A.'s approach to spay and neuter was quite different, when it provided spay and neuter services in the early 70s, with veterinarians performed the sterilizations.
“While other cities were seeing death rates increase, because of the low-cost spay and neuter clinics, Los Angeles shelters cut their intakes in half,” Winograd says.
In the 90s however, the city, faced with budget shortages, eliminated positions for spay and neuter veterinarians and distributed discount coupons to residents who could then redeem them at private veterinarians partnered with the city. The city’s employed veterinarians today do not perform routine spay and neuter surgeries. Instead the city partners with independent veterinarians, private vets that operate through an agreement at City-owned clinics and mobile spay and neuter clinics.
But a few months ago, some veterinarians were refusing to accept the vouchers because the city hadn’t reimbursed them for services since last year. A Board of Animal Services Commissioners meeting cites $121,540 in unpaid vouchers to six different spay and neuter providers.
Gus, who used a $10,000 grant to spay and neuter pets for free in South L.A. and parts of the San Fernando Valley last year, says euthanasia rates could be significantly reduced with an alternative plan.
“The city of L.A. could make massive progress with spay/neuter if they simply provided it free of cost to anyone, regardless of their income level,” says Gus.
In lieu of providing free services, PetSmart charities announced its Spay Los Angeles Initiative two years ago, a $13.8 million funding pledge for reducing pet overpopulation in Southern California along with euthanasia rates. Operated by non-profits FixNation and Clinico, the initiative seeks to open seven high-volume spay and neuter clinics by 2012. So far three have been opened, including the newest clinic at East Valley.
A Criticized Department
Last year, LAAS, represented by the Service Employees International Union local 347, operated with a $20 million budget, 90 percent of which went to salaries. For 2010-2011, the proposed budget will shave off $1.8 million, but the percentage going to salaries remains the same. The cut could mean that 11,000 more pets get euthanized every year.
The regulations and hiring and firing policies enforced by its union contracts are what Winograd calls a roadblock to innovation and the department’s single biggest obstacle.
“I think the biggest hurdle is actually internal,” he says. “There’s a tremendous amount of bureaucratic inertia in those facilities. I think the staff is resistant to change, I think that the staff is not geared towards success. I actually think that LAAS has become a stagnant, bloated bureaucracy and it needs to develop a culture of innovation to succeed.”
According to Winograd, who grew up in Hancock Park, the fact that even supervisors are union employees means that the department is tantamount to self-regulation. He criticizes LAAS for employing numerous Clerk Typists while they say that there isn't enough money.
In the 2008 LAAS Statistical Report., the department outlined 35 Clerk Typist and 11 Sr. Clerk Typist positions for the fiscal year of 2008-2009, while employing only eight Senior Animal Control Officers.
The 90 percent that goes to salaries leaves the department with less than $2 million for expenses. With budget cuts and the Great Recession still looming, some argue that without a large influx of money, L.A’s no-kill goals just wont happen.
The money from licensing fees ($20 for a spay or neutered dog and $100 for an unaltered dog) could help, however the city is losing millions by not enforcing the licensing law and collecting money. LAAS licenses about 120,000 dogs annually and $7 of each fee collected goes to the Spay and Neuter Program, according to Barnette. The 2008 performance audit cites three sources, including a report by the Humane America Animal Foundation that conversatively suggests that there are approximately 500,000 unaltered dogs and cats in Los Angeles.
Monetary matters are just part of it- the department has been criticized for lack of customer service towards potential adopters as well as lack of care for the animals it’s responsible for.
Winograd’s assessment of L.A.’s Animal department, particularly of the county is dire.
“Los Angeles County has been one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had, in terms of cleanliness, lack of compassion, brutal and medieval conditions and bureaucratic environments,” he says.
In 2007, his No-Kill Advocacy Center filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles County alleged unlawful and abusive treatment of animals at all six L.A. County Shelters. The lawsuit said that activists found animals wallowing in their own feces, dirty cages, animals that were not being given proper veterinary care and treatable animals being killed before the state mandated holding period.
Cathy Nguyen, a rescuer, was one of the plaintiffs. When the lawsuit was filed, she lost her privileges to adopt as a private citizen. While she credits the city for making an effort, her views on the county differ – inefficiency problems along with the rumors of rampant abuse continue to plague the system, she says.
Nguyen remembers a case at Lancaster Animal Shelter where a dog that had been put down and loaded in the freezer walked out alive the next day, caused by a under dose of sodium pentobarbital.
The mentality of many shelter workers is an impediment to growth, she says.
“They treat it like they’re working at Target, as if they work with items rather than lives.”
While acknowledging that LAAS has been a contentious place over the years, Barnette sees the same type of progression towards a no-kill goal for L.A., but says that it’s not something that happens overnight.
“I’ve got people inside and outside the department that I think are just fabulous, those are the people I want to work with,” she says. “I don’t want to focus on the negative, that gets so boring. I want to elevate the people who are doing a fantastic job and honor them. We don’t win anything by bashing other groups or by bashing our co-workers.”
Barnette also stresses that the marketing and public outreach can use improvement, an area of the department generally cited by many critics as dangerously lacking.
The responsibility of the dozens of thousands of animals entering through shelter doors however, is an umbrella that stretches to more than just the people in charge of caring, feeding, treating and killing the city’s unwanted pets.
Candi Cooper, an animal communicator who runs Adoption 911 Rescue contributes the overcrowding of L.A.’s shelters and euthanasia rates to irresponsible pet ownership.
“That is a problem that humans have created, not the city,” she says. “They’re just a product of human negligence; they’re just trying to handle the mess.”
Cooper, who is a partner in the department’s New Hope program, where those animals most in risk of being euthanized are made accessible to organizations who can adopt them, doesn’t agree with the vilification of LAAS by some activists and thinks they generally get a bad rep.
“They’re not the devil,” she says.
The Rescue Conundrum
For as much criticism and anger that activists dish out to the department, internal conflicts within the rescue community, where bruised egos intertwine with passion, along a thin line of love and hate have also hampered efforts.
Jeffrey de la Rosa says he’s experienced it first hand.His Lab/Staffie mix Stu has been essentially in dog jail since he was seized by LAAS in 2005 after biting de la Rosa’s now ex-assistant (and ex-girlfriend) who subsequently filed a bite report and sued him for $6 million, according to de la Rosa. Rescued off the tough streets of South Los Angeles while de la Rosa, a move lighting technician was working on Denzel Washington's “Training Day,” Stu has done time in L.A.'s animal shelters and in the care of resues and was in danger of being euthanized after being deemed dangerous, but he now has an inoperable tumor in his nasal cavity with his fate resting on a dangerous dogs ordinance that might bring him home.
But Stu’s situation is only one part of the story.
After a series of events involving a dog named Tux and Barks of Love rescue founder Ashley Greenspan, de la Rosa was accused of being an animal abuser, hoarder and was served a restraining order on behalf of Greenspan on a sexual assault charge. He also was arrested on the charge that he assaulted a woman from Barks of Love with a deadly weapon.
After a stint in jail, de la Rosa’s house was broken into and seven dogs, including his own and foster dogs were taken, he says. That was a year ago. He says he still doesn’t know where they are and says it was Barks of Love who broke in and tooks his animals while he was in jail, adding that Animal Control showed up the morning after his arrest and found his house emtpy. The accusations against him spread throughout the rescue community and he was essentially pushed out. He has filed a defamation case against Greenspan and says the events emotionally destroyed him.
Greenspan says Animal Control officers are the ones who took his dogs and vehemently denies breaking into his house. She wants de la Rosa, whom she says is harassing her to leave her alone.
“My life was ruined by this man,” she says. “I have never broken into someone’s house.”
In a community where emotions run high, it’s not uncommon for “he said, she said” scenarios to play out.
Nguyen, who only works with a handful of rescues, says the drama is pointless.
“If you really sit down and look at the big picture, the bickering has nothing to do with rescuing animals.”
While Winograd calls for regulation of the department, de la Rosa says the rescue community needs the same parameters to shift a scattered community towards one goal, which is to save animals' lives.
An Uncertain Fate
East Valley Animal Shelter, along with South Los Angeles shelter, has the highest annual animal intakes compared to other shelters in the city. A paper posted behind the desk offers an encouraging message to employees faced with operating in a sometimes-hopeless environment: Don’t give up.
A week after Charlie was dropped off, the shelter is bustling. Couples and families tour the kennels to find a new member of their brood. Many get adopted; frantic owners whose dogs had gone missing recover them after a quick search. A female American Bull Dog, hit by a car and unable to move her hind legs is carried to the front by a Good Samaritan who found her. She’s scanned for a microchip with no luck, and taken in the back for a medical evaluation.
Charlie is still there. Shy and timid, he stays near the back of his kennel. He’s eager for attention, but cautious. When he’s lead out on his leash, the row of kennels erupt in angry barks, but Charlie never responds. He clamors excitedly to the play area, the same way he did when he entered the shelter. With his pink tongue flailing in the wind, he sniffs around. Then, as if suddenly realizing his new-found freedom, he darts across the grass, not knowing which human he should give his attention to.
While Charlie’s fate remains uncertain, something else becomes clear. In a city where passionate animal advocacy and pet pampering is starkly contrasted by cases of cruelty, irresponsible pet ownership and a budget-challenged department accused of being an impenetrable monolith that just doesn’t care, the solution depends on harmony.
“Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitudes towards those who are at its mercy: animals,” author Milan Kundera once wrote, and solving the puzzle of L.A.’s inability to save more of its animals means more of the pieces fitting together, an idea which Barnette has started her tenure on.
“Instead of assuming that we all have to think the same, if we realize that this is a war on death, a war on unnecessary euthanasia on animals, we have to accept the fact that we all have different roles to get the end result, which is protecting life and providing love,” she says.
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October 30, 2010 |
