Fwd: [stopthekilling] Fw: Up is Down and Down is Up in Los Angeles

August 8, 2008

POST and CROSS POST:FIRE ED BOKS! Taken from Nathan Winograd's Blog: Up is Down and Down is Up in Los Angeles You can smell the desperation in the air. It is like a thick, putrid cloud of toxic smoke wafting over Los Angeles. To save HAZMAT crews time, I have pinpointed the source of the current leak: the Los Angeles shelter systems. Decontaminate those and you’ll eliminate the stench. Of course, that won’t entirely clean the air. Take the Department of Animal Control for Los Angeles County. The place where animals die of “marked emaciation" and disease which goes untreated and without care, where evidence is destroyed, and laws are violated. The place where abuse is responded to with what appears to be document tampering and promises that they are working on it but times are tough, just give us more money, never mind that we have already been given a whopping $160 million based on other unmet promises of doing a good job. But this isn’t about the stink at the County shelters. That is the subject of three pending lawsuits against the Department. This is about the City of Los Angeles and its animal control system. Over the last couple of years, Los Angeles Animal Services (LAAS) has seen skyrocketing rates of illness, skyrocketing rates of animal dying in their kennels, skyrocketing rates of animals stolen and/or missing, and skyrocketing rates of killing. In fact, a No Kill Los Angeles is nowhere in sight and will never be until that system is turned upside down and the union environment that protects shirkers and prevents innovation is terminated like so many of the animals currently are. But you wouldn’t know this if you read the press releases or the facile promises that the light at the end of the tunnel is just around the corner, unless you lived in Maricopa County or New York City where current leadership of LAAS made the same claims and promises while running those shelters; promises that were just as quickly forgotten in the day-to-day disaster that followed. It may be old news to anyone following these issues how Maricopa County’s animal services department was left in a state of bankruptcy or how a city auditor uncovered shoddy animal care in New York. But not to worry. Los Angeles has a plan. Things are going to be different this time.The current plan: register cats. Forget underperforming employees, forget lack of systematic policies, forget accountability, forget a true and comprehensive commitment to the programs and services of the No Kill Equation, “cat licensing” will solve the problems.Oh it’s a modest proposal. The administration which oversees LAAS wanted to start with a $5 fee and only on cats adopted (or reclaimed) from the pound system. The problem with the $5 fee and only on cats adopted from LAAS is two-fold. First, the licensing or registration tax is annual and fees increase. Second, since most of the cats who are supposed to generate this income are killed by LAAS, revenues would be negligible. As a result, there would be tremendous pressure to expand it to all cats. This proposal is dripping with so much irony, you can’t possible uncover all the layers. But let’s start with the obvious.First, a plan was proposed to penalize people who adopt cats from the pound with a yearly cat licensing tax, whereas if people buy cats, they won’t get taxed. Isn’t this incentive a bit perverse? Shouldn’t there be rewards or benefits to adopting, rather than buying? Has anyone in the administration overseeing LAAS ever heard of incentives to get people to do the right thing? The second irony is that the City estimates that they are losing $6 million a year in uncollected dog licenses. So if they can’t get it together to license dogs, how are they going to squeeze the revenue out of cat owners? It is like the oil companies asking to drill offshore when they are only drilling in less than 20% of the areas they already have drilling rights too. Maybe Los Angeles is taking its lead from Bush-Cheney-Exxon?The third irony is that even if the cat licensing scheme passes, the money won’t necessarily go to animal services. License fees collected generally go to the general fund. So the plan would be to pass a punitive measure that disincentives adoptions, that—if and when it is expanded to all cats—will also give animal control officers more reasons to find animals in violation and therefore write citations or impound cats, that has been proven time and time again to lead to increase killing, that costs more in enforcement than it generates in revenue, so that LAAS can raise money for someone else?This is the same administration which promised taxpayers and animal lovers that mandatory spay/neuter would save money and lives. But that hasn’t happened. The ordinance is responsible for an increase in impounds and killing, costing more in both money and lives, on top of the $400,000 the pound received from legislators to enforce the law. Add to that the lost opportunity costs in taking money away from truly lifesaving programs that can actually reduce both. And now, by finding itself in a storm of its own creation, the City cries that it needs more revenue from LAAS.The fourth irony is that LAAS is doing less with more. LAAS already has one of the highest per capita budgets for animal control in the country and yet the department takes in fewer animals per capita than the national average. Washoe County NV, by contrast, takes in over three times more animals per capita than Los Angeles, and yet is saving 90% of the animals, without punish-others-for-our-own-failings schemes like cat registration taxes or licensing. There is enough waste at LAAS to find savings and I propose a hard look at all the positions doing little more than passing paper to one another within the bureaucracy, while the dogs are left standing in their own waste, or the cats have to contend with abhorrently filthy litter boxes.And finally, though primarily billed as a revenue generator, the reality is that cat licensing doesn’t work. As most cats entering shelters are homeless and have no one to claim them anyway, all it does is create yet another category of violation for animals, which would, in the end, give LAAS animal control officers yet another reason to impound and kill them.So, what should Los Angeles do if it is earnest about wanting No Kill? Or, as in the rationale for the current proposal, if it is interested in maximizing revenues (and as a corollary, controlling costs)? It first needs leadership willing to be held accountable to its own rhetoric. It needs policies which have the force of law that require the agency to adopt as many animals as possible (increasing revenue), maximize owner reclaims (increasing revenue), send as many animals as possible to rescue (reducing costs), increase volunteerism (reducing costs), and replace underperforming overpaid but immune from accountability union protected shirkers with a staff based on merit not seniority, and based on performance not politics. In short, it needs to pass the Companion Animal Protection Act. Unlike punitive and counterproductive measures like the current one, it puts the onus and the fix on the very agency doing the killing.But that is not likely to happen without a consistent public outcry, because it is so much easier to avoid responsibility and pass the blame to others. But in so doing, Los Angeles ignores well over a decade of No Kill experiences and is thus moving backwards in time—back over a decade where cat licensing was all the rage and where increased killing was its result. In 1995, the San Francisco SPCA published one of the definitive position papers against this approach which, for those who truly love cats, should have ended the debate. And for awhile, it appeared to do just that. But history, facts, and reality all seem to be a distraction in Los Angeles. At animal control in Los Angeles, up is down, down is up, and administrators can make promises and then ignore the ugly truth of their policies. I’d say there was something in the water, but this is the status quo. Welcome to Anytown USA: where agencies that pretend to be the animals’ great protectors are, oftentimes, their worst enemies.Thankfully, the Commission overseeing animal control did not approve the proposed registration of cats on a tie vote, so the issue will not go forward for now. But just like the forces behind other counter-productive schemes who do not care if animals are killed because of their policies, they will be back again. And because a call for position papers on the issue has been made, don’t be surprised if cat licensing masquerading as a “modest cat registration to increase revenue measure” rears its ugly head again in the not to distant future.For the 1995 San Francisco SPCA Avanzino-era position paper “Against Mandatory Cat Licensing,” For a copy of the 2007 Companion Animal Protection Act, Nathan

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Nathan J. Winogradwww.nathanwinograd.com

August 11, 2008

Los Angeles is a crazy place, full of the ridiculous. A lot of people

would rather be blissfully ignorant, and just let the animals suffer.

Even though I'm an optimist, I have a feeling not much will change

anytime soon.

August 12, 2008

i agree but i think that if enough peoploe stand up fro the animals a lot can change.... my name is sarah, with an hSara <judacia1978 Sent: Sunday, August 10, 2008 11:52:06 PM Re: Fwd: [stopthekilling] Fw: Up is Down and Down is Up in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a crazy place, full of the ridiculous. A lot of people

would rather be blissfully ignorant, and just let the animals suffer.

Even though I'm an optimist, I have a feeling not much will change

anytime soon.