Homes Over Death

Jay Dee Sheets owned his dog, Jaeger, for 11 years. Then one day,
Jaeger turned up missing.

After scouring the neighborhood, Sheets discovered his pet on a Web
page run by the county’s Pima Animal Care Center. But when he called, a
staffer told him there was no such dog at the shelter.

“I told them that I was looking at him, right there on the
Internet,” Sheets says.

By the time he reached the PACC, Jaeger was dead. “A woman came up
and told me that my dog was no longer in pain,” Sheets says. “I told
her that he hadn’t been in pain to start with.”

The dog had been euthanized despite the fact that he carried an
identification microchip, and even though his owner had already called
several times.

It was a tragic accident, to be sure, but it wasn’t an isolated
incident. The PACC had mistakenly killed another five pets in the year
before Jaeger died—and had supposedly instituted safeguards to
keep that from happening again. Obviously, those reforms aren’t quite
working. But to some, these stumbles are simply symptomatic of a
shelter culture where euthanization has become de rigueur.

Last year, PACC took in more than 21,000 animals. Of that, more than
13,000 were euthanized—a 2 percent drop from the year before, and
8 percent below the number euthanized four years ago. But to Nikia
Fico, of the group Citizens for a No-Kill Tucson, that’s still 13,000
too many.

She says that far too many animals are slipping through the cracks
because of miscommunication and PACC officials’ intransigence. For
instance, the shelter might contact a rescue group about a pet. But
those groups are run by volunteers who can’t always visit PACC at a
moment’s notice. “And a lot of times,” she says, “animals aren’t being
held for them.”

Other times, folks will want to adopt an animal, but are not allowed
to adopt until the routine quarantine period has passed. “But rather
than being notified when that holding period is over, the animal is
being killed,” Fico says.

Another goal is reducing the number of animals identified by shelter
staff as vicious—which amounts to a death sentence. Only
veterinarians are qualified to make that call, she says. “We want a
legal standard of what it means to be vicious, and it has to be decided
by a court of law. If not, then (PACC) needs to try to place that
animal” with a home or rescue group.

Fico says these reforms don’t have to break the bank. “We know that
budgets are tight. We aren’t asking them to implement programs that are
going to cost a lot of money. We’re asking them to work with what’s
already there, and that’s not happening a lot of the time.”

But PACC spokeswoman Jayne Cundy says the shelter does its best to
keep euthanizations at a minimum, and that involves close cooperation
with rescue groups. But she says the shelter can’t hold animals
forever—not even those desired by the rescue groups. Once a group
is called, they have 24 hours to pick up the animal. “We try to extend
that as much as we can,” she says. “But it’s July, and we’re starting
to get really busy. So we can’t extend (the time) as much as during the
quiet period.”

Cundy says the PACC also preaches the spaying and neutering of pets,
and now provides that service in-house. “We advocate that because,
until people stop breeding their animals and passing the puppies on,
we’re only touching the tip of the iceberg.”

But Nathan Winograd says shelters such as PACC spend too much time
blaming the public—and too little time analyzing their own
failures. Winograd is a nationally known advocate for no-kill programs,
such as the one he helped establish at San Francisco’s Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He’s also author of Redemption:
The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in
America.

In Redemption, Winograd dismisses the notion that there
aren’t enough homes for all pets in this country. Instead, he argues
that poor shelter management leads to roughly 5 million companion
animals being euthanized each year.

To critics who call the no-kill concept unworkable, Winograd points
to Washoe County, Nev., which includes the city of Reno. He says
Washoe’s shelter takes in nearly 40,000 animals, yet is able to save 90
percent of its dogs and 86 percent of the cats. “Given that (Washoe) is
taking in nearly twice the number of animals per capita as Pima County,
there’s really no reason that Pima County can’t be doing better than it
is.” (Pima County currently saves about 40 percent of the animals it
receives.)

When he brought that message to Tucson last year, he says the PACC
gave him “a whole host of excuses as to why it couldn’t be done. Then,
when I started going through the different programs that help
(alleviate) the perceived ‘need to kill,’ they were either not being
done, or only being done on a token level.”

Those steps include creating an extensive foster-care program for
animals awaiting adoption, and developing better relationships with
rescue groups.

“I’m not talking about doing that on a token level,” Winograd says.
“I’m talking about putting in a program so that it replaces the killing
of those animals entirely. You can do those kinds of things by tapping
into the compassion of the community. But it seemed to me, when I was
talking to rescue groups in Pima County, that it wasn’t a partnership”
with the PACC. “It was an adversarial relationship, which is incredibly
unfortunate.”

In his book, Winograd argues that statistics from a number of
sources reveal that there are more than enough homes in this country to
accommodate every shelter animal. The problem is that shelters aren’t
doing a good enough job of finding those homes.

While officials at the PACC say their efforts are hobbled by funding
shortfalls, Winograd calls that a red herring. “A lot of these programs
are incredibly cost-effective,” he says. “I would argue that they are
even more cost-effective than killing animals, because every time you
kill an animal, that costs money.”

However, adoption brings in money, he says. “Or transferring an
animal to a rescue group might not bring in revenue, but it transfers
the cost of caring for that animal from taxpayers to private
philanthropy, and it saves money from the need to kill and dispose of
the animal’s body.”

This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2009.