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Mandatory spay-neuter debate about to rage
| Saturday, Mar 15 2008 12:00 PM
Last Updated: Friday, Mar 14 2008 5:46 PM
Pet war has been declared in Bakersfield.
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In this March 2008 photo, this male shepherd mix was seconds away from being added to the group of dogs, upper right, that have euthanized by Kern County Animal Control.
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The armies are massing.
Last week the Bakersfield City Council and Kern County Board of Supervisors decided to study a possible mandatory animal spay-and-neuter law here.
Both decisions followed a Californian report detailing Kern’s rising kill rates and the fact that more than three years of debate and reform have done little to keep 18,669 animals from being “put down” by county animal control workers in 2007.
Simply considering mandatory spay neuter amounts to an opening of hostilities between feuding factions of animal lovers.
Breeders, trainers, American Kennel Club members and your average libertarian hate the idea of government forcing them to fix their puppies and cats.
Mandatory spay neuter would be especially onerous for breeders — from puppy mill operators to kennel club leaders — who’d have to get a permit and bow to government regulation or risk getting ticketed when they try to market the off-spring.
Those who call themselves “legitimate breeders” ask why they should have to pay when irresponsible pet owners and puppy mills are causing the overpopulation problem.
But animal rescuers, animal lovers and county supervisors say “enough is enough,” the killing must stop.
“Not all of us are stupid on our cell phones in our car,” said Kern County Animal Control Chief Denise Haynes. “But because some of us are stupid on our cell-phones in our cars, we all have to pay.”
BATTLE LINES
Critics of the mandatory spay-neuter concept call animal overpopulation a myth and mandatory spay neuter needless.
Bill Hemby, chairman of the statewide PetPAC lobbying group, called a mandatory spay-neuter law proposed for California in 2007 by Assemblyman Lloyd Levine the “pet extinction act.”
Hemby said he will be in Bakersfield Tuesday to begin rallying people to fight the local spay-neuter efforts.
“The results of mandatory spay neuter are the opposite of what the supervisors think will occur,” he said. “Animal shelters receive more animals, licensing plummets, fees go up, euthanasias increase.”
Hemby instead espouses the no-kill philosophy of Nathan Winograd, an attorney, author, former shelter operator and director of the No Kill Advocacy Center.
Winograd developed his philosophy as operations chief of the San Francisco SPCA and director of a SPCA shelter in Tompkins County, N.Y., which in 2006 took in 2,353 animals. Both shelters achieved “no-kill” status — when a shelter kills only animals with untreatable behavioral or physical problems.
Winograd has called for shelter operators to refuse to kill healthy, adoptable animals and commit to creating voluntary spay neuter, adoption and foster care programs that are strong enough to find homes for all of a community’s unwanted pets.
Haynes said Winograd’s philosophy simply wouldn’t work here given Kern’s caseload of 28,241 animals cared for in 2007.
“Those places aren’t rural, low socioeconomic areas with a farmworker population,” she said. “You can’t compare us with San Francisco and San Mateo and upstate New York.”
Judie Mancuso, the campaign chair for Levine’s Healthy Pets Act, argues that a state mandatory spay-neuter law is needed, too.
“They say that if people can do this at a local level, why do we need to do it at the state level?” she said. “We need it in more of the state than we don’t need it. A patchwork of local laws doesn’t provide the coverage to truly solve the problem.”
THE SANTA CRUZ EXPERIENCE
So is there evidence mandatory spay neuter works?
Yes, says Tricia Geisreiterof Santa Cruz County Animal Services. The Healthy Pets Act is modeled after a Santa Cruz ordinance in effect since 1995.
The number of animals brought in and killed there went down consistently from 1995 to 2003.
But the intake numbers went up by 52 percent between 2004 and 2005.
Hemby criticized Healthy Pet Act advocates for excluding those second set of numbers from their analysis of mandatory rules in Santa Cruz.
“It’s unfair to exclude 2006-2007 numbers because you’re picking the best numbers,” he said. “It’s not the right thing to do.”
But PetPAC handouts attacking the Santa Cruz numbers only hint in small print at the most obvious reason the numbers went up in 2005.
Santa Cruz County agreed, on Nov. 15, 2004, to take animals from the city of Watsonville — a rural agricultural community in the south county that did not have a mandatory spay-neuter law prior to that date.
“When the animal shelter took on the Watsonville shelter a couple years ago, our numbers shot through the roof,” said Geisreiter. “Now people are saying mandatory spay neuter doesn’t work.”
But Santa Cruz officials still support mandatory spay neuter, she said.
Intake numbers in Santa Cruz shelters, including Watsonville, started dropping in 2005 and haven’t stopped.
THE SAN MATEO EXPERIENCE
Is mandatory spay neuter needed everywhere?
Scott Delucchi of the Peninsula Humane Society will tell you “No.”
In 1991 Peninsula Humane, which handles animal control duties across San Mateo County near San Francisco, got the country’s first mandatory spay neuter ordinance passed in the county and two cities.
Other cities in the county didn’t join the movement and, after a couple of years, the Humane Society gave up trying. Today, Delucchi said, his organization does little to enforce the law.
“If a person comes to the shelter to pick up a lost animal, that’s where the rule is enforced,” he said.
With an annual intake of around 9,000 dogs and cats and a 100 percent adoption rate of adoptable, treatable, healthy animals, there is little need for mandatory spay neuter, Delucchi said.
“We haven’t come out and supported (mandatory spay neuter) and we haven’t opposed it,” Delucchi said. “We feel we’re doing things that are working better than legislation.”
KERN COUNTY, UNALTERED
Haynes said those things — education, adoptions, rescues, voluntary spay neuter — will make a difference in Kern County. But they won’t make us a no-kill community.
“Maybe 20 years from now we’ll be in that utopia,” she said. “I think we’re just so completely overwhelmed by our current numbers it’s hard to imagine a world like that.”
Passing mandatory spay-neuter laws would speed the arrival of that utopia, she said.
“In six to seven years given current education, adoption and rescue efforts, I think our numbers are going to be better. But unless we stop the flow of animals in, they’re not going to be much better,” Haynes said. “I think (mandatory spay neuter) would get us there faster.”