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Lois Henry: Animals dying while we dither
| Saturday, Jun 21 2008 12:00 PM
Last Updated: Monday, Jun 23 2008 7:50 AM
If Kern County were in charge of responding to the attack on Pearl Harbor, you’d be reading this in Japanese today.
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SPCA
The HOPE foundation of Fresno is coming back to Bakersfield.
The low-cost spay/neuter foundation had been transporting Bakersfield animals to its clinic twice a month but quit because so many people made appointments and didn’t show. They needed a local organization to take on the logistics and when no one stepped forward, the transports stopped.
The SPCA has stepped in and will be taking appointments for the HOPE transports, which will start up again on July 14 and July 28, registration opens June 30 to get your animal on board.
They’re starting small this time around, with 26 animals each transport and hope to build to 100 animals per transport in coming months, according to Executive Director Sandy Dralle.
Prices aren’t set in stone yet, but Dralle expected them to be in the $45/$50 range for cats and $65/$115 for dogs (depending on weight). The SPCA will be adding a $10 charge to HOPE’s basic fees to pay for administrative costs.
Any animal that has not been vaccinated will receive a vaccination for $10 extra.
She said the Kern Humane Society can help defray costs and interested families can call for vouchers. The Humane Society is also kicking in $10 per animal to help pay for gas for the transport.
The SPCA is also continuing its feral cat program where people can get up to three vouchers at a time to reimburse vets for spay/neuter surgeries.
Dralle recommended that people catch the cat(s) first as the vouchers are only good for 30 days.
And the SPCA and Kern County will hold another “neuter fest” for low-income families June 29.
They will do 75 dogs that day, so call ahead. 323-8353
Kern County
The county is continuing to work on developing a spay/neuter voucher program for low-income animal owners, according to Resource Managment Agency Director Dave Price.
They’re in “phase 2,” figuring out what services they want performed.
Then staff will survey local veterinarians for prices and work with the County Auditor on the easiest way to pay the vets.
Price said he’ll get the money from the $80,000 that is left from a $100,000 grant from the Board of Supervisors intended to pay for spay/neuter. About $20,000 of that grant has been spent on one-day spay/neuter clinics.
“My plan is to use up that $80,000 and go back to the Board and show that what we’ve accomplished and ask for more,” Price said.
We’re not exactly Johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to dealing with a “crisis.”
More than two years ago, the Kern County Board of Supervisors created the Animal Control Commission to deal with the county’s massive pet overpopulation problem. It was a “crisis,” everyone agreed, and must be dealt with “urgently.”
This March, after two years of foot dragging, supervisors demanded the Commission bring recommendations to the board by June 10 — or else!
On June 10, recommendations were made, much discussion ensued and supervisors promptly sloughed off the issue until Aug. 26.
Two years and four months (from the Commission’s first meeting in May 2006 to August 2008) is a long time in the cast-off pet world.
More than 21,900 cats and 18,500 dogs will have been killed at the Kern County Animal Control Shelter in that time frame, based on euthanasia rates from the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 fiscal years.
That’s a lot of animals destroyed while we dithered.
Supervisor Mike Maggard, who had asked that staff come back earlier with more information, wants to know how some of the Commission’s recommendations would be implemented.
Such as, “enhanced” enforcement of existing laws.
“Ok, but how?” Maggard asked.
And he was concerned that the recommendations regarding enforcement made no mention of how to better operate the shelter, particularly how to better use volunteers and outside agencies.
“There seems to be all this energy about vigorously pursuing registering and spaying dogs, which is good, but it won’t take dogs off death row in the short term,” he said.
I wondered if Maggard’s attention toward shelter operations had sharpened and his view of Animal Control in general had dimmed after a highly critical report of Kern’s shelter by researchers at UC Davis was recently discovered. (I would say “released” but it apparently languished in Animal Control’s hands until a local animal activist got a hold of it and spread it around. Note to Animal Control: Supervisors hate worse than anything being kept in the dark.)
I asked. Maggard paused.
“(The report) gave an objective, outside view that there are numerous problems in the department,” he said curtly.
That sounds like a “yes.”
I understand Maggard’s desire to get more info before running off half-cocked with new ordinances, but I believe we could have done more by now, much more.
Supervisor Don Maben, who has been part of the Commission since its inception, agreed.
He wanted to vote June 10.
“I’m ready to put survey teams out in the county,” he said referring to one of the recommendations that would increase Animal Control’s staffing so enforcement teams could proactively seek out owners of unlicensed dogs and work with to get them licensed and vaccinated.
Only 10 percent of the dogs in Kern are licensed, Maben said.
“That’s an ultimate failure,” he said.
Yeah, it would cost money to increase staffing. But those employees’ efforts would bring in more money via licenses, which would pay for the increased costs.
“That how most counties work,” Maben said. “For God knows what reason, this county doesn’t do it that way.”
If he sounds frustrated, it’s because he is.
There are a lot of angles to Kern’s animal overpopulation and it’s hard to pick which to attack first.
We don’t have a low-income spay/neuter program, though that could be changing (see box on spay/neuter options).
Our shelter is understaffed and disorganized, according to the UC Davis report.
We don’t have enough people to enforce existing licensing laws.
It seems overwhelming, but there are several things we can do fairly quickly.
Work much more closely with the numerous rescue organizations locally and statewide. There are people who want to save these animals. Use them!
Organize and better use volunteers. People want to help. Use them!
Redirect a small part of Animal Control’s $4.6 million budget toward spay/neuter for low-income families.
Other counties and states have done this and seen dramatic reductions in the number of unwanted animals in a relatively short amount of time. But the program has to be targeted and sustainable, according to Peter Marsh, a director of Solutions To Overpopulation of Pets in New Hampshire.
He’s a numbers guy and here’s what he said about Kern’s numbers:
If we’re killing 8,700 cats and 7,800 dogs a year, for a population of 790,000 humans, that’s 22 animals per 1,000 population. The national average is 12 animals euthanized per 1,000 people.
If we took $400,000 a year, or 10 percent of the Animal Control budget, and spent it on spay/neuter surgeries, assuming we spent $100 per surgery (vets would have to discount their prices) and families would have a co-pay of $10 for cats, $20 for dogs, we could do 4,000 surgeries a year.
That would make a huge dent in the number of unwanted puppies and kittens born each year.
If we can’t skim that much money from Animal Control, what about raising fees for unaltered animals? Or grants? There are ways to find the money, he said.
It’s true that such a program might not work here given our demographics and other factors. “There is no one-size-fits-all fix,” Marsh acknowledged.
There are plenty of other programs, policies and ideas that have been tried elsewhere that we could crib off of to find what will succeed here.
But we have to actually get off the pot first. And that’s where we seem to be stuck.
Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com.