rangerdaze_issue3

A diverse team of experts met at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary January 6 to exchange ideas for creating and implementing strategies that would achieve “zero euthanasia” across the United States within the next decade.

The initiative, which is characterized as the final phase of Best Friends’ No More Homeless Pets campaign, is intended to save the estimated 4 million animals still being killed in shelters each year.

“Pet overpopulation led to 17 million animals being euthanized, but the no-kill movement, with spay/neuter, TNR and adoptions, got it down to four or five million. It’s been stuck there since about 1999,” said Paul Berry, executive director of Best Friends Animal Society.

“The next step is breeding. It’s out of control. Nobody wants to jump on this. We jumped on no-kill when it was unpopular and we’re ready to jump into this.”

Today, the bulk of shelter animals is feral cats and so-called “bully breeds” or “dangerous dogs,” which are bred for fighting or as macho symbols for young men. The dogs are cast off if they can’t or won’t fight, or when they’ve outlived their usefulness for that purpose. In addition, when law enforcement busts fighting rings the dogs must be held in shelters for evidence.

Feral cats and aggressive dogs are usually euthanized because they’re unadoptable.

“We will never get to those 4 million if we don’t go after the people causing bully breeds,” said Berry, who presided over the meeting. “Puppy mills and bad breeders are hurting the reputations of breeders who care.”

Best Friends president Michael Mountain acknowledged that the initiative “may be perceived as an attack on breeders, [but] it’s really the commercial or exploitative breeders, not the hobby breeders who really care about their dogs.”

The initiative, however, will not focus solely on breeding, but also unprincipled dog trainers and “issues of ownership,” including dangerous dog laws, anti-tethering and mandatory spay/neuter.

Berry estimated it will take several months to develop the campaign and perhaps a decade to achieve its goal of zero euthanasia.
BFAS is working with experts to develop the multi-pronged approach. Those who attended the meeting were:
• Mark Kumpf, director of the Montgomery County Animal Resource Center near Dayton, Ohio, and a board member of the National Animal Control Association
• Jim Crosby, a retired Jacksonville, Fla., sheriff’s deputy who conducts crime scene investigations of fatal/serious dog attacks around the country.
• Claudine Wilkins, a Georgia animal law attorney and activist who has helped train lawyers, police, animal control officers and vets to better prosecute animal cruelty cases.
• Tio Hardiman, director of gang mediation services for CeaseFire, a Chicago organization working to reduce inner-city violence, particularly shootings and killings.

Best Friends was represented by Mountain, Berry, Francis Battista, outreach program manager, and Donna Batterham, director of development.

The meeting also included Joe Trippi and his wife Kathy Lash. Trippi, the national campaign manager for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, pioneered the use of online technology to organize what became the largest grassroots movement in presidential politics.
Battista noted that while the companion pet population is rising across the country, the number of euthanasias has remained level.

“The humane community is doing its job,” he said.

Kumpf agreed, emphasizing the need for more regulation and enforcement.

“All those years, the government said, ‘You guys are doing our jobs for us.’ So the government didn’t have to spend money. It whittled down and eliminated. The infrastructure is not there. Evildoers have flourished,” he said. “We’ve got to re-implement, re-invest and re-engineer.”

Among the possibilities discussed at the meeting were registration/licensing and fees for trainers and breeders, as well as zoning requirements and advertising regulations.

Battista cautioned that Best Friends should not inject itself into questions of breeder assessments. “Let good breeders self-identify,” he said.

Crosby, who is researching possible genetic markers for aggression, said [irresponsible] breeders have accelerated not only the process – “generations are now 18 months instead of two years” – but also the negative results of that process.

“The dogs are becoming progressively aggressive,” he said. “They have a lower trigger for aggressive response, they show an inappropriate level of response and they continue beyond traditional stopping point. It’s like if you say to a psycho, ‘I don’t like your tie,’ he not only kills you, but cuts you up and spreads you in the landscape.”

And it’s not only the actual aggression that is highly valued, but the perception as well, according to Hardiman, who approaches the problem through the culture of violence that promotes bully breeds.

“I interviewed 20 guys with pit bulls, but only five to seven actually fight dogs,” he said. “The others are in gangs, and have dogs as a symbol. The dogs have names engraved in their skin, gold chains, and gold teeth.

“There are two types of fighters: teens, who don’t know what they’re doing, and high-level rings. The violence must be attacked in a lot of different ways.”

Some of those ways, according to attorney Wilkins, are education, the courts and legislatures. She suggested lobbying state attorneys general to form animal cruelty task forces, a strategy she worked with the Atlanta prosecutor’s office.

Among her projects, Wilkins has targeted puppy mills in Lancaster, Pa., working with a coalition to educate citizens and lawmakers, and push for changes to horrific conditions in the Amish breeding industry.

For example, she said, puppy mill operators have been composting not only animal feces in their farm fields, but also their carcasses, which some neurologists believe is causing a cluster of diseases among the people in the area.

“Breeders have one of the most extensive products that’s mass produced, but there is no product liability case law,” Wilkins said.
Everyone at the January 6 meeting agreed that the solution to saving the final four million cannot be found inside shelters.

“Once an animal comes through my door, I have few options... and they are not pleasant ones,” Kumpf said.

“We have to solve the problem out in the community,” according to Battista. “This is a problem everywhere, but it’s something people can get their arms around and want to solve.”

posted by: mark_kumpf

This was a very productive meeting. One thing that Animal Control Officers routinely face is the perception that our profession is somehow responsible for animals entering the shelters and the eventual outcomes. The participants at the meeting all agreed that this was not the case. If we are to succeed in reducing or eliminating the euthanasia of healthy and adoptable animals, it will be through the cooperation of animal control, animal welfare, good legislation, measured enforcement, and public acknowledgement of the challenges that face all of us in the animal services field.

Many animal control agencies are now shifting to the adoption proactive stance instead of simply housing animals without adoption chances. In our facility alone, we have not euthanized one healthy or adoptable dog since July of 2006. One focus of the group was to brainstorm on how to produce a set of model plans or a benchmark for others to have as a template for use in their own campaigns to end needless euthanasia.

Much of this meeting was aimed at finding solutions to the problems that result in euthanasia including indiscriminate breeding, animal fighting, uncared for ferals and irresponsible animal owners. Each of these areas can result in "broad brush" legislation that end up with the unintended consequence of punishing law-abiding and responsible pet owners more than those irresponsible owners. Again, the group is looking for fair, well reasoned, and enforceable legislation models that could truly impact the euthanasia rate plateau on which we landed, on our way down to no euthanasia of healthy, adoptable pets.

Mark Kumpf
Director
Montgomery County ARC

Person	From	To
Jason Rhodes	New to Local Govt	Ranger Shire of Esperance
Scott Winter	New to Local Govt	Ranger/Community Safety Officer Fremantle

Summit Aims for Zero Euthanasia