This recent article in L.A. Weekly starts off with a terrible title and goes downhill from there:
Are they really so “bad” that they must be killed? According to whom? What about the “good” dogs – what happens to them?
Regarding manager Brenda Barnette who has reportedly driven some volunteers away from the pound:
“From the beginning, the people engaged in animal issues were deeply divided on Brenda,” says Ron Kaye, former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, who as a blogger at ronkayela.com has kept a watch on Animal Services. “She won over some segments — the classier segments.”
So anyone who doesn’t support the person in charge of needless pet killing at the pound has no class. Nice.
Official “volunteers” work with specific shelters, and are generally calmer than “rescuers,” who tend to be older, single white women with boundless energy — and often uneasy relations with paid staff.
Oh gee, speaking of no class…
“I think she’s doing the best she can,” says Cheri Shankar, a donor and activist, who argues, with plenty of facts behind her, that zealous rescuers have hated every general manager the department’s ever had, from Dan Knapp to Jerry Greenwalt to Ed Boks. “If St. Francis of Assisi came to Los Angeles to run the shelter, rescuers would complain about him.”
Right. Because rescuers just hate. It’s not that all the previous managers have also killed pets instead of doing their jobs, inviting condemnation from people who believe they are wrong to kill, it’s that hysterical old white women who can’t find husbands just hate.
No-kill means killing 15 percent or so of animals.
No kill means saving every healthy/treatable pet at the shelter. It’s not tied to a specific percentage although Nathan Winograd, director of the No Kill Advocacy Center, recently used the phrase “saving upwards of 95% of all animals” to describe the dozens of open admission no kill shelters in the U.S.
To reduce the killing, L.A. would have to persuade city residents to spay and neuter to prevent litters of animals. That means Animal Services — and by extension the City Council and Villaraigosa, who have cut its budget — would have to pay to better publicize and enforce a mandatory city spay-and-neuter law that’s widely ignored.
Right, MSN is failing in L.A. because it’s ignored. Because otherwise, MSN would totally be working, even though it has never worked to significantly reduce the killing of shelter pets anywhere it’s been tried. Ever.
“You can’t adopt your way out of the problem,” says Shawn Simons, who runs Kitty Bungalow Charm School for Wayward Cats[.]
Well yeah, you can – if anyone wanted to quit regurgitating the tired excuses of the past and open their eyes to the successes of the present. No kill is happening – in the north, south, east and west. It’s happening in large cities and rural communities. It could be happening in L.A. – today, if anyone involved wanted it.
(Thanks Jan for the link.)
