It’s true: I was against legislating shelter reform before I was for it.
But a string of particularly horrific stories of abuse and neglect in our nation’s shelters, as well as watching our economy crash and burn because we’d gotten to the point where we were basically letting Wall Street “regulate” itself, have combined to turn me into a shelter reform flip-flopper.
That’s why I’m now strongly supporting passage of laws based on the model “Companion Animal Protection Act” (CAPA) in every state in the U.S. From my column today on SFGate.com:
It’s more than a little disturbing to consider how little actual “shelter” homeless pets receive in some agencies bearing that name. Take Tennessee’s Memphis Animal Shelter, for example.
Conditions there were so bad that they prompted a high-profile sheriff’s raid on the facility in 2009. Investigators found animals starving to death and going without water; there were even allegations of dog-fighting going on at the agency
After the raid, the city installed webcams inside the facility so citizens could see what was going on behind the scenes, but even then, conditions didn’t improve all that much.
Blogger Shirley Thistlewaite, who has been covering the situation in the Memphis shelter for more than a year, posts webcam images from MAS several times a month.
Some of the images show dogs being dragged, terrified, to the kill room. Others show cats being poked with sticks by staff members. There are examples of workers violating city policies, of pets escaping from kennels and cages, even of a puppy being hauled to his death, dangling from a worker’s hand that was holding a fistful of the loose skin on the puppy’s back.
If you’re tempted to dismiss the situation at MAS as an aberration, think again. Other animal control facilities may not have webcams in their backrooms, but volunteers and animal rescuers frequently report abuse and neglect in shelters all over the country.
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I don’t normally get on board the legislative express when it comes to reform. I think that education and advocacy are the best approaches to take when trying to change things. In fact, when (CAPA author Nathan) Winograd proposed that San Francisco adopt its own version of CAPA at a meeting of the city’s Animal Welfare Commission two years ago, I didn’t agree. I thought it was micromanagement. I thought it was government run amuck.
I’ve changed my mind. There are simply too many abuses going on in too many shelters, and too many of them are going unpunished or even uninvestigated. The provisions of CAPA are not outrageous, and most of them are being used already by the best shelters in the country, including animal control agencies in Reno, Nev., Charlottesville, N.C., and Ithaca, N.Y.
Read the complete article, including about the launch of Rescue-50, a joint project of Winograd’s No Kill Advocacy Center and the Florida organization No Kill Nation, to pass CAPA nationwide, here.
Photo: Puppies in a feces-smeared cage in a “shelter,” courtesy of Nathan Winograd.
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