pet connection

[Update: The California State Senate adjourned on Monday without voting on AB 1634. They'll be back in session 10 a.m. Tuesday morning. If you're in California, call and fax all the Senators and let them know you want real solutions for animals, not the empty promise and punitive measures of AB 1634. Be sure to tell them you're a California voter, and that the AKC's shift to neutral does NOT address the problems with this bill.  JenniferJ posted a list of phone and fax numbers here. ]

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There’s a definite place in the dialog on animal welfare for civil discourse. We’re all different people, coming from different places, and we can learn a great deal from considering each other’s points of views, and exploring the nuances of our differences.

But sometimes what we need is someone to stand up and point out that the emperor is buck-naked, and oh yeah: it ain’t pretty.

And that, my dear readers, is when and why we need Nathan Winograd.

This week, Nathan’s got mandatory spay/neuter, and California’s AB 1634, in his sights.

At a recent California State Senate hearing on AB 1634, the bill that started out as mandatory spay/neuter law but has since devolved and been amended into oblivion, a Senator asked Ed Boks, the General Manager of Los Angeles Animal Services (LAAS) and one of the bill’s chief proponents: “Mr. Boks, this bill doesn’t even pretend to be about saving animals, does it?”

To which Boks responded: “No Senator, this is not about saving dogs and cats.”

Ed Boks should know. Since passage of his local version of AB 1634, impounds and killing have skyrocketed at the Los Angeles pound he oversees, exactly as concerned animal lovers feared. In fact, the increased killing was the first at LAAS in over a decade.

As seen time and time again, mandatory sterilization laws are largely a distraction, increasing the power of animal control to impound and kill yet more animals, while they divert resources from programs that do work so that agencies can hire yet more officers to write yet more tickets and impound more animals—or threaten to do so—to no avail. So if it is not about saving dogs and cats, what is it about?

Good question, and one I wish more mandatory spay-neuter advocates, and the lawmakers they keep lobbying, would be faced with — and answer — more often. Because unlike Boks, most of them insist their efforts are, indeed, about saving animals, despite the absolute dearth of any evidence that forced sterilization of pets has ever reduced shelter killing anywhere it’s been tried.

So what’s it really about?

It is about taking the pressure off of their own failures. As the chorus of voices about the killing in California shelters and their own inability or unwillingness to do anything substantive about it grows, so do their attempts to divert attention elsewhere. For a diversion to work, you need someone to blame. And blame needs a boogeyman to be effective. The boogeyman here is that the shelter is merely doing the dirty work of an “irresponsible public” and all those who stand in their way are labeled animal haters.

This approach takes its cues from Karl Rove’s post 9/11 three-step strategy:

1. Invoke 9/11
2. Do whatever you want
3. Silence concerned critics by claiming they don’t care about protecting Americans

The proponents of AB 1634 have tried to sell it in much the same way:

1. Invoke 9/11 pet overpopulation
2. Do whatever you want
3. Silence concerned critics by claiming they don’t care about protecting Americans animals

That explains the true believers, but Nathan also points out that there’s something darker at play here: the desire to punish “bad” pet owners.

While they claim to be motivated by saving lives, there is something much more powerful driving them: the desire to punish. An activist truly focused on lifesaving, who subsequently learns that punitive legislation is not only a dismal failure, but that it has the opposite results (more impounds, more killing), would end their support of such methods and begin to push for more compassionate leadership at animal control or the programs and services of the No Kill Equation.

In an article I’m writing on how the growing housing crisis in America is affecting pets and pet owners, I’m seeing this in play again and again: shelter directors and animal workers who implement policies and perpetuate attitudes that actively harm pets, simply to punish their owners for not living up to their lofty standards of “responsible pet ownership.”

So, as we watch the advocates of the gutted-and-amended-and-amended-and-amended-again AB 1634 make one more grab at the brass ring in California’s senate this week, I can’t help but ask: what if we’d spent all this time and money and energy in trying to achieve a better future — and life — for the state’s dogs and cats by implementing the programs and policies that have worked in communities all over the country (including in California) to bring shelter live release rates above the 90 percent that is the goal of the no-kill movement?

Of course, that wouldn’t have taught those rotten irresponsible pet owners anything, would it?

In the last two decades or so, the number of dogs and cats being killed in shelters has dropped from 23 million to less than 4 million. The number of dogs and cats adopted from shelters rose from 17 percent to 23 percent. As Rich Avanzino from Maddie’s Fund has pointed out, simply bumping that up to 25 percent would cover the number of dogs killed for population control in American shelters. And nearly all dogs and owned cats are already sterilized — voluntarily. And yet the demonization of American pet owners continues, and is even on the rise.

Check out Nathan’s blog post here…