pet connection

From this morning’s Houston Chronicle:

It was a wasted opportunity that likely cost many homeless Houston dogs and cats their lives.

In 2006, Nathan Winograd, a pioneer of the national “no kill” animal shelter movement with an impressive consulting track record, offered to tour the city’s struggling Bureau of Animal Regulation and Care and make recommendations on how to lower the unacceptably high kill rate. At the time, according to Houston Chronicle reports, that rate hovered around 80 percent.

Winograd, who already planned to be in the area to give a seminar in The Woodlands, offered his services to Houston for free.

The city, apparently at the behest of BARC’s newly hired director from Dallas, Kent Robertson, refused the offer and made it clear that the out-of-town do-gooder wouldn’t be welcome at BARC.

So the killing at BARC continued. And a few months ago, Robertson, the director that Mayor Bill White had hailed in 2006 as “the best person in the nation to turn around BARC and help Houston treat animals more humanely” resigned and high-tailed it back to Dallas, coming nowhere near his goal to make the nation’s fourth-largest city a no-kill zone for neglected and abused animals.

Numbers provided by the city’s Health and Human Services Department have been inconsistent, but one set of data provided to the Chronicle puts the percentage of animals euthanized from July 2007 to June 2008 at 73 percent.

Animal advocate Lydia Caldwell isn’t one to accept defeat when it comes to animals. She tried to turn Robertson’s failure into BARC’s opportunity.

Earlier this fall, Caldwell contacted Winograd, director of the national No Kill Advocacy Center, based in Oakland, Calif., and asked if he was still open to coming to Houston. He was. Caldwell got to work raising more than $7,000 to pay for his travel expenses and services.

She quickly reached her goal. On Monday, a spokeswoman for the health department told me that the city has actually received $8,000 in support of the Winograd visit.

“It’s a catch-and-kill operation, and it doesn’t have to be,” Caldwell says. “He’s really our only chance of dropping that kill rate.”

The full story — and even more good news for Texas animals — is here.

In other Nathan Winograd news… PetHobbyist.com, where I’m an editor, is developing a lot of new features and tools for mobile use, including a series of podcasts available on our site as well as on iTunes. In a New Media twist on the usual post-retirement broadcast career for sports figures, ex-New England Patriots football star Chad Brown (pictured at right) is handling the reptile end of things for our flagship site, kingsnake.com, and I’m doing the interviewing for, well, every other type and species of animal on the planet.

Nathan kindly agreed to be my guest for the first podcast, in a conversation where he challenged the conventional wisdom that movies about dogs are somehow bad for dogs. He asked a simple question: what’s wrong with celebrating dogs? His answers might surprise you.

Now, some of you already know this about me, but I don’t like change. I stubbornly told the owner of PetHobbyist.com that I wanted to use my usual digital recording equipment for the podcasts. He warned me I wouldn’t be thrilled with the quality, but like I said: I’m stubborn. But of course he was right, and from now on I’m going to do it his way. But what Nathan has to say is interesting enough that hopefully you can forgive the quality issues — and hopefully he will, too!

The podcast is here.