pet connection

The San Francisco SPCA announced today that Jan McHugh-Smith would be leaving her position as director in March of next year and returning to her home state of Colorado to be closer to her family and work for the Humane Society Pikes Peak Region.

Controversy and criticism have plagued McHugh-Smith and the SF/SPCA in recent years. An expensive veterinary hospital — a legacy from her predecessor — as well as the decision to close down the SF/SPCA’s three-decades old hearing dog program without any notice to its longtime staff and clients contributed to a growing narrative in the community that the organization had lost touch with its animal lifesaving mission.

A move to get the SF/SPCA to change course gained momentum in 2008, when a scathing article in the alternative newspaper SF Weekly accused the organization of abandoning its commitment to no-kill — a movement that originated at the shelter when Richard Avanzino was its head.

Called “A Time to Kill,” the article said that a kitten named Tulane and a young dog named Isaac had been killed by the SF/SPCA even though they could have been saved — and that this change was part of a larger picture:

The SF/SPCA has also announced a new protocol for euthanizing sick kittens, which conflicts with the public’s perception that the shelter adheres to no-kill principles.

The reason for the new euthanasia policies is, in part, money. The SF/SPCA is scrambling to find funding to complete its controversial $30 million, for-profit animal hospital, the Leanne B. Roberts Animal Care Center. The project is only half complete, and with the looming specter of hiring staff, new equipment costs, and opening expenses, there has been an emphasis on saving money around the shelter, where it costs an estimated $43 a day to house a healthy cat. Since president Jan McHugh-Smith was hired a year ago, she has scaled back or eliminated internationally known behavior and medical services that had saved thousands of animals over the years.

Employees and volunteers were alarmed at the recent closure of the 30-year-old Hearing Dog Program, along with major changes to adoption policies, cutbacks to the Cat Behavior Program, and the loss of the volunteer Affection Eaters program, which might have been able to help Tulane.

The cutbacks and new policies have caused at least seven staffers to quit, as well as an uncertain number of volunteers. Some of them have organized into two groups who are vowing to expose the new policies even if it means that donors, the lifeblood of the nonprofit, stop cutting checks.

Although McHugh-Smith insisted in an interview with me that the SF/SPCA, and she, remained commited to a no-kill goal, the community wasn’t convinced. A series of contentious Animal Welfare Commission hearings followed, with local rescue groups and the organization FixSanFrancisco.org demanding changes at the shelter.

The changes that came about weren’t what those groups had in mind. The expensive veterinary hospital came online during the current economic downturn, and is currently a million bucks in the red. Hours and staff were cut, and the shelter’s relationship with the high-profile Academy of Dog Trainers was terminated.

Another scathing cover story in another Bay Area alternative weekly, entitled “How the San Francisco SPCA Let Us Down,” alleged that SF/SPCA was sucking in all the donor money but letting the local rescue groups do all the work:

At a January 8, 2009 meeting of the Commission of Animal Control and Welfare (ACW) – which advises the Board of Supervisors regarding animal issues in the City – animal care supervisor Eric Zuercher presented some startling statistics: While the SF/SPCA took 122 dogs from (Animal Care and Control) in 2007-08, independent rescues took far more. Grateful Dogs Rescue, which gets 80 percent of its dogs from ACC, took 141 in 2007, and 146 in just the first three quarters of 2008. Rocket Dog Rescue, which, Zuercher stated deals with the toughest cases (pit bulls, medical issues), took 111. Other groups also stepped in – Muttville takes older dogs, Wonderdog takes a lot of small dogs. The 122 taken by the SF/SPCA represents just 14 percent of the total dogs they took in 2008.

Where cats are concerned, the SF/SPCA fairs better, with 73 percent of its cats coming from ACC in 2008, though that is down from 84 percent in 2007. The percentage of cats taken from other shelters jumped from 16 percent in 2007 to 25 percent in 2008.

Toni’s Kitty Rescue saved 200 kittens in just four months, all of which would have been euthanized otherwise because ACC does not adopt out kittens under eight weeks of age (and the SF/SPCA won’t take them). Lana Bajsel’s Give Me Shelter gets 95 percent of its cats and kittens from ACC – they currently have 100 cats in their system on an $80,000-a-year budget, while the SF/SPCA has just 170. Without the rescues, Zuercher concludes, many more animals would have died.

“We would be so greatly diminished without the rescues,” Zuercher says. “They astound me and inspire me with the amount of effort they put into this.”

With McHugh-Smith’s departure, the Board of the SF/SPCA says they’ll be conducting a national search for a new director. Will real change come — once again — to San Francisco?

This morning one of the pet-insurance companies — not the one that advertises here, please note– sent out a fear-mongering bulletin on Canine Influenza that was really little more than a sales pitch to sign up for insurance.

I am a big believer in pet health insurance (even more after I got the very nice check for McKenzie’s recent malady), but fear-mongering? Not cool, dudes.

Especially with everyone already in a near freak-out over anything having to do with any flu, as the excellent science reporter Edie Lau writes for the VIN News Service:

Had the new canine influenza vaccine come out in ordinary times, veterinarians may have had little trouble deciding whether, when and to which owners’ dogs to offer the shot. Clients might easily have grasped that the shot is appropriate for dogs that congregate in places such as boarding kennels and shows, but not necessary for stay-at-home pets.

But times are not ordinary.

With a human pandemic flu in full swing and fresh evidence that the virus in people has passed to pet ferrets and a house cat, flu viruses of all varieties are stoking high anxiety. That’s translated into unusual — some say unwarranted — public interest in the dog flu shot and a heightened sensitivity among clinicians on the subject.

The canine influenza vaccine is not a “core” vaccine, but rather a “lifestyle” immunization, to be used only under certain conditions. Since its release, practitioners have been puzzling over just what conditions warrant it. For instance, they wonder, is it appropriate for a boarding kennel to require the shot in a region where canine influenza is not known to be circulating?

She goes on to write about who should be considering the vaccine for their pets, and why people looking at boarding over the holidays may not feel they have a choice but to vaccinate, since some kennel owners are mandating it:

[University of Florida researcher Dr. Cynda] Crawford [who discovered the virus] said she understands both veterinarian and kennel-owner perspectives on the issue. “As a veterinarian, I would prefer that policies like that be made on evidence,” she said. “At the same time, I have seen a few boarding establishments here in Florida just wiped off the face of the Earth financially (after an influenza outbreak).”

Like boarding establishments, [veterinary] clinics may have an interest in playing it safe, Crawford added. “Now (that) there’s a vaccine, what is your liability if you don’t tell clients about it?” she said. “If I do not tell clients whose dogs are socially active in the community, and they go out and get canine flu, they may come back and say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me there was a vaccine?’ ”

[Dr. Steven] Barta, a Michigan practitioner wondering how to broadcast the availability of the vaccine without inciting panic, ended up preparing a short letter for clients on the subject. It reads in part:

“This vaccine does not prevent the disease but it lessens the severity of the disease. After careful consideration and research we feel that this is an important vaccine to be given to any dogs that fall into the following categories:

• Kenneled dogs or those that visit doggie day care

• Frequent visits to the groomer

• Dogs that play at dog parks

• Out-of-state travelers

“In essence, dogs that receive the Bordetella vaccine are also candidates for the Canine Influenza Vaccine.”

The letter apparently met his goal of being informative without causing a panic. Two and a half weeks after he sent it out, Barta said the demand was “surprisingly low.”

Canine influenza originally was discovered among racing greyhounds in Florida in 2004. Before that, dogs were not known to be susceptible to the flu. The flu subtype, H3N8, evolved from a virus that infects horses.

Crawford said the virus has since reached 29 states and the District of Columbia, with urban areas in Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Florida particularly hit hard.

Read the rest here. And read Christie’s earlier blog post — from August, please note — here.

I have a dog who was a victim of canine influenza. He got it a massive dog show in Houston as 6- or 7-month-old puppy, probably from dogs brought in from Florida. The Texas A&M vet school didn’t realize what they were dealing with at first, so Woody might have been the first case in Texas — a dubious honor, to be sure. He survived thanks to A&M and is a robust, healthy dog now. Because my dogs do go to places with lots of other dogs, I will be vaccinating them. I do not, however, vaccination them for “kennel cough” because in healthy dogs it’s a minor, self-limiting disease.

But you need to look at the risk/benefit equation for yourself, talk to your veterinarian and make your own decisions — based on science, not fear.

Image: Damn, that’s a good-looking dog! Smart and hard-working, too.

I am not holding my breath, but some cautious and skeptical semi-quasi-optimism about the safety of our food supply is not entirely irrational at this moment, pending the further analysis and developments that will undoubtedly make this all entirely meaningless — and of course, no mention of the pet food recall or pet food at all:

A Senate committee passed legislation on Wednesday that would increase government oversight of the U.S. food supply, which has been battered by a series of high-profile recalls that have soured consumer confidence in the food safety system.

The bill would expand U.S. Food and Drug Administration oversight of the food supply by giving it the power to order recalls, increase inspection rates and require all facilities to have a food safety plan in place.

[....]It has been almost 50 years since oversight of the food supply was significantly overhauled, but momentum to reform the system has grown following high-profile outbreaks involving lettuce, peppers, peanuts and spinach since 2006.

An estimated 76 million people in the United States get sick every year with foodborne illness and 5,000 die, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Senate legislation would require FDA to inspect all food facilities at least once every four years and high-risk plants no less than once a year. Currently, many facilities can go several years without being inspected.

It also would implement traceability for fruits and vegetables, and require the FDA to conduct a pilot study for processed foods.

Read the whole thing here. Tell us whatcha think.

A cable news host, who shall remain nameless here since I don’t believe in giving people unwarranted publicity, claimed on his radio show on Wednesday that the health care bill includes pet insurance for dogs. Now, much as some of us might like that, it’s simply not true, and fortunately Politifact was there to debunk it. According to Politifact, there is “no public option for Rex, no death panels for Fido.”

What the bill does include, apparently, is the creation of a Public Health Workforce Corps to provide scholarships and education loan repayment assistance for public health professionals, including veterinarians.

So why do we have public health veterinarians? I’m so glad you asked. I’ve been working on a book about animal-related careers and, of course, one of them is public health veterinarian. Public health veterinarians work as epidemiologists in city, county, state and federal agencies, investigating animal and human disease outbreaks. They help protect human health as it relates to zoonoses, diseases that can be transmitted between animals and people through direct contact or consumption of animal products–diseases like swine flu, avian flu, mad cow disease and West Nile virus. They’re also involved in food and water safety and helping communities–people and animals–recover after natural disasters. There’s a shortage of public health veterinarians, which is one of the reasons they’re included in the legislation.

One of the things that I hope will make my book different and interesting is that I’ve woven in profiles of people in the various fields. For this one, I spoke to Katherine Feldman, public health vet for the state of Maryland. She spends her days doing everything from writing policy on rabies prevention and control to meeting with summer-camp directors to discuss ways they can help prevent campers from developing Lyme disease or being exposed to rabies through interactions with wildlife.

My role as state public health veterinarian is to look after the health of Maryland citizens wherever animals might be involved in disease risks or transmission. Issues that are common for me to deal with are things like exposure or potential exposure to rabies or other zoonotic disease issues.

So if you hear this rumor going around, set the record straight.

In case you’ve been under an Internet rock, you might have missed the news that the FDA has issued an alert about Vetsulin, an insulin product for diabetic dogs and cats, warning that is formulation may be incorrect and it might thus fail to act correctly in patients who are using it — which in the case of diabetes is not a minor problem.

The short version: If you’re using it, call your vet. She might not actually know about the alert yet, so if you’re the first to tell her, you might want to have the alert handy, as well as this FAQ from the drug’s manufacturer, BigPharma giant Intervet/Schering-Plough.

So, I was mulling over the wording of the alert when an email popped into my inbox, cc’d to Marion Nestle. It was a reader, asking if either of us had any thoughts on the fact that Wysong Pet Food is saying that they didn’t issue an press release about their ongoing pet food recall because “the matter was of small enough consequence that we have even been told by the FDA that a news release is not necessary.”

Huh, I thought. Good question.

That was on Saturday, and I figured that Monday morning I’d talk to the FDA and see if that’s true. And then reality, in the guise of a “wake up and smell the coffee!” note from Marion, reminded me that getting comments from the FDA is getting to be right up there with getting them from, well… industry.

Worse, actually, because sometimes industry will actually talk to you. FDA? Not so much.

It’s not just us pet food junkies getting the cold shoulder. From the Society of Professional Journalists:

The Association of Health Care Journalists and SPJ are fed up with federal agencies’ use of public information officers to chill the flow of information. The two groups sent a letter this week to the FDA urging the agency to stop requiring interviews between reporters and government employees to be approved by PIOs and attended by PIOs.

This practice has become widespread throughout all levels of government, and it needs to stop. While PIOs play an important role in answering questions and facilitating interviews, they are hampering the flow of information when acting as delaying middle-men or go-betweens. Having information transmitted through a middle person is hearsay and fraught with accuracy problems – a disservice to the public.

If you cover an agency that practices this form of information control, don’t put up with it. Request that the higher-ups put an end to it. And if they don’t see the importance of direct communication, then circumvent the Big Brother channels and talk to people directly, as journalists must do to ensure accuracy. It’s our duty to get it right.

So wish me luck as I call a government agency and attempt to pry information out of it without having to file a Freedom of Information Act request.

Although, on the other hand, that’s not actually a terrible idea…