It’s Tuesday, 9 AM at a Los Angeles shelter and a worried little terrier has just been “red-listed.” Unless someone adopts her, she’ll be killed. Another dog will take her place and that dog, too, if he isn’t adopted, will be killed. Could spay and neuter laws make a difference in this dog’s life?
In California, in 2008, municipal shelters reporting to the California Department of Public Health took in 833,304 dogs and cats. Of those, 429,987, or 51%, were killed. That would be a sad enough number for the whole country but it’s just for the state of California. In the U.S., the number of pets killed in shelters is astounding. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) reports that every year, between six and eight million dogs and cats enter U.S. shelters and three to four million of those animals are killed because there aren’t enough homes for them. In 2009, uncontrolled breeding compounded by record job losses and home foreclosures are causing the number of animals flooding our shelters to rise sharply. When the figures are finally reported, they’ll be tragic.
Until we get a handle on this crisis, we need to refrain from buying animals and adopt from shelters instead. We ought to promote adoption to our friends. And we must fix the dogs we have.
Sterilization would help reduce the overall population of dogs. Clearly, if we restrict procreation, cutting back on the number of dogs produced, we’re going to cut back on the overpopulation of dogs. Although responsible people do fix their pets, there are too many people who don’t or just won’t. They’re not thinking about the massive death toll and the fiscal impact—it costs U.S. taxpayers $2 billion per year to house and euthanize all those unwanted animals.
On February 12, 2008, the City Council of Los Angeles passed a law that requires all cats and dogs in the city to be spayed or neutered after the age of four months (with some exemptions). I was one of the people in the packed Van Nuys courthouse when the dog breeders booed the decision. “My dog is my property! Nobody’s gonna tell me what to do in my backyard!” a breeder yelled.
For California, Judie Mancuso, Director of Social Compassion in Legislation, is co-sponsoring The Pet Responsibility Act (SB 250, which is inactive until the January session) with Senator Dean Florez. The bill is intended to reduce the $250 million spent in California each year to house and kill unwanted pets in overburdened local shelters. Guardians who choose to keep an unaltered dog would need to obtain an unaltered license. “In our bill,” says Judie Mancuso, “a dog is impounded because it was running at large and if it’s unlicensed and unaltered, the owner is cited, required to sterilize and bring back proof of sterilization or continue to be fined. Voluntary spay and neuter through the education campaigns and increasing pet adoption has helped, but it will never be enough without a state law.”
“It’s about time we tried something that might work,” says Cathy Davis, General Manager of Los Angeles Animal Services. “History teaches us that volunteer spay/neuter doesn’t work and that’s why we see tons of animals coming in. Clearly, we need to give it an opportunity to work. We’ve got to try to something different to interrupt the flow of pets coming into the shelters.”
New York City passed a spay/neuter law in 2000, which requires the sterilization of all dogs and cats before being adopted or redeemed by an owner from a shelter. “The reduction in intake is due in large part to our mandatory spay/ neuter of shelter animals,” says Jane Hoffman of the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals. “Would I love to have everybody’s animals fixed? Yes. Will there always be people who don’t for some bizarre reason? Yes. I think it’s going to be very difficult to pass mandatory spay/neuter laws unless the city and the community can provide free or low-cost and accessible spay/neuter.”
Hoffman has little patience for people who engage in irresponsible breeding. “I would really like all these idiots who think it’s the miracle of birth—I’d like to them to have to watch the euthanasia of all these animals and maybe that would be enough to move them. Every dog sold in a pet store should be spayed and neutered prior to sale, just like shelters are required to do.”
“The best type of spay/neuter legislation,” says Teri Austin, President of the Amanda Foundation in Los Angeles, “is to make people want to do it.” Austin runs a free, mobile spay/ neuter clinic in L.A. that serves low-income neighborhoods. Last year, her Spaymobile performed over 7000 spay/neuters. “You have to provide good reason, make it advantageous, have enforcement, and you must make it plausible for everyone to comply. The bible says, ‘the poor will always be with us’, and so you’re going to have to have free, and/or low cost service,” says Austin.
Ed Sayres, President of the ASPCA, believes a combination of volunteerism and available, free spay/neuter works best. Of spay neuter legislation, he says, “The energy put towards that and the polarizing dialogue is a lot of energy that could be put toward making spay/neuter incentivized and accessible. If you do better enforcement of the license law and have a significant differential between spayed and un-spayed in the licensing fee, then that’s the more solid approach. I’ve never been a proponent of mandatory spay/neuter,” says Sayres. “There’s no data that supports that it works and lots of data to support incentivized and accessible spay/ neuter.”
“Laws educate people,” says Paula Fasseas, the vibrant and outspoken founder of Paws Chicago, the city’s largest no-kill animal shelter. Fasseas believes that laws institutionalize behavior. “Once it becomes law, it becomes the norm,” she explains. “The majority of people are law-abiding citizens. It would save thousands of dogs and stop the cycle of excess animals. In Chicago, you need a license to sell Christmas trees! But there’s no requirement to have a license to breed pit bulls? Then they sell them, they end up in the city pound and they get killed. Less animals mean less taxpayer dollars going to collecting, holding, killing, and disposing of 19,000 dogs a year in Chicago.”
Richard Avanzino, President of Maddie’s Fund, a foundation with a $300 million endowment, objects to spay/neuter laws. “When laws are enacted,” says Avanzino, Maddie’s Fund will not spend its money to fulfill government responsibilities. Where they do have mandatory spay/neuter, we do not fund in those areas. If government passes laws, then government should fund the enforcement and application of those laws. My concern is; if mandatory spay/neuter applies to all the dogs and cats of America, then we’re not going to have dogs and cats in America when the law is fully implemented.”
“What is Avanzino smoking?” said Judie Mancuso of Social Compassion in Legislation. “For those of us in the real world, we know this scenario Avanzino has painted will never be true.”
Another vocal proponent of mandatory spay/neuter laws is Dr. Andrew Kaplan, the charismatic N.Y.C. veterinarian who founded The Toby Project, an organization whose mission is to address pet overpopulation. “I’m 100% behind it!” says Kaplan. “Pet overpopulation results in five million dog and cat deaths a year in shelters. That’s acceptable? A solution depends on mandatory spay/neuter. Compliance is the major argument used against it. Murder is against the law. Are we not going to have a law against murder because it’s hard to enforce?” Kaplan goes even further. “Anybody who’s against this, let’s have those people do the killing one day and see if they think it’s acceptable. Let’s put it on TV every night— killing dogs and cats!”
Powerful animal enterprises like the NAIA (National Animal Interest Alliance), PetPac (a lobbying organization of breeders) and breed clubs like the AKC (American Kennel Club) are fighting spay/neuter laws, calling these measures unconstitutional and an intrusion on privacy.
“We’re anti-stupid regulations. This is unenforceable, unconstitutional, hair-brained legislation,” says Patti Strand, National Director of NAIA and board member of the AKC. “The problem with these laws,” continued Strand, “is that no one has done the research necessary. Our major thrust is to try to define the issues on fact-based evidence.” Note that the people defining the issues for NAIA are commercial breeders, research scientists, egg producers, cattle ranchers, hunters, and exotic pet dealers. The NAIA’s promotional material proclaims they are “dedicated to responsible animal use.” They’re dedicated to using animals, not protecting them.
Plainly, animal enterprises are against laws that undercut their profit margin. For example, the AKC made over $22 million in registration and certification fees in 2005 for 920,000 dogs—all unaltered pups. They encourage breeding. In fact, the registration and certification of dogs is their “bred” and butter.
To absolve themselves from the shame of pet overpopulation, they flat-out deny it exists. Patti Strand’s NAIA Web site states that pet overpopulation is “a myth perpetuated by people who would end the breeding of purebred dogs and cats.”
The source most often credited for the hypothesis of the mythical overpopulation crisis is author Nathan Winograd. Commercial breeders who fight spay/neuter legislation zealously promote his book, Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America.
Breeders exploit and pervert his ‘overpopulation myth’ as a convenient excuse to continue unfettered breeding. “I’m against mandatory spay/neuter because it gives animal control more power to impound animals,” Winograd said. “If you put protections in legislation, no dog can be impounded and killed for the sole reason that he’s not sterilized.” Winograd creates programs to encourage adoption and places much of the blame for shelter deaths on a failure of the shelter system. He thinks there are plenty of people, millions, to adopt all these animals. His book is both admired and dismissed in animal rights circles. A lot of what he says is disturbingly true but many people told me that his numbers don’t add up and that his accusations are unfair.
“I don’t know where he gets the numbers,” says Dr. Allan Drusys, chief veterinarian for Riverside County Animal Control in California. “They don’t make sense to me. The alleged demand for animals just doesn’t exist. I’m in favor of mandatory spay/neuter…I have worked in two shelters very close to freeways,” says Drusys. “There were never traffic jams of people wanting to come to adopt. He’s distorting reality. The blame is on mankind that willy-nilly produces these animals. This is a supply-driven equation, not a demand-driven equation and Winograd does not seem to comprehend that. The idea that mandatory spay/neuter kills pets is rubbish.”
Ed Sayres of the ASPCA defends the shelters that have “not only helped communities but the entire country.” About Winograd, he says, “Nathan usually says all the demeaning and disparaging remarks he can make about shelter directors in general, which in its tonality, is completely inappropriate… There can be poorly managed agencies. Nathan just makes this a grandiose, national statement. It’s hardly the case.”
“To blame shelters for pet overpopulation is just insulting,” said Lisa Carter, the Director the Santa Cruz SPCA.
Lisa Peterson, Director of AKC Club Communications is another denier of pet overpopulation. Incredulously, I listened to Peterson tell me, “When shelters run out of dogs they import them from other countries and if we have an ‘overpopulation’ of dogs, then why are they importing them from other countries?” I asked her where she was getting her information. “I read it in media reports,” she answered. Before we ended our jaw-dropping talk, she gave me one last doozie. “I don’t see the creation of new dogs as a correlation as to what’s going on in the shelters.” This is, at best, very creative thinking.
Cathie Turner, a breeder and Executive Director of Concerned Dog Owners of California, opposes mandatory spay/neuter laws “because it makes almost everyone a criminal. They’re creating a climate to force dog owners to either sterilize their dogs regardless of the age or turn them in to animal control,” she added. “We’re all for voluntary spay and neuter but SB 250 is going to cause a huge increase dog deaths in California if it passes. The killing rate since the [Los Angeles] spay/neuter law passed has gone up 24%.” I asked Turner if it’s possible that the euthanasia rates might have risen because the severe economic downturn has forced so many people who have lost their jobs and homes to abandon their animals.
“We do not have a pet overpopulation problem,” Turner insisted. “We have more than enough people adopting dogs to take care of all the strays if only we could get all the owned dogs back to their owners.”
Months ago, while I was standing in the reception area of an L.A. shelter to rescue a dog, six dogs were dumped by six different owners right in front of me.
Lisa Carter, Director the Santa Cruz SPCA, is a fierce advocate for mandatory spay neuter. “I’ve lived it,” says Carter. “Since it was implemented, we’ve decreased euthanasia over 70%. The county built a shelter that was one kennel smaller than the shelter that it replaced whereas in other counties, the shelters they’re building are 300 to 500% larger than the shelters that they’re replacing. The amount of animals is increasing because there are no spay/neuter laws.”
The Humane Society of the United States has supported numerous spay/neuter ordinances in the past, and considers bills on a case-by-case basis. “It is simply wrong,” says Michael Markarian, Executive Vice President of HSUS, “to refer to these measures as ‘mandatory spay and neuter’ because they typically allow responsible pet owners to opt out of spay/ neuter for their animals for numerous reasons. Under these measures, people who elect not to spay or neuter their animals in order to breed their dog or cat must pay a permit fee. In that sense, this legislation provides incentives for people to spay and neuter, and amounts to something of a differential license fee for people who do not want to spay or neuter their animals.”
Luckily, the worried little terrier from the L.A. shelter was rescued by Leslie Gallagher of Two Hands Four Paws just hours before she was to be put to death. No one wanted her. She’s now in a loving home—mine. We’ve named her La Mouche, which means little black fly in French. She’s in my lap right now, licking my hand while I type this.
But what if La Mouche was the only dog available at the shelter? The fight to adopt her would be intense. What if there were two more like her? The fight would be less intense. What if there were a thousand La Mouches, or ten thousand or a million? Then it would be La Mouche who would be in an intense fight—a fight for her life. So the problem is irrefutable—there are too many dogs.
Lisa Carter of the Santa Cruz SPCA will not let her passion for saving animals die. “On my grave stone,” she says, “I don’twant my name, I want it to say: Spay and Neuter.”
About the Author: Carole Raphaelle Davis is the West Coast Director of The Companion Animal Protection Society and author of The Diary of Jinky, Dog of a Hollywood Wife. Visit her Web site at: www.hollywooddog.blogspot.com
