The Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control self-insures, and after a mauling at the Agoura shelter resulted in a settlement reputed to be close to half a million dollars, the DACC implemented a system where all volunteers and staff were required to watch a series of videos (at a cost to the taxpayers of $50 per viewer) and pass a hands-on test of their animal handling skills before they were allowed to interact with animals.

Despite these training videos having been filmed in a veterinary clinic and having very little to do with the shelter environment the highly paid public servants who run the DACC thought they had all the bases covered.  Except as usual they didn’t.

The County court system refers petty criminals to the DACC for community service in the shelters.  At the Castaic shelter, these completely untrained workers are, according to volunteers, being allowed to handle cats because of staff shortages.  According to volunteers one of these court referral workers mishandled Bella, A4542088, which caused her to bite and be deemed rescue only.   Despite the fact that Castaic officials knew a rescue was coming to pick up the cat on the following day, they euthanized her as we reported in last week’s blog post.

The reason the rescue did not pick up Bella in time to save her was the discontinuance of the ‘one time pull’ policy.  Prior to the end of 2012, the head of a rescue could fax or email a shelter authorizing an individual, whose name, address, telephone number and driver’s license information they would provide in writing, to pick up an animal on the rescue’s behalf.    The DACC’s service area is geographically spread out, and this was the only way rescues could save animals both in terms of time and cost.   When a rescue is advised at noon that they have until 5:00 pm that same day to get an animal out of the shelter, often the only logistically possible way to do it is to “deputize” someone who is near the shelter to pick up the animal on behalf of the rescue.   Nearly every other shelter system in Southern California honors a “One time pull policy” but Marcia Mayeda’s DACC doesn’t.  As a result pets die.  Bella was far from the only one to suffer this fate.

In other shelter news, the Downey Shelter continues its policy of refusing to microchip certain adopted animals (sick dogs and dogs which have been deferred from spay/neuter surgery) in direct violation of Los Angeles County Code 10.20.185, which requires that all dogs over the age of four months must have a microchip.

The DACC is still killing adoptable dogs, and not just Pit Bulls, despite having numerous empty kennels.  We do not know if this is a financial or philosophical decision – but do know it is an unpopular and heartless decision.

Nearly everyone involved in pet rescue in Los Angeles County wonders how Marcia Mayeda, the disinterested and ineffective head of the Department of Animal Care and Control (DACC) is able to keep her job.  Few government agency heads garner as many complaints to the County Board of Supervisors at the apparently Teflon-coated Mayeda.

As a frequent critic of Mayeda, I constantly get e-mails and phone calls from rescues, volunteers and DACC employees complaining about DACC policies which make it unnecessarily difficult to adopt, rescue or care for the shelter system’s animals.

I ask these people why they are calling me instead of going public with their grievances.  DACC employees are afraid of “Freeway Therapy”, the term describing Mayeda’s unofficial policy of transferring employees who have fallen out of favor to the shelter farthest from their homes – and no one wants to be a DACC employee living in Lancaster and forced to drive every day to Agoura to put food on their table.

The rescues are scared of losing their pull privileges.  Although Mayeda is not legally allowed to retaliate against rescues for speaking out, many have had their privileges revoked for questionable reasons.  This has instilled a sense of fear which has silenced valid criticism.

Volunteers want to advocate for the fair treatment of shelter animals but know the likely consequences.  They may be fired in violation of Federally protected Section 1983 rights, as happened in the cases of Cathy Nguyen and most recently myself.

Remaining silent about issues affecting the county shelters will not make the problems go away.  According to Castaic volunteers, the shelter’s cats went without food or water for one day in February because of inadequate staffing.  This is cruel and intolerable – and a direct violation of the Hayden act.    A kitten named Bella (A4542088) allegedly bit or scratched an individual (there were no witnesses).  The shelter, which had designated Bella as “rescue only”, advised the volunteers that Bella would be euthanized in 48 hours unless a rescue took her.  A rescue stepped up and the volunteers alerted the shelter that the rescue would pull Bella the next morning.  Despite knowing that the rescue was on its way, and having empty kennels, the shelter euthanized Bella for no discernible reason other than to teach the volunteers a lesson – that they should not complain about lack of care for the Castaic felines.

Pets should not suffer because of an inept and uncaring bureaucracy.  Our shelter system is supposed to be humane.  Unfortunately it is far too often inhumane – and all of our collective silence will only perpetuate this needless suffering.  People must speak up and speak loudly.

There would be no one happier than me if I woke up tomorrow and discovered that Los Angeles County’s shelter system had decided to go no kill. I would also be delighted if I won the Power Ball lotto.    The odds for me to win  Power Ball are, according to statisticians,  one chance in 175,223,510.  The odds of Los Angeles County going no kill aren’t much better.

It’s a simple problem to understand- too many animals coming into the system, and not enough going out.   Until someone can reduce the intake numbers, which will only happen with strong spay/neuter laws, microchip laws, a ban of puppy mill dogs  being imported into our community, and landlords being refused the right to discriminate against pet owners, we have no chance.

However even if I can reluctantly condone something I abhor, the killing of innocent pets by the government – I can do so only if it is done for cases of irremediable suffering, pets who are dangerous (and so called “dangerous” pets need to be evaluated far better than they are now) and when the shelters are so overcrowded that it is the only way to alleviate the condition.   However when a shelter has forty empty kennels, there is absolutely no justifiable reason to kill a healthy pet.

For the last two months all of the Los Angeles County Shelters have had the smallest number of impounded pets since we have been able to tabulate the shelter populations on the internet.   Baldwin Park, Downey, Lancaster and Carson shelter volunteers have been reporting record numbers of empty kennels – yet the shelters are being ordered to kill – and the barrels in the shelter’s freezers are full of carcasses.

If anyone asks DACC officials why they are ordering pets to be slaughtered, they are accused of demoralizing the staff and threatened with dismissal if they are a volunteer.    However when one talks to the staff they tell us the only thing that is demoralizing them is that they are being ordered to kill pets who don’t need to be killed.

In a follow up to my last week’s blog about Downey’s failure to microchip pets, Marcia Mayeda in e-mails to activists accused me of lying.   She was then sent just a few of hundreds of impound numbers of pets (A4278450, A4386464, A4485782, A4465980, and  A4560366)  who were verified by DACC officials to have been released without microchips by Downey.   Ms. Mayeda has to - no one’s surprise - neither apologized nor responded.   We predict that she will blame the problem on an underling and discipline them – because with Mayeda the buck never stops here – it’s always someone else’s fault.

The DACC has published a mission statement on their website.  This mission statement says,  our mission is achieved through shared county values including professionalism, responsibility, compassion, commitment, integrity, accountability and community partnership.”

When you prove yourself to neither have responsibility, compassion, integrity nor accountability as Marcia Mayeda has demonstrated with this and hundreds of other incidents, you create a crisis in confidence amongst the public and your employees – and the only way to ameliorate the situation is to discharge the perpetrator.    If she had any integrity Marcia Mayeda would resign.  Since she doesn’t want to give up her $200,000 a year job and won’t go on her own – it’s time for the County Government to restore credibility and fire her.

I have been involved in rescuing shelter pets for nearly a decade – and I’ve constantly been struck by the number of well intentioned people involved in rescue who are incapable of working collaboratively for the welfare of the pets because of petty grievances, personality clashes, and all too often, the need to prove that they love animals more than anyone else possibly could.   To me this is all irrelevant – all I care is that pets get out of the shelter and are placed in loving situations.

That is why my spirits have picked up recently upon observing what is happening in the City of Los Angeles.  It appears that the rescue community has actually managed to unite, and express their opposition to Brenda Barnette, the clueless and autocratic head of the Los Angeles City Shelter system.  You don’t have to be a psychic to realize that Ms. Barnette’s days are extremely numbered.   For those of us whose attention is focused on the unfortunate pets in the Los Angeles County shelter system (DACC), we can only hope that this is the beginning of a shelter version of “an Arab Spring”.   Hopefully the County’s rescue community will learn from our city brethren, and come together to motivate the Board of Supervisors into ending Marcia Mayeda’s mismanagement of the DACC.

In shelter news, the DACC still cannot get its act together on the medical front.   If a pet is deferred from spay/neuter surgery at the Downey shelter – the medical staff refuses to microchip the pet (although adopters and rescuers are charged $15 for the microchip they do not receive) – and approximately fifty pets a month are being released without the ability to track them.  According to Los Angeles County Code 10.20.185 all dog over the age of four months must have a microchip.  Yet the DACC, under Marcia Mayeda’s, leadership does not follow this code.

Again we would like to remind you that   on April 25th the second episode of the PBS television program “Shelter Me” is being previewed at the Laemmle Theater in Santa Monica.   Marcia Mayeda has announced that she will be in attendance.  Ms Mayeda rarely goes anywhere in public and back in January when she was supposed to visit the Baldwin Park Shelter for a well publicized publicity stunt, she quietly changed the date of her appearance and brought security people.   For those of you who would like to finally be able to congratulate Ms. Mayeda on the wonderful job she is doing, or perhaps offer some suggestions, it might make an interesting and highly entertaining evening.

Every two weeks volunteers from the Downey Shelter and United Hope For Animals gather to photograph and video the pets at the Downey Shelter.  Normally they take photos of cats, rabbits and dogs, but Downey’s management has now issued an order that no photographs can be taken of cats during the shelter’s public hours – something they did not notify the volunteers until after the shelter was open.   Therefore this week the volunteers were only allowed to add dogs.

If you go to the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control’s website, (www.animalcare.lacounty.gov) you will  be immediately struck by two things.  First, the DACC doesn’t move stray dogs over to the “adoptable” listings after their stray hold periods are over.  Second, the high intake shelters (Baldwin Park, Carson, Downey and Lancaster) have fewer dogs listed than at any previous time in their history.  As I write this on April 12th, Baldwin Park has 200, Downey has 230, Carson has 132 and Lancaster has 142 dogs.

DACC officials are patting themselves on the back for these low numbers, wondering out loud where all the dogs have gone, and marveling at the number of empty kennels at their shelters.  On a recent day Baldwin Park had 48 empty kennels, Downey had 20, and our Lancaster and Carson sources were reporting similar numbers of empties.

Why are there so many empty kennels?  For the last several years the rate of intakes slows from February – May and this accounts somewhat for the drop in population.  Our networking programs at Baldwin Park, Downey and Carson have increased rescues and adoptions, and the Heigls and Best Friends have been transporting pets to no kill shelters in record numbers.  Unfortunately these positive developments do not fully explain the declining shelter populations.

The County’s head veterinarian has been quoted as saying that dogs become so stressed and depressed after spending 21 days in one of the DACC’s shelters that it more humane for them to be euthanized (polite way of saying “killed”) than to remain in the shelter and possibly be adopted or rescued.   Given the absurdity of this statement I halfway expect to hear of the DACC issuing a directive prohibiting kennel attendants for putting blankets in the dogs’ kennels for fear that the depressed dogs will start committing suicide by hanging themselves.

When this was first publicized the DACC denied it, even though staff members, dismayed at having to carry out these orders, confirmed this was the policy.  But when you look at the DACC’s web site there are very few dogs who have been at the shelter longer than 21 days  – and those dogs who have been there longer are evidence dogs, networking dogs or dogs whose microchips were not discovered until they were checked one final time by a RVT before they were to be euthanized.

The DACC is killing for time and time alone.   Staff members have been ordered to use a new euphemism for this policy – calling it “unable to kennel” – which has joined “Irremediable suffering” and “aggressive” as grounds for killing dogs.

On April 25th the second episode of the PBS television program “Shelter Me” is being previewed at the Laemmle Theater in Santa Monica.   Marcia Mayeda, the head of the DACC, has announced that she will be in attendance.  Ms Mayeda rarely goes anywhere in public and back in January when she was supposed to visit the Baldwin Park Shelter for a well publicized publicity stunt, she quietly changed the date of her appearance and brought security people.   For those of you who would like to finally be able to congratulate Ms. Mayeda on the wonderful job she is doing, or perhaps offer some suggestions, it might make an interesting and highly entertaining evening.

I visited the Baldwin Park Shelter this afternoon.  That’s the shelter I volunteered at before I was fired as a volunteer for criticizing mismanagement of the Los Angeles County Animal Shelter system.   Almost one quarter of the kennels – forty-seven in all – were vacant.  With this many empty kennels there is no reasonable justification, other than irremediable suffering, for the DACC to order any dogs to be killed at Baldwin Park, I thought to myself.

There was a mistake in this logic – I used the words “reasonable” and “DACC” in the same sentence.  It seems the DACC has decided that keeping a dog impounded for longer than 21 days is unreasonably stressful for the dog, which will presumably become so depressed and ill on the 22nd day that it would be happier dead than alive.  Despite the availability of large numbers of empty kennels the DACC has ordered shelter staff to kill.   Pets are now being killed for time rather than space.  Volunteers and staff at other shelters have confirmed that they were told this was the new DACC policy, and when we examine the DACC’s website we see that with very few exceptions there are no dogs who have been at the shelter longer than 21 days.  The county’s adoption rate has not dramatically surged and DACC employees have confirmed that they are still taking healthy, non aggressive pets to the back of the shelter to be euthanized.

Today I rescued one of the dogs whose 21 days were up.  Cornelius (A4539344) is a four month old, three pound Chihuahua puppy who had been at the Baldwin Park Shelter for 22 days and the shelter had alerted me he had to leave immediately.  Cornelius seemed quite happy to see me in the shelter – his tail was wagging profusely and hasn’t stopped since I brought him home – but according to the new DACC policy he was supposed to be dead.

The Los Angeles Department of Animal Care and Control’s Mission Statement claims its policy is “to promote responsible pet ownership, compassion toward animals…”  and then goes on to say “As the agency responsible for animal-related public safety, our mission is achieved through shared county values including professionalism, responsibility, compassion, commitment, integrity, accountability and community partnerships”.

If truth in advertising laws applied to the DACC, the DACC leadership would be prosecuted for fraud – as well as cruelty to animals.

Four years ago when I first walked into a Los Angeles County shelter I was stunned by the number of highly adoptable dogs being euthanized every day because they were “invisible” – not marketed, often without viewable photos on the website and never actively brought to the attention of potential adopters. The shelter workers were resigned to the fact that an impounded dog would most likely be euthanized in four days because Marcia Mayeda, the bureaucrat running the County shelter system (DACC), was only interested in making her budget work and showed no inclination to ameliorate the problem by encouraging rescue, adoption or transports of animals from her shelter or launching educational programs to promote spay/neuter and animal welfare in the numerous communities the DACC serves. Hundreds of invisible dogs died in quiet obscurity in the back of the shelters because no one knew about them or cared.

Four years later and I’ve seen a radical change at Baldwin Park, Downey and Carson. Baldwin Park was the first Southern California shelter to make the affirmative decision to be transparent in their actions. The shelter’s outstanding leadership empowered their volunteers to make a difference by marketing the shelter’s impounded pets through the social media websites of Facebook and YouTube, something which had previously been discouraged (SEACA, another Southern California shelter system, still prohibits photographing of its pets). It was tremendously successful and Baldwin Park’s “live releases” increased exponentially. The Downey shelter implemented a similar program in January and last month Carson came on board. We are making huge progress.

Marcia Mayeda has done nothing. She has missed every opportunity to show leadership in trying to get pets out of the shelters. While volunteers work around the clock to partner with no kill shelters throughout North America and transport large numbers of dogs to those shelters, Mayeda has done nothing – unless you count making it more difficult for legitimate 501(c)3 rescues to adopt pets.

In any private sector business a chief executive who continues to deliver bad results quarter after quarter is replaced by the shareholders. When politicos disappoint their constituents send them packing on election day. Mayeda holds a position appointed by the five elected members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors – Gloria Molina, Mike Antonovich, Zev Yaroslavsky, Don Knabe and Mark Ridley-Thomas. It is time to hold these officials accountable and insist that in exchange for our votes that they dismiss Marcia Mayeda.

The Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control (DACC) is a lot like North Korea.  The leadership regime issues heavily manicured proclamations – which can never be taken at face value – telling of their great successes, their leader is inaccessible to the public and travels with security, and the true statistics showing how badly the DACC is doing are guarded as state secrets.  But what reminds me of North Korea the most is the way that the DACC markets the product it is supposed to be ‘selling’ – the sad pets who found themselves impounded in the county shelters.

Two months ago the DACC started its own Facebook pages for the Baldwin Park and Agoura shelters.  Full of pictures of glorious leader Marcia Mayeda, the DACC has only managed to attract 69 followers (many of whom are employed by the DACC) on its Baldwin Park page and 45 followers on its Agoura page because it forgot to include one essential element.  There are no pictures of the shelters’ pets!

Promoting pet adoption and marketing their pets is one of the essential functions of a shelter.   The DACC is failing miserably at this, not just on Facebook – but in every facet of its operations.   Last year the marketing geniuses at the DACC staged an event at their shelters where they actually advertised, ‘come visit our shelters – so you can see an actual animal control truck’!  Needless to say the people stayed away in droves – but the staff and pets didn’t mind – as the county had the shelters provide food for the guests that didn’t come – and the employees and some lucky pets had a free lunch – courtesy of Mayeda and company.

The DACC needs a leadership change at the top.  People who understand the importance of marketing and being in touch with the communities they serve need to be brought into the agency and then, and only then, do we have a chance of getting to the utopian goal of operating no kill shelters.

It is difficult to establish a definitive measuring stick to judge whether Animal Control is doing a good job.  Most of us just look at the body count – the number of pets being shipped off in barrels to rendering plants.   In the eleven and one half years that Marcia Mayeda has run the Los Angeles Department of Animal Care and Control,  the DACC has – according to their own numbers – killed 549,430 pets or nearly 131 pets per day.   In my opinion you have to go far beyond this dreadful number to really judge a shelter system.   You need to see what Animal Control is doing to reduce the number of intakes, so it can reduce the number of pets euthanized.

Is the shelter system effectively reaching into the community it serves and promoting spay/neuter?  Is it enforcing the law in communities where spay/neuter laws have been enacted?  Is the shelter maximizing efforts to collect licensing revenues?  Is the system doing an effective job of marketing its impounded pets?  What is the opinion held by the public, volunteers and staff?

There is no way to subjectively quantify these measurements and it comes down to a variation on former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous quote on pornography, “I know it when I see it.”  What I see when I look at the DACC is abysmal.  Too many deaths, too much of its budget squandered, the agency is wracked by bureaucratic inertia and is often at war with its volunteers and employees.  Without independent oversight, the numerous complaints filed against the DACC are handled by the DACC and are often answered by form letters.

If the DACC was a publicly held company the stockholders would have revolted and demanded change.  It cannot be fixed from within and only a complete overhaul of the agency will improve its unacceptable performance.

Every two weeks volunteers from the Baldwin Park Shelter and United Hope for Animals gather at the shelter to photograph and video the shelter’s pets.  Attached is the latest networking list.  Anything you can do to help by adopting, rescuing or networking these fabulous pets is appreciated and urgently needed.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”   Using Einstein’s definition, objective analysis of the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control would lead you to believe that the bureaucrats running the County’s shelter system are most likely insane.   For years the DACC leadership has been more interested in preserving their jobs and their turf than implementing new solutions to the problems facing the shelter system, and have been content to use the same failed strategies.  The results have always been the same – way too many dead animals in barrels, inside freezers waiting to be transported to rendering plants.

It is time to end this insanity and make some real inroads into improving the shelter system.  In this –  the fourth and final part of my recommendations to improve the DACC – I am proposing a radical makeover of the way the Los Angeles metropolitan area approaches its animal control problem.

First it is time for the head of the DACC to go to both the Board of Supervisors and the individual municipal governments and lobby them to allow residents to have more pets if certain conditions are met.  Presently the law throughout most of Los Angeles is residents are allowed to have three dogs.  Some people live in apartments, others live in homes on small plots of land, others live on larger plots of land.  If someone lives in an apartment perhaps three is the right number, but if you live on an acre of land you should be able to have more pets.   Governments should allow a fourth licensed dog to property owners who apply for an exemption and pay for an inspection of their property to see if it would support an additional pet.  All pets on the property would need to be altered, and the fourth license should be more expensive.  This would create more licensing revenue for the DACC, as well as reduce the shelter intakes as people would not have to surrender as many pets.

It is time to merge the Los Angeles County and Los Angeles City shelter systems.   I live in the City of Los Angeles, but I pay my property taxes to Los Angeles County and there is no reason that the two governments cannot work together to implement this.    If we merge the two shelter systems not only would we achieve a more cohesive and understandable policy throughout the Los Angeles metropolitan area, but there would be substantial savings.  Administrative redundancies can be eliminated and the money could be used to put more workers in the kennels and in the field throughout both the City and County.  The more people who are in the field the better enforcement will be, and tickets can be issued for unaltered and unlicensed pets – all of which reduces the number of pets coming into the shelter systems.   Money that would have been spent on redundant bureaucrats could be used to develop pet education and retention programs – trying to head off pets before they end up at the shelters’ doors.

The DACC has a pretty good sounding mission statement, “…our mission is achieved through shared county values including professionalism, responsibility, compassion, commitment, integrity, accountability and community partnerships.”  With the changes I have outlined perhaps it might become more of a reality and less of the empty slogan it is now.