State Senator Jan Peavey represents the 27th District in Sacramento and sends out monthly newsletters to her constituents and we were pleased to see her give a shout out to the volunteers at the Agoura Shelter for their service in her January 2014 newsletter. What was even more interesting is her quote “Volunteers help with the countless chores that have helped to make the Agoura Hills Animal Care Center no-kill facility one of the best.” This coincides with statements – overheard by lower level DACC employees – made by Los Angeles County Department of Animal ‘Care’ and Control Deputy Director Derek Brown claiming the Castaic shelter is no kill as well. Where did Senator Peavey get the idea that Agoura was no kill? From the DACC of course.
The only problem is that both shelters are killing. According to statistics published on the DACC’s website, Agoura killed 83 dogs and 160 cats in the last year, while Castaic snuffed out the lives of 208 cats and 192 dogs before sending their bodies to rendering plants. Although we suspect that the Agoura Shelter’s statistics are grossly misstated and that the DACC is manipulating their statistics to make the Lancaster shelter appear to be doing better than it is at the expense of Agoura and Baldwin Park in particular, these numbers prove our contention that when the DACC speaks, to use polite bureaucratic terminology, “they misspeak”, which translates into English as “they f@#king lie”.
Speaking of the Lancaster, the shelter’s staff are being ordered to clean up their act and everything else so that Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich can pay a visit to the shelter on January 26th without having to see any of the reality of pets being left on sweltering trucks, pets being deprived of water and several employees being AWOL from their shifts. We are sure DACC officials, who rarely come to this or any other of their shelters, will be there proudly guiding Supervisor Antonovich through a sanitized facility, where he will be told that Lancaster is the highest adoption shelter in the County. The pity is that Antonovich may actually believe them.