I just looked up the stats for 2011 for Animal Care Services, our city run "shelter". Well, they are better than 10 years ago when ACS was killing over 50,000 a year, with the breakdown of 18,000+ cats and the rest dogs. So we can be called a "less kill" city. But far from anything logical. In 2011 they killed 21,822 of which 6,813 were cats. This year's funding (2012) is about $9.3 million wasted dollars. The sad thing is that we could be no-kill in about a year, maybe 2 at the most with the proper advertising and expenditure of funds.
Right now TNR is allowed but it is not funded by the City. Right now we have a grant from Best Friends for free and low cost spay/neuter, but only in certain zip codes. What would be needed is about a dozen mobile clinics to be circulating in all the neighborhoods at all times, a mass teaching effort to have people trap and bring feral cats and owned dogs to the clinic for FREE spay and neuter operations. An ordinance requiring apartment building owners and duplex owners to write into the leases of the tenants a spay/neuter clause that no one gets to rent an apartment if their pet is not spayed/neutered and proof shown to the manager/owner. A whole lot of stray cats and dogs come from tenants who abandon their pets when they move to another apartment or whose pets go outside and get lost and pregnant. If they abandon a spayed/neutered pet, that's only one animal put out. If the animal isn't fixed, it's dozens of future animals born from that one animal. This is a REAL problem and leads management to call Animal Control to clean up the mess and kill the animals. Meanwhile feeders are trying to do TNR under the radar because management hasn't gotten educated that TNR actually helps the problem not increases it. Since most people work outside of their home or during set hours of day, it would make more sense to have the free and low cost clinics open during the evening to late evening - from 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM for intake with operations done during the morning and animal pick up in the next evening, same hours as intake, and regular hours on weekends, Saturday and Sunday during the day. At least something more logical than rushing around at 6:00 AM to get the cat to the clinic, the kids to school or daycare and the adult to work. Then reversing it to pick up the kid at daycare or school, and the adult to the clinic before it closes to get the cat. The technology is available but the intelligence and sense to use it seems to be lacking in people we put in positions of authority. Shelters have become big business. Even prisons are becoming big business. So the fact that more and more illogical laws are passed putting people behind bars doesn't bother our government because it's "good for business". Having too many kids is big business because it sells more diapers, more toys, more kids clothes, more cribs, etc.. Even being sick is big business so hospitals are allowed to raise rates, more tests than are needed are done. More animals are killed testing new drugs that could be tested in half the time using upgraded technology. Sigh. I need to get off this Soap Box and go clean the litter boxes. Spay and Neuter your cats and dogs and your weird relatives and nasty neighbors too! ________________________________ From: Kathryn Hargreaves <khargrea...@gmail.com> To: felvtalk@felineleukemia.org Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2012 10:13 AM Subject: Re: [Felvtalk] "No-kill" animal shelter killing FeLV+ cat Yes, per Gavin Nicols' comment on http://www.no-killnews.com/?p=3935 San Antonio is nowhere near No Kill (90%+), even if they considered FIV+/Felv+ cats healthy, which you indicate they don't: ``For 2012 Fiscal Year to Date, the healthy and treatable dogs and cats make up 76% of total intake (in 2011, healthy and treatable was 66% of total intake).'' This is an issue that needs to be discussed in the No Kill community.
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