KHTS Radio Santa Clarita Radio – Santa Clarita News
The Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control recently adopted a “socially conscious” animal sheltering strategy, prompting the Board of Supervisors to request updates over the next few months, officials said Tuesday.
In a motion by 5th District Supervisor Kathryn Barger, the Board of Supervisors approved a directive to the Department of Animal Care and Control (DACC) to report back in 90 days regarding the new operating practices, according to the agenda for the Aug. 6 meeting.
DACC officials began practicing socially conscious animal sheltering as a “responsible and humane philosophy” in response to reported negative consequences of “no-kill” operating practices, according to Barger’s Office.
“DACC is proud to stand with these forward-thinking, responsible and compassionate organizations and will continue to provide innovative solutions to making our communities safer and more humane for animals and residents,” said DACC Director Marcia Mayeda.
In order to meet an artificially-established live release rate of animals, many no-kill practices require agencies to refuse admission to animals they cannot offer for adoption, which denies animals a safe haven and overcrowds animal shelters, according to the DACC.
This can result in disease outbreaks and dangerous animals being adopted into the community in order to meet the statistical live release goals, DACC officials said.
“Los Angeles County has made it a top goal to ensure every unwanted or homeless pet has a safe place to go for shelter and care. (County) animal care centers will not turn away animals in need of assistance,” said a statement from Barger’s office.
This adopted strategy is an acclaimed best practice in animal welfare and is being implemented by many animal welfare organizations and animal welfare industry associations across the nation, according to officials.
For more information about socially conscious animal sheltering, visit here.
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“Socially-conscious” sheltering is just the latest in a series of attempts by neglectful, fossilized shelter bureaucrats to discredit the commonsense programs of the No Kill sheltering movement.
LA County (LCACC) is one of the most regressive animal control systems in the state of California. And in a clearly self-serving effort to cover up their reported neglect, their rampant waste of taxpayers’ money, and their continued reliance on euthanasia as a primary means of addressing animal homelessness, they’ve changed the name of the euthanasia-centered paradigm they operate in, while changing none of its inhumane practices.
This is nothing more than an attempt to rebrand euthanasia-centered sheltering to make it sound like they’re being ethical, when what they’re really doing is creating a protected space for county bureaucrats to continue killing healthy and treatable animals. LA County Animal Care and Control killed 34% of animals in their care last fiscal year – nearly 20,000 animals. That’s due to mismanagement and a resistance to learning new ways. LA deserves better.
If ever there was a way to confuse the general public and uninformed animal advocates, this is it. The fact that this has been embraced by Marcia Mayeda, who runs LA County Animal Services, and is endorsed by PETA, should tell you everything you need to know about this movement. It is designed as an attempt to whitewash shelter killing, and disempower No Kill. A superficial overview of its central tenets might make it sound like its ideology is founded in animal rights, but don’t be fooled. There are already many attempting to conflate this with life-saving, but it is quite the opposite, and in fact merely represents another mechanism to guise killing in the name of “compassion”. It is the ultimate Trojan horse, so to speak, and let’s hope it doesn’t detract from what’s really at stake here: animals’ lives.
What exactly is Socially Conscious Animal Sheltering? Where did the Board of Supervisors get their data to support the motion that they passed? Where is the research? I’d like some light shed on how this motion came about as there are many blatant mistruths contained in it.
It is not the No Kill policies and practices that have failed. TRUTH: 500 cities and towns in our country are successfully practicing No-Kill sheltering techniques and have a save rate of at least 90%, sometimes 99%.
No Kill does not mean closed shelters. TRUTH: Open admission sheltering is not humane sheltering when the end result is killing. At one open admission No Kill shelter, the average length of stay was 8 days.
Any shelter can call themselves a No Kill shelter. Some, like a shelter in Las Vegas claiming to be No Kill, was closed down for inhumane treatment.
TRUTH: The shelter’s director failed to implement life-saving, progressive protocols. No Kill did not fail. The Board of Directors failed to ensure No Kill practices were in place and being followed.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors are wrong.
“By denigrating the movement to end shelter killing as akin to warehousing and abuse, and by ignoring the protocols of shelters which have truly achieved No Kill and are clean, well-run and successful, these naysayers embrace a nation of shelters grounded in killing – a defeatist mentality, inherently unethical and antithetical to animal welfare.”
From Nathan Winograd’s “Redemption” (http://www.nokilladvocacycenter.org/uploads/4/8/6/2/48624081/filmcomp.pdf)
Everyone committed to humanely sheltering animals rather than warehousing them, or killing them, including each and every member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and their staff, must watch this:
https://youtu.be/z-CwFaUsuTg?fbclid=IwAR3MKYWbBU8xOh92zEcoUm4coKDB5jM0WNKcyO3WD6jrvh5aJYQdMZDaW3Y
This is the truth. These programs work. That cannot be denied by misleading “facts” wrapped up in a short-sighted motion that clearly misrepresents what No Kill Sheltering is and what No Kill sheltering can do.