Doing the Right Thing for Pets and People

I can’t use the word in the newspaper, but it’s a noun meaning something like guts, a colloquialism, plural--usually two. I want to congratulate the Los Angeles City Council for having enough of them to do the right thing.

The right thing this week was voting for the toughest spay and neuter law in the nation. However varied the council members’ motives--concern about stray packs of dogs running dangerously amok in the streets, about thousands of pets put to death in crowded shelters, about overbred pets and ill-bred owners--together they mustered 10 votes out of 13, enough for final approval next week.

If Alan Greenspan saw these kinds of price hikes nationwide, he’d be hiking interest rates as high as Tiny Tim’s falsetto:

License fees for unsterilized dogs would rise from $30 to $100. Owners of sterilized dogs would still pay only $10. The difference in one year’s license fee should be enough to get the pet sterilized, and animal groups have pledged $300,000 in “sterilization scholarships” for the poor. Unsterilized cats must be indoors or risk a $500 fine. And a $100 breeder’s license will be required of anyone whose pet has a litter.

The council’s rare and laudable show of gumption sets the bar a little higher for its animal services commission a few blocks away.

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On Monday morning, the commission will hear its director, Dan Knapp, detail the state of the shelters. If he wanted, Knapp could make a one-word speech: deplorable.

Three and four dogs are kept in cages meant for one. The city hasn’t found a replacement for its one full-time vet. Strays may have a better chance of survival out on city streets than inside the low-adoption, high-kill-rate shelters.

Knapp came here in 1998 to change a department whose reputation stank as high as the droppings hosed out of the animal cages. An ordained minister and a well-regarded reformer from Sonoma County, he has brought some order and some hope to shelters.

The commission is meeting this Monday because of what it heard last Monday: allegations of animal cruelty committed by workers in the South-Central shelter, the city’s most overcrowded.

Yet two hours before Monday’s hearing begins, about a third of the animal control staff at the South-Central shelter will report to a new workplace, the North Central animal shelter, and three North Central shelter workers will head to South-Central.

Despite the coincidental timing, Knapp says the transfer was planned well before the allegations were made. North Central shelter has done wonders of late, and South-Central, says Knapp, “could use some of the good that’s been brought to North Central.”

As to the charges, which are being investigated, “I’m not saying there was animal abuse, but I can say that yes, at our shelters, our employees have combat fatigue. This is a very, very difficult place to work.” But “we don’t believe in transferring problems.”

That’s good, because there’s a cautionary tale from the LAPD and the LAUSD.

The LAUSD has been waltzing the “dance of the lemons,” a phrase Mayor Richard Riordan uses to describe how substandard school principals don’t get busted in rank or fired, but merely transferred from school to unwary school.

And over at the LAPD, there’s something called “freeway therapy,” a kind of attitude adjustment for officers who get out of line. They get transferred to the division farthest from their homes, giving them plenty of commute time to contemplate their sins.

As protecting lemon principals does nothing to help students, as “freeway therapy” may not be good for either cop or citizens, any shell game that moves problems around instead of confronting them may be good in-house politics but very bad public policy.

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Before the changes at North Central, I was dropping off newspapers for the cages when I saw a man, his son and their female pit bull. He wanted her fixed under the city’s low-cost spaying certificate.

The woman at the counter was abrupt. We don’t do that anymore, she said--even though a sign in the window advertised it.

But the vet costs too much, he protested. She shrugged.

Well, I was steamed. Here was a man trying to do the right thing, and in front of his boy, The City--for this woman was the city to him--gave him the brushoff.

I asked what he could pay, what the vet charged, and made out a check to his vet for the difference. It only made a dent in my checkbook, not in the city’s problem.

Spring is puppy and kitten season. The city and its commission can try to make this season the last where the miracle of birth is swiftly followed by the spectacle of death.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].