You can hear the barking a block away, desperate cries of every pitch, hundreds of dogs calling out for help. Even though she's been to the shelter countless times, Whitney Smith has never gotten used to it. Her mouth goes dry when she pulls into the parking lot. She can feel the animals trembling, alone and abandoned, their days numbered.
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Animal rescuer Whitney Smith: Los Angeles
is "an efficient killer."
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Smith is a "rescuer," part of an almost messianic subculture devoted to saving every animal that roams the streets. Week after week, she stalks the halls of shelters, feeds feral cats at 1 a.m. and sends flurries of emails with subject lines like "URGENT ... GOLDEN RETRIEVER A544665 AT DEVORE!!! ... NEGLECTED, BADLY ABUSED, EMACIATED!! MUST EXIT TODAY!! ... RESCUE ONLY!! PLEASE HELP HIM" and "They killed DOLLY PARTON — DOWNEY SHELTER."
"It's very brutal to be in the rescue milieu," she says. "You're constantly looking at the peril of these animals that deserve a home. You discuss death every day."
The Los Angeles Animal Services department has a budget of about $20 million and just over 300 employees, and runs six animal shelters, which take in more than 50,000 dogs and cats a year. Of those, more 20,000 are killed — or, as many say, euthanized or put to sleep.
One might think that, with such grim figures (it's worse at L.A. County shelters), the city would take all the help it can get. But Animal Services, under the leadership of general manager Brenda Barnette, hired two years ago from Seattle Humane Society, has managed to alienate a number of volunteers and rescuers.
"From the beginning, the people engaged in animal issues were deeply divided on Brenda," says Ron Kaye, former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, who as a blogger at ronkayela.com has kept a watch on Animal Services. "She won over some segments — the classier segments."
It didn't help that she had some experience breeding dogs for show as a hobby, which many rescuers equate to, at best, being a Nazi sympathizer. Also, many activists found her cold and dismissive.
"She doesn't exactly warm you up and make you want to spend time with her," says Laura Beth Heisen, former commissioner of the board of L.A. Animal Services . "She's driven volunteers away."
Official "volunteers" work with specific shelters, and are generally calmer than "rescuers," who tend to be older, single white women with boundless energy — and often uneasy relations with paid staff.
"I think she's doing the best she can," says Cheri Shankar, a donor and activist, who argues, with plenty of facts behind her, that zealous rescuers have hated every general manager the department's ever had, from Dan Knapp to Jerry Greenwalt to Ed Boks. "If St. Francis of Assisi came to Los Angeles to run the shelter, rescuers would complain about him."
Barnette, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and a few city councilmen would like L.A. to go "no-kill," an impossible-sounding goal like "zero waste" and other dreams of the often poorly managed city government.
No-kill means killing 15 percent or so of animals. But Los Angeles euthanizes nearly 40 percent of the strays and lost pets at its shelters, which is up a few percentage points from fiscal year 2009-10. Low-kill San Francisco and Seattle destroy only 20 percent of impounded dogs and cats.
Until lately, shelters had one staffer dedicated to "volunteer outreach" and another to "rescuer outreach," under its program New Hope. Today, there's just one volunteer coordinator for all six shelters. Rescuer outreach was added to duties performed by each shelter supervisor.
"We're at a time where we really need bodies taking care of our animals, and we just don't have staff," Barnette says.
Hundreds of dogs sit in unheated cages near their own feces, with not enough staff members to hose down the cells more than once or twice a day, much less walk the animals. Other dogs sit shivering — it can take a while for the limited staff or volunteers to distribute blankets.
Which makes Barnette's latest dual proposal — designed by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and set for a December vote by the political appointees on the city's Board of Animal Services Commissioners — puzzling.
One plan, called SAFER, would have city employees conduct a six-minute videotaped screen test — the city calls it a "behavioral assessment" — in an attempt to determine which dogs have "the probability of future aggression," according to the ASPCA's website. Does the dog guard his food? Attack other animals? Bite a hand that comes from behind?
Critics call this "temperament testing" — a way to kill dogs right off the bat, and a possible way to juke the city's worsening euthanasia stats by marking the dogs that fail their screen test as "unadoptable" and removing them from the pool, making it seem as if Animal Services is killing fewer dogs that deserve a chance.
Barnette denies this. "It's not a tool used to determine what dog is put down," she says. "It's a tool to help place a dog better."
Riverside County Animal Control, whose three shelters receive about 50,000 animals a year, used SAFER tests for a time.
