"In a municipal shelter like ours, it identifies which animals are dangerous," says Jackie Schart, an animal behaviorist at Riverside. But, as is obvious to most, "It's not pass or fail. There's a whole category of modifiable behavior."
Schart says overly aggressive animals are put down — and would be anyway. Dogs showing signs of aggression were designated for rescuers only, who could train them before trying to get them adopted.
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Animal rescuer Whitney Smith: Los Angeles
is "an efficient killer."
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Unfortunately, it took 10 full-time Riverside County employees to rate the dogs, and nine were reassigned or cut due to budget deficits. Schart is the only one left.
The second program proposed by ASPCA and Barnette, Meet Your Match, gives dogs and cats more detailed personality tests, resulting in labels like "Go-Getter" for a hyperactive dog, and "Private Investigator" for cats that do little more than stare at you. Riverside County implemented Meet Your Match only for cats, which Schart says was successful at matching cats and owners. It was dropped due to budget cuts.
The question Los Angeles volunteers are asking now is, if Animal Services had to severely cut back the staff for New Hope, how will it pay the city workers to conduct the SAFER screen test and the personality-profiling Meet Your Match?
Dr. Emily Wells, who developed both programs, says ASPCA is only proposing a pilot program, at one L.A. shelter, and plans to pay for one staff position to run it.
But Heisen says dismissively, "It's simply out of place in a crowded, high-volume shelter. If they don't get adopted soon, they're dead anyway. It is complete pseudo-science."
Weiss says the programs have been found to increase adoptions and decrease return rates at humane societies in Wichita, Kan., and Portland, Maine. But "There's so much passion and energy around saving lives," she says. "We almost need a behavior assessment for all those folks working in L.A., so we can come together and collaborate more."
Even if the dual program were somehow implemented and helped boost adoptions, it's unlikely to make much more than a dent in the population of doomed Los Angeles cats and dogs put to death — by lethal injection.
"People say to me, 'They kill puppies?'" says rescuer Smith. "All day long. Every day. It's, like, the biggest kept secret. We are efficient killers. Do you think SAFER's gonna change the numbers?"
To reduce the killing, L.A. would have to persuade city residents to spay and neuter to prevent litters of animals. That means Animal Services — and by extension the City Council and Villaraigosa, who have cut its budget — would have to pay to better publicize and enforce a mandatory city spay-and-neuter law that's widely ignored.
"You can't adopt your way out of the problem," says Shawn Simons, who runs Kitty Bungalow Charm School for Wayward Cats, a nonprofit that "socializes" feral cats.
By failing to neuter their favorite animals, L.A. residents have created an astonishing surplus of Chihuahuas and pit bulls, the latter of which are bred in some neighborhoods for illegal dog-fighting.
"For me, Animal Services is symbolic of the city's inability to find the political will to solve problems," Ron Kaye says. "It's just symptomatic of the fundamental breakdown in how we enforce laws."
