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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: November 2006

The Wildlife Program that might make Milwaukee famous

 

MILWAUKEE--The Wisconsin Humane Society handles 5,000 wild animals of as many as 145 species per year, among total intake of about 18,000 animals. Almost as much cage space houses recuperating wild creatures as houses dogs and cats.

Present trends indicate that Wisconsin Humane will within another few years receive more wild animals than either dogs or cats--indicative of the success of local initiatives to reduce dog and cat overpopulation.

Among major U.S. humane societies, only the Progressive Animal Welfare Society, of Lynnwood, Washington, in the greater Seattle area, appears to have as rapidly transitioned into addressing the issues that will affect the most animals-- and people--in a post-pet overpopulation environment, in which relatively few dogs and cats are either at large or killed for reasons other than incurable illness, injury, or dangerous behavior.

PAWS now handles about 4,500 wild animals of 170 species, compared with about 4,000 dogs and cats, but most of the PAWS wildlife workload was acquired through a 1999 merger with Olympic Wildlife Rescue, which was already among the largest wildlife rehabilitation centers in the world. Unlike the Wisconsin Humane program, which is entirely on the same premises as the dog-and-cat facilities, the PAWS wildlife program works from both a rescue center in Lynnwood and the former Olympic Wildlife Rescue headquarters in McCleary, on the Olympic Peninsula.

 


Despite the size and groundbreaking aspect of the Wisconsin Humane wildlife program, wildlife received barely a mention in the announcement when 12-year Wisconsin Humane executive director Victoria Wellens in October 2006 received the American Humane Lifetime Achievement Award. This could be interpreted as either reflecting the low profile of wildlife work within most humane societies, or as indicative of the magnitude of Wellens' contributions to dog and cat work.

Recently elected first president of the newly formed National Federation of Humane Societies, Wellens may have the shortest tenure in animal work of any Lifetime Achievement Award winner, but her leadership ability was evident almost immediately.

Wellens arrived at Wisconsin Humane just as the San Francisco SPCA created a furor by introducing the Adoption Pact, an agreement with the San Francisco Department of Animal Care & Control that guarantees a home to any healthy and non-vicious dog or cat. The Adoption Pact culminated a five-year phase-out of San Francisco SPCA involvement in animal control, while the DACC was created, followed by five years of aggressively escalating dog and cat sterilization.

Despite the success of the San Francisco experiment, other big-city humane societies were hesitant to try to emulate it. The American SPCA dropped the New York City animal control contract in 1994, but no other major humane societies had done so before Wellens led Wisconsin Humane in a disengagement from animal control that made the San Francisco and New York disengagements look comparatively simple.

Unlike the San Francisco SPCA and the American SPCA, which each had only one municipal animal control contract to turn over to a newly established city agency, the Wisconsin Humane Society had contracts with 19 different municipalities. For a time they appeared inclined to go in as many as 19 separate directions, but in 1996 the municipalities formed the Milwaukee Area Domestic Animal Control Commission.

 


Both MADACC and Wisconsin Humane built new shelters, opened in August and December 1999, respectively. The MADACC shelter, at just under 22,000 square feet, is a traditional animal control facility, operating in more-or-less the traditional manner--although the workload is already markedly reduced.

The Wisconsin Humane shelter, at 40,000 square feet, was among the first big-city shelters designed to resemble shopping mails rather than traditional kennels--or "animal jails," as visitors often perceive them. Critics complained at first that Wisconsin Humane was purportedly leaving the majority of stray and abandoned animals to be housed briefly and then killed in relatively cramped surroundings, while giving the animals with the best adoption prospects relative luxury. That criticism was short-lived, as adoptions rose and shelter killing fell.

The Wisconsin Humane shelter debuted about a year after the San Francisco SPCA unveiled Maddies' Adoption Center, a year before the opening of the present Oregon Humane Society shelter and others that pioneered the "mall" concept. The main entrance literally resembles a shopping mall. Major departments are accessed through "storefront" doorways. Now emulated by new shelters worldwide, the mall atmosphere was then so unique that American SPCA vice president of national outreach Julie Morris called it, "A stunning example of the cutting edge in animal sheltering," devoting an entire page of ASPCA Animal Watch to it.

The escalated Wisconsin Humane emphasis on sterilization helped to cut the numbers of animals killed in greater Milwaukee area shelters from 20.0 per 1,000 human residents in 1995 to 10.5 in 1999, and only 4.1 a year later, in the initial year of a five-year contract that gave Wisconsin Humane the first right of refusal on any animal deemed adoptable by the MADACC staff. During the five-year contract, Wisconsin Humane accepted about half of the animals offered by MADACC, keeping the Milwaukee area rate of shelter killing between 4.7 in 2001 and the low of 4.1, reached again in 2003.

However, after Wellens briefly experimented with adopting out pit bull terriers and Rottweilers who passed behavioral screening, dangerous incidents involving some of the dogs persuaded her to suspend pit bull and Rottweiler adoptions. Because 74% of the dogs coming to MADACC in recent years are pit bulls and Rottweilers, MADACC executive director Len Selkurt chose not to renew the exclusive agreement in 2005. The shelter killing rate rose to a six-year high of 4.8 per 1,000 humans.

Despite the pit bull and Rottweiler abundance, dog and cat sterilization has markedly reduced the numbers of dogs and cats found at large in Milwaukee and the surrounding suburbs. Wildlife has taken advantage of the growing opportunity to slip through yards and bed down under bushes or in crawl spaces without being barked at. Native predators now compete with feral cats for prey--and sometimes eat the cats, too, contributing to the reduction of the cat population. The presence of urban coyotes in Milwaukee became recognized in 2004, when three were hit by cars, two were trapped, and a hue-and-cry broke out over coyotes eating pet cats. Osprey nested in Milwaukee County for the first time on record in 2005. Bald eagles nested in Milwaukee County in 2006 for the first time since 1875.

The "Tweety & Sylvester" argument over the role and impact of feral and free-roaming cats in urban ecosystem is still hot in Wisconsin, a decade after University of Wisconsin at Madison wildlife biology professor Stanley A. Temple produced an estimate that cats kill about 39 million birds per year in Wisconsin alone.

Often debunked, but still amplified by birders' web sites, the Temple claim would have it that the Wisconsin cat toll on birds is nearly 40% of the national total projected in 2003 by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Migratory Bird Management Office biologist Albert Manville.

The Wisconsin Humane web site includes a guesstimate that there are 190,000 feral cats in Milwaukee. Applying four different approaches to estimating feral cat numbers, based on food availability and animal control trends, ANIMAL PEOPLE found the numbers converging on a probable peak feral cat population for the Milwaukee area at between 62,000 and 70,000, and indicating a summer high of 21,000 to 30,000 in recent years.

Wellens is seeking to amend a Milwaukee ordinance that inhibits use of neuter/return by subjecting people who feed or release cats to fines. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Humane feral cat program has sterilized 850 feral cats in the past five years, and even that relatively small number appears to have been enough to keep MADACC cat intake stable at just over 7,200 per year, suggesting that even modest expansion of neuter/return could bring a steep decrease.

Wellens and Wisconsin Humane had their most visible role in bridging concern for wildlife and concern for cats in April 2005, when the 12,031 attendees at the annual state-wide caucuses of the Wisconsin Conservation Congress voted 57% to 43% in favor of a proposal to allow hunters to shoot feral cats. But the vote split along regional lines. Fifty-one caucuses mostly in the sparsely populated northern and western parts of Wisconsin favored shooting cats. Twenty caucuses in the densely populated Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, and Green Bay areas rejected cat-shooting. Governor Jim Doyle made clear the next day that no authorization to hunt cats would get past his veto.

Wisconsin Humane demonstrably does as much bird rehabilitation--or more-- than anyone else in the state.

One currently prominent Wisconsin Humane campaign, Wisconsin Night Guard-ians for Songbirds, WINGS for short, urges owners of high-rise buildings to turn off their lights rather than lure migrating birds into window collisions. The Wisconsin Humane web site promoted WIINGS in fall 2006 beside announcements for National Feral Cat Day.

"Having wildlife advocacy and dog and cat advocacy under one roof has really helped us," Wellens emphasizes, because when a public issue presents a potential conflict among the interests of different species, the department heads can be quickly meet to develop a mutually acceptable response. From long experience at working together, the Wisconsin Humane department heads have developed a level of mutual understanding and trust rarely seen between cat and bird advocacy group leaders.

Wellens is personally credited by staff with developing a cooperative atmosphere that was markedly lacking before her time, when disputes between factions within the Wisconsin Humane board and shelter staff frequently spilled into news media.

Wellens came to Wisconsin Humane with a background in child welfare work that also helped her to create a uniquely child-friendly atmosphere in the Wisconsin Humane shelter. There are, for example, no sharp corners on any of the shelter furniture. All of the educational materials are developed in-house, and are designed to school library standards.

But observers believe Wellens' ability to resolve disputes was the key skill she brought to the job. Although most of the key personnel remained in their positions, infighting and factionalism soon disappeared--and so did friction with other charities.

Wellens credits her predecessor, Leon Nelson, with introducing the Wisconsin Humane wildlife program circa 1983. Wellens credits the growth and development of the program to husband-and-wife team of Scott and Cheryl Diehl. Cheryl Diehl was among the founding staff. Scott Diehl joined the team a year later. "Integrating our wildlife department into our mission is key to our service delivery," Wellens told ANIMAL PEOPLE. "When people have conflicts with wild animals in their yards, and call the humane society for help, they need expert advice, not just 'That's nature' or 'call an exterminator.'"
Demonstrating "be kind to animals," Wellens believes, requires having wildlife staff who can do hands-on rescue as required, including in emergency situations for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Wellens points out that, for example, Wisconsin Humane personnel are experienced at capturing animals inside buildings. When a deer bounds through a window, the deer is leaving DNR territory, where a fractious animal might be shot, and entering the bailiwick of humane officers.

The advice that Wisconsin Humane dispenses to citizen callers often differs little, if at all, from the advice offered by nature centers, but the pitch is different because it is presented as part of being kind to animals, instead of as the perspective of wildlife managers, acculturated to promoting hunting, fishing, and trapping, and conservationists, whose chief concern is preserving native biodiversity rather than preventing suffering.

The unspoken message conveyed by humane societies that do not offer wildlife help may be that wild animals are beyond humane concern, Wellens worries, seeking to set a different example. Wildlife may be hunted, trapped, poisoned, or harassed in many ways that would be illegal if done to dogs and cats, and humane societies that refer callers to wildlife agencies may be inadvertently indicating that they think this is acceptable.

"We consider public education that helps to prevent the need for wildlife rehabilitation to be the most important of our goals and most critical part of our mission," Scott Diehl told ANIMAL PEOPLE.

A call to Wisconsin Humane, for example, or visit to the Wisconsin Humane web site, <www.wihumane.org>, will provide quick access to an around-the-clock tip line "to humanely resolve most kinds of wildlife/human conflict to everyone's satisfaction," Diehl said. The tips are just a button click away from tips on coping with typical dog and cat behavioral problems.

Scott Diehl is also proud of the cooperative relationhips developed between Wisconsin Humane and other southern Wisconsin wildlife rehabilitation centers. Among their collaborative activities, Diehl mentioned relocating orphaned animals among the different centers to ensure that the orphans are raised with their own kind.

Unlike dog and cat programs, which are self-funded, in part with revenue from adoptions and other services provided to pets, the Wisconsin Humane wildlife program has few funding sources of its own. Subsidized by the dog and cat programs, the wildlife work consumes about 15% of the total program expense of the organization.

Wellens and Diehl both point out that raising public awareness to create a funding stream for wildlife rehabilitation and education is probably the biggest challenge they face, and will be an even bigger challenge for other human societies, much less experienced, as they inevitably find themselves drawn more into handling urban wildlife.

But Wellens sounds confident in pointing out that everything the humane cause has ever done required developing public awareness of a new approach to solving problems. Helping the public learn to live peacefully and mutually respectfully with wildlife, she believes, will be no more than just the natural next phase of growing into the "be kind to animals" mission. --Merritt Clifton