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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: March 2007

Failure to isolate & vaccinate incoming animals shuts shelter

LAS VEGAS--A six-member Humane Society of the U.S. shelter evaluation team in mid-February 2007 joined Lied Animal Shelter staff in euthanizing more than 1,000 of the 1,800 animals in custody.
About 150 of the animals were ill, and 850 were believed to have been exposed to the illnesses, with a high likelihood of becoming infected.

"It has been a mess, but we are almost out of the emergency phase. Adoptions will open again soon," Animal Foundation of Nevada president Janie Greenspun Gale told ANIMAL PEOPLE on February 19. Gale promised to identify a newly hired executive director for the shelter "soon."

The Animal Foundation operates the Lied Animal Shelter, which houses animals for the city of Las Vegas, Clark County, and North Las Vegas.

The evaluation team, headed by HSUS director of animal sheltering Kim Intino, found both parvovirus and distemper among the holding kennels for incoming dogs, and discovered panleukopenia among the incoming cats.

University of California at Davis shelter medicine program chief Kate Hurley, who was one of two veterinarians on the HSUS inspection team, also identified a bacterial infection that caused a fatal hemorrhagic pneumonia. This "had not been documented in a shelter before," Hurley told Steve Friess of The New York Times. "There was some uncertainty of how to best manage the bacterial infection and what best to do," Hurley said. "We were in new territory, and found it in both cats and dogs."
As well as participating in the Lied Animal Shelter evaluation, Hurley was in Las Vegas to present a daylong seminar on shelter disease outbreaks at the Western Veterinary Conference.

"Although shelter officials were not aware of problems," wrote Mike Kalil of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "the HSUS team noticed dogs and cats suffering from serious respiratory and intestinal diseases shortly after it arrived."

"We didn't realize this was happening," affirmed Lied Animal Shelter manager Diane Orgill.

"Vets found a much lower rate of disease in the approximately 800 dogs and cats in Lied's adoption park," Kalil reported. "Infected animals were concentrated in the shelter's intake area, where at any time about 1,000 animals typically spend three to 10 days," awaiting reclaim, sterilization surgery, or euthanasia, based on veterinary and behavioral assessment.

Orgill acknowledged that overcrowding "undoubtedly hastened the spread of disease," Kalil wrote.

"The number of animals we have increases the chances of this happening," Orgill said.

Originally handling only Las Vegas animals, the Lied Animal Shelter opened in February 2001. The Lied management almost immediately came under intensive criticism for purportedly killing incoming animals too quickly, after an incident in which a child's dog was euthanized by accident.

The shelter was expanded two years later to also hold the Clark County animals.

Las Vegas and Clark County animal control were handled for many years before 1995 by Dewey Animal Care, a for-profit veterinary contractor that still serves some Las Vegas suburbs. Dewey killed most incoming animals soon after arrival, as did most U.S. animal control shelters.

Isolation overlooked

As there was no anticipation that many animals would be in longterm care, and therefore at risk of catching diseases from constant exposure to newcomers, shelters built before recent years usually did not incorporate the extensive isolation and quarantine facilities that are now standard in shelter planning.

Until under 15 years ago, the most common reason for quarantining shelter animals was to see if a dog who had bitten someone might be rabid. The quarantine time in such a case was typically two weeks, but shelter designers rarely anticipated that a shelter would have more than a few dogs in quarantine at any given time.

Quarantining cats did not become a routine consideration until ambitions of no-kill sheltering spread in the mid-1990s. Recognition gradually followed that keeping healthy cats in large numbers requires quarantining new arrivals to avoid the spread of upper respiratory infections of all sorts, to which cats are much more susceptible than dogs.

The Animal Foundation of Nevada, founded by Mary Herro to perform high-volume, low-cost dog and cat sterilization, debuted in 1988 in a former shelter building owned by the city of Las Vegas, predating the Dewey contract. The much-emulated clinic has sterilized more than 200,000 dogs and cats.

The Animal Foundation took over first the Las Vegas shelter contract and then the Clark County contract at request of elected officials, Herro told ANIMAL PEOPLE. Both jobs proved bigger than was anticipated.

Seeking a successor and trying to retire for several years, Herro amid the 2001 controversy turned the Animal Foundation over to Gale, whose family long owned the Las Vegas Sun. The rival Review-Journal was usually first to expose issues involving the Animal Foundation, often raised by other humane organizations.

The Sun is now published as a Review-Journal insert--but while friction between competing news media affecting Animal Foundation coverage may have diminished, other local humane organizations are not less critical.

"Sheltering is all about disease control," Las Vegas Valley Humane Society president Karen Layne reminded Friesse, of the New York Times. According to Friesse, Layne alleged that "Gale and other shelter officials simply thought disease was a normal part of running a shelter."

"This is unforgivable in light of the fact that it was absolutely preventable," Heaven Can Wait Sanctuary legal counsel Holly Stoberski told Associated Press. "They were not properly vaccinating the dogs and cats in a timely manner."

"No-kill" issue

Gale "tearfully faced critics at a hastily called public meeting," Friesse wrote, and acknowledged that the Lied Animal Shelter animal intake policies had been misguided. "Gale said her organization had been operating the shelter like a rescue operation and had not been euthanizing enough animals to keep the space safe and sanitary for the adoptable ones," Friesse summarized.

"Our policies were written to save every animal we possibly could," Gale told Friesse.

"Our problems became unmanageable," Gale told ANIMAL PEOPLE, "when we began getting 200 or more animals every day. We scrambled for space, even though we built a shelter three times larger than the new one we built five years ago, but still the issue of space and [finding enough] vets to do [both] high-volume spay/neuter [and shelter disease control] were our Waterloo."

The central conflict between public expectations and what the Animal Foundation could do had escalated for years.

Explained Gale to ANIMAL PEOPLE in a September 2002 e-mail, "The major criticism we encounter is that early on, based on the 'no-kill city' definition we understood from publications such as yours, we said we wanted to make Las Vegas a no-kill city, with our new [adoption] shelter as the beginning of the process. Now all the other groups throw that at us, saying we are not no-kill, and we are perpetrating a fraud on the community."

ANIMAL PEOPLE reminded Gale in response that, "The now-defunct No-Kill Directory and all literature for the No-Kill Conference series, 1995-2001, always carried on page one the phrase, 'Implicit to the No-Kill philosophy is the reality of exceptional situations in which euthanasia is the most humane alternative available.' Those exceptional situations include irrecoverable illness or injury, dangerous behavior, and/or the need to decapitate an animal who has bitten someone, in order to perform rabies testing."

ANIMAL PEOPLE also warned Gale that the humane society mission of trying to save every animal, limited only by donor generosity, is inherently incompatible with the animal control mandate of protecting the public, limited by what taxpayers are collectively willing to support. Guiding both the Lied Animal Shelter and the Animal Foundation successfully, ANIMAL PEOPLE advised, would require building a firewall between their respective roles, to avoid having animal control issues jeopardize humane objectives.

Shorter holding time

Suspending most routine shelter operations for a week to cope with the emergency, the Lied Animal Shelter reopened with a pledge to hold animals deemed unadoptable for only 72 hours on the chance that they might be reclaimed.

"We are not abandoning our principles," Gale emphasized. "We are just being more vigilant in identifying unadoptable animals and letting go of them earlier. The others will have 120 days to find homes, and rescues are always welcome."

Animal Foundation spokesperson Mark Fierro said the Lied Animal Shelter would also begin vaccinating all incoming animals against the most common serious shelter diseases, as recommended by HSUS, and already practiced by progressive shelters worldwide, including several that ANIMAL PEOPLE recently visited in India.

The Lied Animal Shelter either adopted or returned to homes 12,079 dogs and 6,279 cats in 2006, killing 7,065 dogs and 16,492 cats. The Las Vegas area rate of shelter killing was approximately 12.3 dogs and cats per 1,000 people in 2006, slightly below the U.S. average of 14.8, and down by about a third since the Animal Foundation took the Las Vegas animal control contract.

But the Lied Animal Shelter also lost 3,652 animals, including 1,105 dogs and 2,280 cats, to illness and other causes of death besides lethal injection.

Shelter losses to "illness and other" are normally a negligible percentage of intake. For example, all shelters in the state of Virginia combined lost just 697 dogs and 1,455 cats to "illness and other" in 2006, out of 96,875 dogs and 86,953 cats handled.

Other shelters hit

However, the Lied Animal Shelter disease outbreaks were scarcely unprecedented--just unusual because of how large they were and how long they apparently festered.

The Humane Society of Indianapolis in January 2007 stopped accepting kittens for two weeks after receiving nine cats who were suffering from feline panleukopenia.

Indianapolis Animal Care & Control meanwhile was reportedly overwhelmed when just one individual surrendered 60 cats who had symptoms of upper respiratory illnesses.

The Hillsborough County Department of Animal Services, in St. Petersburg, Florida, suspended adoptions in October 2006 after six dogs developed symptoms of canine distemper. Two dogs died, two were euthanized, and two were treated. All 305 dogs at the shelter were vaccinated against distemper.

The Cheyenne Animal Shelter reopened in early May 2006 after euthanizing 42 dogs due to canine influenza and closing for a month of cleaning and reorganizing procedures. Shelter director Alan Cohen instituted a four-day quarantine before incoming dogs are allowed to mingle with the general population.

Despite the quarantine and other new precautions, 19 dogs at the shelter developed canine influenza in early February 2007, forcing the shelter to close until March 2.

None of the sick dogs will be euthanized this time, Cohen told Associated Press.

"One of the biggest differences this time is that everyone's knowledge level is a little bit higher," Cohen said. The recovery rate from canine flu, Cohen said he had learned, is believed to be more than 90%.

--Merritt Clifton