ANIMAL PEOPLE is the leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide. Founded in 1992, ANIMAL PEOPLE has no alignment or affiliation with any other entity.

 

This site built and maintained by: GREANVILLE ASSOCIATESand CRESCENT COMMUNICATIONS •Rev. 12.1.05 Copyright ANIMAL PEOPLE, INC. 1992--2006

 

 

 

 

 
   

 
powered by FreeFind

ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: September 2007

San Francisco/Los Angeles rivalry extends to pit bulls

 

SAN FRANCISCO, LOS ANGELES--Even the storied rivalry of the San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers may never have been as heated as the controversy over the California cities' radically different approaches to reducing the numbers of pit bull terriers who are impounded and killed by animal control--but for those keeping score at home, San Francisco seems to be winning.

"Not long ago, pit bulls occupied about three-quarters of the dog kennels at San Francisco's Animal Care and Control shelter," observed San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Marisa Lagos on August 27, 2007. "Now, only about a quarter of the unwanted canines at the shelter are pit bulls."

San Francisco Department of Animal Care and Control director Carl Friedman told Lagos that his department has impounded 21% fewer pit bulls since the city passed a law requiring that pit bulls must be sterilized. The number of pit bulls killed in the SF/DACC shelter has fallen 24%.

The law took effect at the beginning of 2006. In the interim, SF/DACC has confiscated 38 pit bulls, Friedman said. Local agencies have sterilized about 500 pit bulls.

"This law has been a success in reducing the euthanization of animals," acknowledged San Francisco SPCA president Jan McHugh-Smith.

Opposing breed-specific legislation, the San Francisco SPCA had for 10 years previous to the passage of the sterilization mandate promoted special incentives for keepers of pit bulls to get them altered, including offers of cash and merchandise.

The SF/SPCA has also offered intensive screening and training of pit bulls to encourage that they be adopted. In 1996 former SF/SPCA president Richard Avanzino even tried to rename pit bulls "St. Francis terriers," in hopes of making them more adoptable. That project was suspended within 60 days after several "St. Francis terriers" killed cats in their new neighborhoods.

Lower profile screening and training has been more successful, but included a high-profile debacle in November 2003 when SF/SPCA volunteer Anastasia Klafter, 27, illegally allowed her adopted pit bull therapy dog to run off leash in Golden Gate Park. The dog chased a police horse, who threw the rider and kicked Klafter in the face. Another police officer shot the dog, who survived, and was required by court order to be leashed and muzzled at all times when outdoors.

Noting the SF/SPCA pit bull program successes, undeterred by the occasional failures, and that 2,442 of the 6,312 dogs who were killed in the Los Angeles city shelters in fiscal 2007 were pit bulls, Los Angeles Animal Services director Ed Boks on July 20, 2007 announced a proposal to turn the South Los Angeles Animal Care Center Annex into a "pit bull academy," headed by Tia Marie Torres.

Torres, 47, in 1999 founded the Villalobos Rescue Center in Canyon Country, a Los Angeles suburb. The center is reputedly now the largest pit bull rescue in the world.

Like the Villalobos Rescue Center, the "pit bull academy" would employ paroled convicts.

The plan was soon put on indefinite hold, at first because unionized city workers objected that hiring parolees would bypass the civil service employment protocol.

Los Angeles Daily News staff writer Dana Bartholomew on August 8, 2007 disclosed that even as Boks was trying to win over skeptical members of the Los Angeles city council, Torres reportedly told Marlene Garcia of the Lahontan Valley News & Fallon Eagle Standard that she bought the former Salt Wells Villa brothel in Nevada in late 2006 in hopes of reopening it. The brothel was closed in 2004 due to permit violations.

"Sex sells," Garcia quoted Torres as saying. "It's the only industry that never fails. That's when I got the idea to start a brothel and generate money for my nonprofit."

Torres admitted to Bartholomew that she made the remarks, but said she was joking, and actually intended to use the former brothel to house exotic cats and birds.

While the pit bull academy idea appeared to be politically dead, Boks came under renewed attack from anonymous web critics for reducing animal population control killing at the alleged expense of more animals dying in the Los Angeles city kennels from fighting and disease caused by overcrowding.

Central to the criticism was the claim that Los Angeles city cage deaths rose from 1,150 in fiscal 2005 to 3,059 in fiscal 2007, while policies intended to encourage feral cat care-taking and discourage kitten and puppy surrender halved receipts of unweaned kittens and puppies--normally the animals most susceptible to cage death.

Boks on September 18 replied via the Los Angeles Animal Services web site that only 751 cage deaths occurred in fiscal 2005, 682 in 2006, and 1,101 in fiscal 2007, and that many of the animals actually died "in the care of a private veterinarian or in a foster home." More died in foster homes chiefly because under Boks the department has done much more fostering.

Similar criticisms preceded the October 2001 firing of former Los Angeles Animal Services director Dan Knapp. Like Boks, Knapp was an ex-minister, and arrived pledging to reduce animal control killing, but ran into increasingly vicious activist attacks after he was unable to achieve results as dramatic as San Francisco.

Largely overlooked by critics is that Los Angeles has cut shelter killing at about the same rate as San Francisco since the start of Knapp's tenure in 1998, but was then killing three times as many animals per 1,000 human residents.