Animal Control and Rescue

From: Animal People May 1998

Dog Ecology in Puerto Rico

	LUQUILLO, P.R.–– To save a sato, one of the Puerto Rican street dogs lately made legendary by humane literature, a would-be rescuer first must find a sato––and that, these days, is surprisingly difficult.
He looked like a sato ––until he ran home.
Mailings from major humane organizations would have you believe homeless dogs are everywhere in Puerto Rico. Doing a personal ecological assessment of the Puerto Rican homeless dog and cat problem, however, I spent six days and five nights, March 25-30, combing the 320-square-mile island from Luquillo in the east to Mayaguez in the west, Old San Juan in the north to Ponce in the south. I drove every major highway, circling the island and criss-crossing representative parts of it six times, twice by night and four times by day, mostly on mere ribbons of winding asphalt barely wide enough for two cars to pass abreast. For the first four days, I cruised slums, dumps, agricultural districts, strip malls, waterfronts, restaurant areas near beaches, the vicinity of the Carolina airport, and the El Yunque rainforest—initially alone, but also for about 16 hours of observation time with Perry Fina of Pet Savers, the outreach foundation of the North Shore Animal League, which funded my trip to sort conflicting reports about the homeless animal problem there. On the fifth day I traveled more than 20 miles on foot. First I jogged from my lodgings at the Grateful Bed & Breakfast between El Yunque and Luquillo to the local beach and back, by different routes. Then I walked west from the Grateful B&B via back roads to the edge of El Yunque, turned east, and combed the sidestreets of three villages on my meandering return to Luquillo. In Luquillo I checked the streets and alleys of the industrial park, the restaurant district, and the hotel district. I finished with one last sweep of the beach area, including the back alley behind the 16 bars and chicken grills that serve beachgoers, as well as the frontage road slums across a four-lane highway. Well after dark I returned by car to do still more surveillance. The sixth day I revisited El Yunque, then took back roads along the Rio Canovanas, through the old slave port of Loiza, and along the beachfront by the slow route to the airport for a late afternoon departure. In more than 75 hours of looking, I saw exactly 100 unrestrained dogs, of whom no more than 20 might have been genuine satos. The rest, often wearing collars, were more likely free-roaming pets––an impression I confirmed on my walking tour. That day I found a ratio of 44 restrained dogs to 13 free-roaming dogs, a much higher rate of evident ownership than could be seen from a car. This appeared to be because owned dogs inside houses and/or behind fences are more inclined to rush to a visible point and bark at a pedestrian than they are to notice a passing vehicle. I also found that 10 of the 13 free-roaming dogs I saw that day rose from lounging in the street to trot to a particular porch or doorway upon my approach, where they then took a proprietary stance––home, defending their territory. Of the three dogs who did not rise and trot home, I later learned that the one in the worst shape was in fact an old pet with hip displasia, who just couldn’t move quickly. On my last day, from the car again, I observed only 14 dogs, of whom 13 were free-roaming. I often stopped to see what the dogs would do. All 13 headed home, where several were greeted by humans––including three dogs who were initially pursued outdoors by a naked man who had just jumped out of his bathtub and was trying to keep the dogs from running in front of my car.
Over the six days, I saw 77 dogs held by chains, fences, or leashes. It would thus appear that only about half of the Puerto Rican owned dog population is restrained. Yet care standards appeared lacking to no greater an extent than the care standards for children, and certainly to no greater an extent than I saw during the 4 years that ANIMAL PEOPLE published from the rural Adirondacks in upstate New York, along the Vermont border.
I visited good Puerto Rican neighborhoods, where all the yards were neatly fenced, all the children had toys and proper clothing, and all the dogs seemed well-attended and loved. I also visited neighborhoods where dogs and ill-clad children alike played and foraged at their peril in narrow but busy streets. Even in those neighborhoods I saw little sign of food scarcity, among either dogs or humans––but I did see far more dogs who were clearly afflicted with parasites, both internal and external. At a guess, I would think the children in these neighborhoods are also more likely to endure the same or similar miseries. In addition to the 177 live dogs, I spotted 30 roadkilled dogs, about an equal number of roadkilled small lizards, three roadkilled Norway rats (all on the same stretch of road beside an unofficial dump outside Luquillo), three roadkilled ignuanas, a freshly flattened mongoose, and two roadkilled chickens––a surprisingly low number considering that throughout Puerto Rico I saw half a dozen freeroaming chickens for every dog. At least two-thirds and perhaps 80% of all the dogs I saw in Puerto Rico, both free-roaming and restrained, were unneutered males. Females evidently have far higher mortality, as I have previously seen among feral cats on the U.S. mainland, and female dogs may also be more often killed at birth. Among the 100 unrestrained dogs, nine were lactating females. Three females, no longer lactating, led puppies. One large sato, high in El Yunque, ventured forth at night with a litter of four. The other two, both small and bedraggled, with long hair utterly unsuited to the Caribbean climate, had one puppy each.
Two dogs under fairly flimsy restraint also had one puppy each. Though the mothers could not roam, the puppies were quite able to bolt through gaps in the fencing to either roam or become roadkill.
The relatively low evident fecundity would suggest that the free-roaming and potentially free-romaing dogs are, at most, barely reproducing at a pace to match roadkill attrition. If the Puerto Rican homeless dog population is either growing or holding steady, most recruitment is probably not through reproduction but through abandonment––not of puppies, remarkably scarce among the free-roaming population, but rather of adult dogs. And dogs are indeed abandoned in Puerto Rico, typically around age one, for behavioral reasons, according to my observations in about eight hours at animal shelters–– exactly as on the U.S. mainland. But little abandonment appears to involve intentional cruelty. Some Puerto Rican shelters have a deserved reputation as death camps for dogs; the typical abandonment seems to be by people who want to give an animal they feel they cannot keep a chance. I witnessed women and one little girl in tears as they abandoned dogs, almost certainly under orders from men of the family. Gas station cashiers explained that dogs I saw on their premises had been left hours before by customers who hoped some other customer would take them home––and I was tempted to try to take one very cute, bright chihuahua mix myself, until I saw she was lactating, possibly with pups nearby, whose begging might have been just for food, not adoption, unless one could find and take her litter too. Long trust-building might be required to get her to lead the way. Down in the dumps Except for the ambitiously humane Protectores de Animales Regional y Estatal shelter in Caguas, and the quite conveniently located Centro de Control y Adopcion de Animales del Municipo de San Juan, whose location is very well identified by signs, I found Puerto Rican animal shelters not only difficult to locate, but often also reluctant to give directions and hours by telephone, if accessible by telephone at all, and typically quick to demand if asked for their address as to whether my intention was to drop off a pet. I never did either locate or connect by telephone with the Amigos Unidos por Animals Abandonados shelter in Vega Baja, the apparent but unnamed target of an “animal collector” expose in the spring 1998 edition of PETA’s Animal Times. I also couldn’t find the Albergue de Animales Municipal de Arecibo, though a group of teenagers staffing a pet supply shop attached to a downtown veterinary clinic that adopts out street dogs tried hard to give me directions. The most extreme example of an animal shelter evidently not doing the job was that of the Humane Society of Puerto Rico in Guaynabo. Founded in 1958, and directed for 40 years by now retired Belgian consul Richard Durham, HSPR in mid-1986 came under a blistering Internet attack from one Karen Fehrenbach, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency staffer then assigned to Puerto Rico. Backed by some local animal rescuers and allied with the Caribbean Recycling Foundation, which then and now was attempting to establish itself as a brokering agency for Puerto Rican humane groups, Fehrenbach accused the HSPR of allowing dogs and cats to starve, and to suffer lingering deaths from untreated injuries. But when I requested verification, Fehrenbach refused to document any of her claims with either photographs or witness statements, and instead unleashed a string of attacks on me via Internet bulletin boards for even asking questions. Supporting statements eventually obtained from Fehrenbach allies seemed shaky, partly because some of them replicated Fehrenbach’s own statements word-for-word, partly as well because they were contradicted by a first-hand report from Neil Trent of the World Society for the Protection of Animals, who had visited the HSPR shelter, he said, only days before Fehrenbach said she had seen the atrocities. Durham was gone long before I got to visit HSPR, and so was Fehrenbach, who according to both DEA sources and other animal rescuers active in Puerto Rico ran into trouble with DEA internal affairs for allegedly abusing her position. Her case is apparently still under DEA review. However, without defending Fehrenbach’s conduct, I did find reason to believe negligence was and remains HSPR standard procedure. When I called, the evident shelter manager informed me of Durham’s departure nine months earlier, gave me directions with apparent wary reluctance, identified himself as “Freddy,” and explained that even though I had come all the way from Washington state to see him, he was trying to close the shelter in time for lunch at 12:00 sharp, and therefore wouldn’t be there when I arrived. When I did arrive, at a facility more than a mile from the listed shelter address, “Freddy” was still trying to lock the door and escape, hindered by two carloads of people who insisted on giving up dogs. One middle-aged couple eventually dumped a sick sato in a plastic bag out on the street, along with trash. “Before our eyes, they throw garbage,” commented Freddy. Indeed they did. Allowing Freddy to depart, enabling me to get an unencumbered look at as much of HSPR and environs as I could from the outside, I observed mountains of trash on the two approachable sides of the building, on both sides of the street. High barbed wire-topped fences made a no-man’s-land of the yard.
	On closer look, the trash proved to consist almost entirely of the cardboard boxes and plastic bags in which people had brought and left animals, together with rags packed into the containers to help make the animals comfortable, tins and disposable dishes of animal food, and occasional animal toys.
A lactating black mongrel paced nervously through the trash, ignoring accessible food scraps, apparently concerned about puppies who must have been inside. Deciding to give Freddy the benefit of the doubt and assume he was ignorant of proper shelter management, not knowingly neglectful, and remembering former North Shore Animal League shelter director Michael Arms’ frequent admonition that if a shelter allows itself to look like a dump, it will be treated as an animal dump, I set about picking up the trash. I packed every cardboard box that was sturdy enough to be packed. There was no dumpster to put the boxes into. Instead I stacked the boxes along the curb beside my rented car, intending to consult with Freddy later as to where I should take them. Then I tried to pick up a plastic bag from the street directly in front of the shelter truck door. Inside I found the remains of puppies or kittens––I couldn’t tell which––decomposed to liquefaction, bones, and fur. A shelter worker appeared from the far end of the building. He caught the black dog. Moments later Freddy returned. He and the other man unloaded and carried indoors about as much cat litter as ANIMAL PEOPLE uses in a day for our 18 cats, and as much dry dog food as we use in a week, for our two dogs. HSPR, however, boasts 60 runs, and claims to handle 12,000 animals per year. I wondered if the evident lunchtime purchases were part of an inefficient daily routine, or were made for my benefit, to cover for deficiencies in the operation. Without receiving a specific invitation, I followed Freddy into the bleak, windowless HSPR office. Again Freddy questioned me: why did I want to see the shelter? What was my intention? “You realize,” Freddy warned, “that shelters in Puerto Rico are not like the ones in North America.” Then he saw my camera. “There will be no picture-taking,” he added. In other words, whatever was behind the doors was so bad that he didn’t want anyone else to see it. “Then that is where our conversation ends,” I informed him.
I did later get to see part of the HSPR interior. Disspirited dogs were hard to see among piles of trash. More trash rotted and reeked in tall grass behind the shelter.
Soon after my return to Washington, the current HSPR president called to lament that she hadn’t been able to meet with me, and to complain about the difficulties of operating with little money and public support. Her office, I understood, was in Santurce, which raised some question as to whether she or Durham had really known much if anything about the shelter operations. Having seen many shelters in less auspicious locations and less affluent communities whose staff managed to take in abandoned animals before they were crushed in the street, who picked up trash and didn’t act like fugitives, I was utterly unimpressed with her continuing string of excuses, unsupported by any description of active efforts to straighten out the problems. I told her that if she can’t run an operation visibly deserving public support, she should get out of the business, that HSPR was flat-out the worst so-called shelter I’ve seen in many years, and that doing a job that badly wasn’t doing animals any favors. Revisiting HSPR two days after my first visit, with Perry Fina this time, we discovered the grass had been mowed behind the barbed wire, a fence had been fixed so that visitors couldn’t walk behind the shelter if they cared to brave the refuse and stench, and a dumpster was in place––though the trash I had picked up remained where I’d left it, including the stinking bag of puppy or kitten remains. That bag clearly didn’t represent an isolated incident, as Perry soon discovered the right jawbone of a small adult dog, directly in front of the shelter. We failed to capture two small satos, a male and female, whom we found apparently living in the cemetery across the street. Going to the dogs We were not surprised to find satos nearby. Both on the mainland and in Puerto Rico, animals probably abandoned at shelters in off-hours commonly haunt shelter neighborhoods. On the mainland, the abandonees are more often cats. Dogs–– because most U.S. mainlanders no longer tolerate free-roaming dogs––tend to be quickly caught. In Puerto Rico, they remain at large. The most free-roaming dogs and cats I saw anywhere in Puerto Rico were close to animal shelters, not only HSPR but also even the tiny but quite well-managed Villa Michelle, on a mountaintop above Mayaguez. At Villa Michelle, directed by academician Hilda Ramirez, the problem is simply location. A highway sign directs visitors toward Villa Michelle, but the road then winds through several intersections, climbs steep hills, and is too narrow in places for two cars to pass abreast. Either unable to find Villa Michelle or unwilling to risk accident, some people whose initial intent may be to surrender animals apparently give up and dump the animals instead. I found nothing at all wrong with Villa Michelle itself, and was favorably impressed by the exercise arrangements for both the dogs and cats. But nowhere else did I see as many clearly dazed, wandering, homeless dogs and cats within a matter of blocks, and I also found the bones of an apparently abandoned dog in tall grass directly opposite the shelter gate, just below the lip of the roadside ravine. At a guess, a car descending the mountain from above hit and killed the dog, knocking the remains out of sight of the shelter staff, before anyone at the shelter knew the dog had ever been there.
	I found feral cats living around the refuse depot across the street from the Centro de Control y Adopcion de Animales del Municipo de San Juan, run by the University of Puerto Rico veterinary school. Bunkered behind glass, the Centro staff one after another left me to stand around by myself while each disappeared, ostensibly to get permission to talk to me from someone else.
The management might be surprised to learn how much a reporter can find out from an hour and twenty minutes of eavesdropping on conversations between staff and visitors, reading signs, seeing what literature is out on desks or posted, noting the behavior of the visible and audible animals. By the time I left, it was plain that the Centro de Control y Adopcion de Animales del Municipo de San Juan is at best a mediocre by-the-book animal control agency, with the location and physical facilities to promote adoptions, high-volume low-cost neutering, and pet care education, but no real will to do so. Contact between human visitors and the animals was discouraged. Most animals were kept well out of sight. Cages of kittens were allowed to play in view of the waiting room, but no one made an effort to show them off, or promote the petting and cuddling that ends up sending one or several home. Except around shelters, free-roaming dogs appeared most often in older slums and suburbs. The most certain satos lurked near traditional semi-outdoor grills, which send the smell of hot chicken wafting throughout their neighborhoods, produce plentiful food waste, and serve a clientele who eat outdoors, vulnerable to begging. Satos also appeared around fast food franchise dumpsters, where one finds feral cats on the U.S. mainland. Feral cats are scarce in Puerto Rico; I saw just 23 cats of any kind. Cats have never been popular pets in Puerto Rico, and even though most of cats I saw were both unneutered and free-roaming, the presence of free-roaming dogs has apparently inhibited successful outdoor kitten-rearing. I could have counted many more dogs by concentrating my efforts just on the locales most likely to have them, or by spending more time with rescuers who attend free-roaming colonies, but the purpose of an ecological assessment is not to produce inflated counts. Rather, the object is to find the true dimensions of a situation, including an overview as to how representative the habitat of a particular kind of animal might be relative to the totality of the surroundings. Free-roaming dogs, including satos, are common to certain sites in Puerto Rico, but on the whole the niche for genuine satos appears to be diminishing. This may be more responsible for their apparent rapid decline than any of the still small subsidized neutering programs on the island: the oldest, that of PARE in Caguas, still neuters fewer than 50 animals a week, and none of the others appear to be neutering more than 25 a week. Roadkill Like other wildlife, feral or otherwise, satos need adequate food to survive and reproduce at a rate exceeding attrition. For centuries the Puerto Rican dogs suffered little predation. The only mammals native to the island are bats, none of the native birds are big enough to be much of a threat even to puppies, and none of the reptiles––mostly skinks, with some geckos and iguanas––would harm a dog except in self-defense. Satos enjoyed relatively abundant food not long ago, when the biggest business in Puerto Rico was cattle ranching, with byproducts including slaughter offal, carcasses of animals dead in the field, afterbirths, and dung. Since there was little if any refrigeration, satos also enjoyed more food waste. They supplemented their diets with windfall fruit. That began to change more than 30 years ago, but the real transformation has only come within the past decade, with explosions in the rates of car use and ownership, the simultaneous advent of refrigeration and the fast food industry, the disappearance of village slaughtering sheds, the decline of open-air grilling, the contraction of the cattle business, and urban sprawl overtaking not only the former cattle ranches but also the fruit trees. Simply put, the increase of car use has subjected the Puerto Rican free-roaming dog population to quasi-predation at unprecedented levels, just as development has contracted the food supply from sources other than human owners. Projections of the Dr. Splatt and Strah Poll roadkill studies suggest cars annually kill about 0.3% of the mainland U.S. dog population. In Puerto Rico, cars seem to be killing 20% or more. The food supply would have to be plentiful indeed to boost canine fecundity enough to offset such losses ––but canine births appear surprisingly low relative to dog numbers, due to the disproportionately low number of females. If Puerto Rico had native mammals such as deer, rabbits, raccoons, woodchucks, squirrels, chipmunks, and prairie dogs, more car use could increase the food supply for homeless dogs, as they might scavenge the roadkills of other species––but Puerto Rico has no native species of sufficient size or abundance to make roadkill even an incidental source of canine nutrition. Feral mongooses living in and around El Yunque are both relatively scarce and capable of fending off dog attacks. Though some Puerto Rican dogs are adept rat-catchers, rats don’t seem to contribute significantly to most dogs’ diets. Dog might eat roadkilled dog, but cannibalism inherently does not stimulate population growth.
In short, reports that Puerto Rico teems with homeless dogs are exaggerated. And it is not just my own observation that says so: a team of 22 volunteer animal control officers from the U.S. mainland, organized by retired USDA veterinarian Isis Johnson of the Puerto Rican Street Animal Project, with help from the American Humane Association and National Animal Control Association, in two weeks of patrolling Puerto Rican streets in January 1997 reportedly caught and killed just 70 dogs––well under one dog per person hour. At that, the ratio of dogs I saw to the time I spent looking suggests that the animal control officers probably did catch about 75% of the free-roaming dogs they saw.
Numbers Partly, the lower numbers of homeless dogs than has been reported may reflect a recent decline in the population. Partly it may be because previous investigators have relied on rescuer reports, and rescuers, who tend to deal with the most distressed animals, also typically overestimate the universality of personal experience. As far back as 1981, researchers Robert Calhoun and Carol Haspel documented that Brooklyn cat-feeders tended to overestimate the number of cats consuming the food they left out by about a third, and I wouldn’t be surprised if sato rescuers similarly think they are dealing with more dogs than they do, just because to a rescuer the stream of animals needing help often does seem endless. Mostly, though, I think investigators familiar with the dog-keeping norms of the U.S. mainland tend to hugely underestimate how many free-roaming dogs do have homes. In fact, Puerto Rico appears to have about the same ratio of dogs to people (about one dog per five human residents) as the U.S. mainland, but Puerto Ricans are far more likely to let their dogs roam at large––as was common on the U.S. mainland until under 20 years ago, and is still the norm in many rural areas. Puerto Rican shelters report receiving about 50,000 animals per year, among them, mostly dogs. This is plausible. But it also means that the 3.5 million residents of Puerto Rico are sending about the same number of dogs and cats per capita to shelters as the 3.5 million residents of Los Angeles, the 2.7 million residents of Chicago, the 1.6 million residents of Philadelphia, and the 1.6 million residents of Houston. There are differences, in that Puerto Rico doesn’t have great numbers of feral cats, and therefore doesn’t have great numbers of cats entering shelters, relative to dogs; U.S. cities don’t have large free-roaming dog populations. In addition, Puerto Rican shelters tend to have very low adoption rates, typically under 10%, so far more animals are killed. Pets are not adopted from shelters chiefly because they are readily available from friends and neighbors. But adoption rates in the U.S., now running at 25% plus on average, were typically also less than 10% just 15 years ago, and began to rise only as the advent of affordable neutering reduced the percentages of pets who will ever either birth or sire a litter to under 10% of owned cats and under 30% of owned dogs. Humane ethic
	Puerto Rican pet care clearly requires improvement. Most obviously, owners must be encouraged to neuter pets. They also must be encouraged to treat pets more often for parasites, who thrive in the hot climate––but horses, emaciated due to worms while knee-deep in grass, are a more common sight in rural areas than either scrawny or mangy dogs.
There are three evident obstacles: lack of veterinarians willing to do low-cost and/or free neutering, vaccination, and parasite treatment, against the reported opposition of the Puerto Rican Veterinary Medical Association; lack of aggressive neutering, vaccination, and parasite treatment promotion; and lack of ready access to affordable veterinary clinics. The importance of access may be underestimated. Although Puerto Rico is small and highly mobile, travel tends to be slow due to winding roads and congestion. Ways must be found to make affordable neutering, vaccination, and parasite treatment accessible to all Puerto Ricans within a half hour’s drive. The advent of injection sterilization of male dogs, now undergoing field trials in Mexico and at the Arizona Humane Society, and soon to begin trial by the North Shore Animal League, should solve the cost and access problems, since it is much easier and less expensive to transport a syringe than even a mobile surgical neutering clinic. Injection sterilization should also get around the psychological problem that Puerto Rican males, like many mainland counterparts, are alleged to have with submitting their dogs to castration. Use of low-cost neutering and other affordable veterinary treatment could be boosted by spot announcements on the many popular salsa radio stations––a medium that so far as I could tell was not being used. Puerto Ricans are avid radio listeners, and keen competition for ad dollars should keep air time within reach. Conducting a keep-your-dogs-home campaign via radio spots would also be a good idea––but must be tempered with recognition of the differences between typical Puerto Rican accommodations and those in the U.S. The message I’d use: “You have an investment in your dog––love, care, neutering. Your children would be heartbroken if a carkilled your dog. Please, keep your dog home.” Puerto Rican houses tend to be quite small by U.S. standards, making “keep your pet indoors” messages unrealistic. Puerto Ricans who can afford fences––and have yards to fence––tend to have fencing already, for security reasons, and tend likewise to keep their dogs fenced. Telling the remainder of the Puerto Rican population to keep their dogs under physical restraint will, if successful, mean only that more people will keep their dogs tethered, alone and miserable. From my conversations with Puerto Rican dog owners, however, I suspect most would just ignore the message. In my observation, male dogs are not neutered in Puerto Rico, and dogs are not generally tethered, not from negligence, but from the perception that castration and tethering are inhumane. At least as regards dogs, basic humane values are in place. This shows as well in the public resistance that the animal control officers brought to Puerto Rico by Isis Johnson found to the idea of rounding up and killing street dogs en masse. As Johnson lamented in the December 1997 edition of NACA News, many Puerto Ricans just wouldn’t cooperate, because they thought the killing was cruel and unnatural. What Puerto Rico lacks is not an ethic of kindness toward animals so much as more knowledge about quality animal care. Escalated adoption promotion will have limited success in Puerto Rico: most people who might want a dog already have one, homes and yards are small, and dog-keeping costs money. However, it appears to me that U.S. adoption shelters in areas where demand for dogs exceeds the birth rate, including the North Shore Animal League, could easily accept and place almost every healthy or recoverable Puerto Rican shelter dog for some years to come. Most of the dogs entering Puerto Rican shelters are small to medium sized, young, and have been socialized. I saw some potentially dangerous dogs in shelters, including a few truly scary pit bulls and Rottweilers, but most Puerto Rican shelter dogs are of good disposition. Two projects, Save A Sato, organized by Karen Fehrenbach, and the St. Louis-based Pet Search, led by Alice Dodge, already fly adoptable animals to U.S. shelters on a regular but limited basis. Perry Fina of Pet Savers and Emilio Massas, director of the PARE shelter in Caguas, were close to finalizing details of a much bigger transport program as ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press. As in the rural U.S. South, where Pet Savers has provided animal transport from selected major animal control shelters to the North Shore Animal League adoption shelter on Long Island for a decade, a successful dog transport program can be used as a magnet to get owners to bring unwanted litters and pets into shelters. Then the mothers can be fixed free or at big discounts. Judging by recent rapid gains against pet overpopulation in the U.S., an effective extension of humane services could bring Puerto Rican dog and cat fecundity under control––without more shelter killing––in five years or less. My hope is that extension and expansion of the already successful PARE programs, including to other sites, will encourage the HSPR and San Juan animal control to markedly improve their services in order to remain competitive, and that Puerto Rico can get to no-kill animal control as fast or faster than the many major U.S. cities with similar shelter intake rates. ––Merritt Clifton