Does Bill White hate puppies? (cont'd)
The Chronicle has run another story on BARC, the city's long-problematic animal shelter that hasn't shown much improvement under our seemingly disinterested mayor.
Here's an excerpt, from the top of the story:
In 2005, Mayor Bill White’s task force on animal protection had a heady list of goals, none more ambitious than this: significantly reducing the euthanasia rate at the region’s animal shelters, including the city pound.
Four years later, city officials say progress has been made implementing the task force’s recommendations. The city pound — the Bureau of Animal Regulation and Care — has saved lives by transferring more pets to rescue groups. And BARC now scans animals for computer identification chips, making it more likely pets will be returned to their owners.
But city officials, including White, say killings at the facility have not gone down as much as they had hoped. And animal welfare activists say the pound, geared toward picking up roaming dogs and other animals, has not shouldered the responsibility of finding homes for them, work that will require cooperation with volunteers and rescue groups.
“We want a dramatic double-digit percentage decrease in the number of animals that are euthanized,” White said. “There needs to be a new culture at BARC that is friendly to volunteers, works well with nonprofit organizations and survives the loss of a director,” he said, referring to Kent Robertson, who resigned as bureau chief and has not been replaced.
Some animal welfare activists say BARC is poorly run, in part, because it is underfunded. City officials acknowledge that BARC’s statistics on euthanasia are unreliable, and some activists wonder if the euthanasia rate has gone down at all.“BARC’s philosophy is still round the animals up and kill them,” said Margaret Gondo, longtime volunteer at BARC and a member of the 2005 task force. “This goes back to Bill White. He doesn’t want to foot the bill for animal control. He wants the private sector to foot the bill.”
Goals and lofty rhetoric and task forces are great (great ways to put off activists, anyway), but hard statistics might tell us more about how the city is following through on all of the hot air from the politicians.
Unfortunately, BARC still does not keep reliable statistics, which we only learn at the bottom of the story:
The [2005 Task Force] concluded that BARC had not kept reliable statistics on animal intake and euthanasia. That hasn’t changed. BARC officials said they could not provide the Chronicle with reliable statistics for 2005-2008 but said the percentage of animals being killed had decreased.
That says quite a lot about the philosophy at BARC (pre and post-Task Force) -- and it says to me that nothing has changed.
We know that Mayor White doesn't much like criticism, so it's not surprising that he's so defensive with reporters about the problems at BARC. His underlings have been taking pretty much the same approach -- whining to activists that the administration doesn't get enough credit from them for good things they do (to which we reply -- we have all the respect in the world for the animal lovers doing great work for the City. The BARC management and thin-skinned pols in denial about the inhumane conditions? Not so much).
To be fair, these are problems that preceded Bill White. And they seem to be problems that are going to outlast him, unfortunately.
Maybe the next mayor will be a bigger fan of puppies.
BLOGVERSATION: Lose an Eye, It's a Sport.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/17/09 09:18 PM | Print |
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