Animal advocates demand an end to Riverside’s $2.45 million boondoggle
News and headlines for September 21 - October 4, 2024
In the news: Animal advocates demand an end to Riverside’s $2.45 million boondoggle. Another week, two new pet food recalls. Dog abuse overshadows presidential campaign. Do you have what it takes to save lives? Communities are looking for someone to run their animal shelters. Students start the school year with new vegan options. Making shelter dogs happy. Making shelter cats happy.
These are some of the stories making headlines in animal protection:
Animal advocates demand an end to Riverside’s $2.45 million boondoggle
Rescuers and other animal advocates turned out in droves to protest, demanding that Riverside County cancel its $2.45 million “consulting” contract with Kristen Hassen. Hassen is seen by many as an excuser of regressive pounds, a defender of their abusive directors, and a contributing cause of many of the problems experienced by the Riverside County pound she was then hired to “fix.”
On the heels of removing Erin Gettis, Riverside County’s pound director, after a lawsuit charged her with ethical and legal misconduct, Riverside County inked a roughly two-year contract (27 months) with Kristen Hassen, formerly of Austin Pets Alive, worth $2.45 million for “consulting.”
At Austin Pets Alive, Hassen was one of the chief architects and promoters of Human Animal Support Services (HASS), urging “shelters” to make pandemic-era closures permanent by turning away stray animals. She also sat on the National Animal Control Association board, which encouraged shelters to re-abandon animals people found on the streets.
These policies manipulate intake and placement rates by abandoning the fundamental purpose – indeed the very definition – of a shelter: to provide a safety net of care for lost, homeless, and unwanted animals. Under HASS, “Intakes of healthy strays and owner surrenders doesn’t exist anymore,” and there is “No kennel space for rehoming, stray hold or intake.” Instead, the community — whose taxes and donations already pay for shelters — is expected to pick up the slack (hence the euphemism “community sheltering”).
Care for homeless and stray animals is left to chance: people who find animals are told to take them into their own homes until their families are located or leave them on the street. According to HASS, the “hope” is that the lost animal “finds its way back home.” Such hope is misplaced. Indeed, for many animals, it proves fatal.
While at APA, Hassen also promoted or defended abusive pound directors, helped form a committee to shield directors from public accountability, defended the killing of healthy and treatable dogs and cats, and promoted authors and their books that disparage rescuers and shelter volunteers, perpetuate harmful stereotypes of women and people of color, defend dogfighters, and promote the killing of marine mammals.
Despite Hassen’s praise of Gettis, Gettis’ facility killed more animals than any other reporting “shelter” in the United States. And as previously reported, a lawsuit filed in California’s Superior Court provided evidence of her leaving dead animals in their cages and other animals covered in excrement. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit allege that these conditions represent “a shocking, callous, and ongoing failure to follow California law” as a result of cutting costs “by carrying out a policy to kill healthy, adoptable animals, instead of spending resources feeding, caring for and housing them, and hiring sufficient personnel to perform those duties and veterinary services, and ensuring that the animals are adopted in the community or through animal rescue organizations.”
The lawsuit demanded “a forensic audit of the animal services budget and data records, questioning the allocation of the department’s $39 million budget” and called “for the removal of Animal Services Director Erin Gettis.” Two weeks after filing the lawsuit, Gettis was removed.
This begs the question for Riverside County officials: Instead of hiring a “shelter” director who doesn’t know what they are doing and then spending millions more on a consultant, why not hire a director who is passionate about saving lives, has the skill set to do so, and is willing to spend the money the taxpayers allotted for its intended purpose: to care for animals?
Another week, two new pet food recalls
