A $2.45 million boondoggle
News and headlines for September 14 - 20, 2024
In other news: Riverside County hires industry apologist for $2.45 million. Animals 24-7 isn’t a humane publication. Getting in synch with your dog. National Pet Memorial Day. Lawsuit challenges claims of environmentally-friendly beef. Do you have what it takes to save lives? Communities are looking for someone to run their animal shelters.
These are some of the stories making headlines in animal protection:
Riverside hires industry apologist for $2.45 million
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?
Animals 24-7 isn’t a humane publication
Merritt Clifton writes an online publication called Animals 24-7. Although he claims it is a chronicler of humane work, Animals 24-7 spends an inordinate amount of “ink” to demonize “pit bulls.” His recent article, “Did Trump & Vance mean pit bulls are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio?” is the latest in a long line of absurd claims, including one that posits “responsible parenting and pit bulls do not mix,” another one that suggests car racing is safer than bathing one’s (“pit bull”) dog, that anyone who disagrees with him on “pit bulls” is akin to an anti-vaxxer, and that “pit bulls” should die because otherwise they “might” kill you while you are on a trampoline.
To be sure, Clifton has always been predisposed to hate dogs. In a 2014 article in the Huffington Post, Douglas Cooper dubbed him “The Academic Impostor Behind the Pit Bull Hysteria.” Cooper called out Clifton for trying to defray criticism of his views by falsely claiming that his work is “peer-reviewed.” It was not. And as Animal People, his defunct physical periodical, morphed into the online website Animals 24-7, the articles about pit bulls have increased in outlandishness.
Indeed, Clifton brags that,
ANIMALS 24-7 is especially noted for our in-depth coverage of attacks by pit bulls [and] other dangerous dogs,” maintains a “dangerous dog data library [that] includes sub-menus on pit bull statistics, pit bulls & public safety, pit bulls & the humane community, voices of pit bull experience, pit bull liability, pit bull legislation, pit bull history & sociology, pit bull behavior, dogfighting, pit bull advocates, [and] pit bulls abroad…
If you are someone who wants “pit bulls” to die, promotes breed-discriminatory legislation, or are a pound director who kills them, Animals 24-7 is your go-to source. But what Animals 24-7 does not report or recognize in slavish devotion to Clifton’s obsession is the truth and the science. Namely, that:
The breed of a dog tells how they look, not how they behave;
50% of dogs labeled as pit bulls lack the DNA of breeds commonly classified as pit bulls;
Dogs targeted for breed discriminatory laws are not more likely to bite, do not bite harder, and such bans do not result in fewer dog bites or bite-related hospitalization rates; and,
Enforcement is expensive, with no measurable impact on public safety.
Instead, spurred by vendettas, Merritt Clifton has turned into a cartoonish extreme.
Getting in synch with your dog
