The Long Beach animal shelter numbers are in, and while there has been some small improvement, LBACS still lags far behind progressive shelters in cities like Austin and Sacramento in lifesaving, killing more than 1600 cats, dogs, puppies and kittens in 2016. (By comparison, Austin saved 95% of their shelter animals, and Sacramento did over 5,000 adoptions in 2016, while Long Beach saved only 74% of animals and did only 579 adoptions).
These are the numbers you will never see or hear from Mayor Garcia or LBACS. Typically, Mayor Garcia likes to talk about decreases in impound and euthanasia numbers, and he completely leaves out adoptions, fosters, the missing, or even the numbers transferred to SpcaLA, which remains unaccountable to the public and firmly against No Kill. Tomorrow, Jan. 28, LBACS will hold its annual Open House, and this time Mayor Garcia will be in attendance, no doubt to “handle” recent complaints coming out of the rescue community and to reassure everyone, as he did in 2014, that things will get better at LBACS -- unfortunately, we have seen little change in adoptions in the past 2 years. Here are some things Mayor Garcia won’t tell Long Beach's animal lovers, but that you should know: While there has been a decrease in euthanasias, it has not been anywhere near as large as what Mayor Garcia will tell you, as he employs his own version of “alternative facts” to justify the shelter’s poor performance. For example, he'll tell you that euthanasias decreased for dogs by 27% - a large percentage. The truth is, when you look at adult dogs – not including puppies, which Mayor Garcia does and which inflates the number - 17% were killed in 2015 and 15% were killed in 2016. That’s a 2 percentage point decrease, not the 27% that Mayor Garcia wants people in Long Beach to believe. And while Mayor Garcia and LBACS work to deceive you about the numbers of animals killed, LBACS killed 437 dogs and puppies last year, while they adopted out only 286. The number of kittens killed was an astonishing 816, and cats killed were 409. Adoptions overall increased slightly, but the total number of adoptions, at 579, is extremely small, especially when compared with the over 5000 adoptions Sacramento’s shelter did, with over 700 happening in the last 2 months of 2016 alone. One last thing we doubt you'll hear from Mayor Garcia is any mention of LBACS' illegal killing of Thor, a dog who had an adopter and a rescue group willing to take him in. The city has callously dismissed complaints lodged with the City Attorney about his killing, which violated the Hayden Law. The city clearly has no intention of being accountable to the public with regard to these facts, nor of holding LBACS accountable for breaking the law. One point of note is the fact that Garcia has requested an audit of LBACS, in an oddly cheery letter that contradicts the reason for an audit in the first place. This letter was issued on the same day that rescue groups fiercely complained about the pending killing of shelter animals. Since we are 18 months away from the next mayoral election, it appears that the Mayor is looking toward re-election. Some of you may remember how Mayor Garcia used the shelter animals to get elected. Given his wholesale abandonment of our shelter animals after he took office, Mayor Garcia should not be re-elected unless he means to keep his promises to make real and lasting change at the LBACS shelter. Please keep these facts in mind when you hear Mayor Garcia trumpeting the "good news," which in reality, is just more "business as usual" at our city's low-performing shelter. The people of Long Beach need to hold him accountable for Thor's death, low adoption numbers, and his "alternative facts" about the shelter's disappointingly slow progress. It’s more smoke and mirrors to keep folks quiet, while animals continue to be killed at our shelter, using our taxpayer dollars and in our name. Please share and let your elected officials know that this is unacceptable. How Can You Help? The animals need you to be their Voice. Tell them to stop killing in our name, using our taxpayer dollars. Tell them that we want a shelter that reflects the compassionate and humane values of the people of Long Beach. Please speak out now. Here's how: Write to your City Council Member - Contact Info here Speak at City Council during Public Comment Join us on our Facebook Page
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Long Beach Animal Care Services, and the City of Long Beach by extension, apparently does not want to hear from you if you disagree with their killing of animals in general, or with their illegal actions with relation to animals in their care. In other words, No Free Speech For You. If you go to Long Beach Animal Care Services' Facebook page, you'll now see a "Terms of Use" notice that says, among other things: ***Long Beach Animal Care Services reserves the right to remove without notice any comments or submissions that it deems to be inappropriate or offensive..." among them "personal attacks, defamatory attacks, or any type of comment that is non-constructive, hateful, spiteful or insulting." ***Also, anything that they consider "factually inaccurate" (a term thrown loosely about by LBACS and the City when it comes to the data around animal outcomes, particularly adoptions) can also be deleted by LBACS, apparently. Because "insulting" is a very subjective criterion that LBACS has given itself free reign to apply, this policy covers, well, just about anything LBACS management doesn't agree with. As you may know, it is the policy of this page not to comment on the Long Beach Animal Care Services Facebook page. We feel our Facebook postings, articles the media writes about our advocacy and communications we send to the City and/or LBACS are an adequate outlet for our discussions about the animals. We never have posted on their page and have no intention to. However, it is very disturbing when we see a public, taxpayer-funded agency which has been publicly criticized for poor management, that uses killing as a primary means of addressing animal homelessness and that has illegally killed at least one animal and probably many more once all research has been completed, trotting out legalese to tell the folks who pay their salaries that LBACS can delete, based on an extremely broad definition, anything they don't agree with. When people unnecessarily kill animals and do so in potentially illegal and inhumane ways, they don't like to be called out on it. And this surely proves it. We encourage people to continue to speak out for animals at LBACS - but not on their page. Through the means provided us by our democracy: Commenting at City Council, asking for meetings with your Council representatives, peacefully protesting, and any of the many ways discussed below: How you can help: https://goo.gl/U44smo Report complaints about LBACS: https://goo.gl/FT7V8j Yet another unjust death at Long Beach Animal Care Services. It’s been reported on a local networker’s page that Caleb, a healthy dog that had been at the shelter for 2 weeks, was killed this past week in spite of the fact that LBACS was not full and had multiple empty cages. This happens often in unreformed shelters like LBACS – Empty-Cage Killing. It happens for a variety of reasons: It’s easier to kill than to care for or socialize animals; the shelter is disorganized; a dog that has been denied proper human care and handling been out of his kennel in weeks is less than a 100% model citizen and growls one too many times. What it all boils down to is an indifferent City that promotes and encourages bad shelter management. Posts on the networker’s page detailed more horrors out of LBACS: **Evaluations done by un uncertified “behaviorist” through the kennel slats **No walks or play yard access for dogs **Inconsistent rules and lack of follow-through on leads that could save lives **There was even a report of over 2 dozen cats being killed the day before the Mayor visited to make the shelter look less crowded and the shelter staff lying about it. If you’ve been following this page, you know there’s more. ** Thor, who had an adopter and a rescue who wanted him last July. Thor was killed illegally by LBACS in violation of the Hayden Law, a fact the City Attorney continues to deny in spite of a preponderance of evidence. **Charlie, an arthritic little guy who was shuttled around the shelter, bitten by kennel mates, neutered while sick, and then after this ordeal, was killed for “manageable behavior.” **Punkin Spice, a defenseless kitten killed because she tested FeLV+ at an age where false positives are commonplace. The list is far longer than this and it goes on and on. How is it even possible that these things are happening in our shelter and people are not down at City Council every Tuesday night telling the people whose salaries we pay that they’re not doing their jobs? Mayor Garcia has shown himself to be insincere in his professed desire to help our shelter animals. Since being elected, he has implemented not one significant shelter reform measure to clean up the mess at LBACS. He went to Sacramento Animal Care Services and met personally with their shelter director, Gina Knepp , who personally oversees 4400 adoptions a year, and Mayor Garcia told no one about it. Working with the City hasn’t worked. It’s been tried over and over. Nearly 9 years ago, advocates were talking to the City, asking them to reform LBACS. City Council will listen when they get the message LOUD AND CLEAR from the community that the KILLING MUST STOP. Right now, they’re not hearing that. Go to City Council. Protest. Write letters to the editor and your city council rep. If all you can do is share post, share posts. But don’t wait for the City to listen to reason. They have nearly 9 years of experience in placating the rescue community, in patting folks on the head and saying “thanks for all you do” and then turning around and letting the slaughter continue. If they keep killing, and we know what’s going on and don’t speak up at City Council, in protests, and in public denouncements of a broken shelter that refuses to change, it’s on US. It’s on ME. It’s on YOU. It’s the moral obligation of each and every one of us who care about animals to stand up and say stop the abuse and STOP the killing. The City Council meeting schedule is here: https://goo.gl/AnREUm Facebook pages of City Council are here: https://goo.gl/jXWtKo E-mail addresses of City Council are here: https://goo.gl/pwHBKc People often defend animal shelters, and this is true in Long Beach, as well. Recent arguments put forth have said that LBACS doesn't have enough money to stop killing the nearly 2400 animals they kill each year. That is absolutely not true. LBACS has a budget in excess of $4.5 million, not counting money from the cities it contracts with. Sacramento ACS has substantially the same budget and is doing 4400 adoptions a year. It's not because of a lack of money that our shelter kills. When you look at the animals most killed by our shelter and look at why they were killed, the reasons become clear: - Dogs. Dogs with good temperaments or slight but manageable behavior issues are being kept in the shelter for long periods of time. They then deteriorate after these long stays, or they are subject to snap judgments based on limited information about their temperaments and are labeled "severe behavioral issue" or "aggressive" and are killed. Dogs who get kennel cough after unnecessarily long stays are also killed at the shelter. If there had been a strong adoption or foster program, they wouldn't get sick and they wouldn't be killed. Problem: Lack of a strong adoption program and foster program, not a lack of funding. - Cats: Cats also enter the shelter in good shape, but they easily become sick with URIs (your average cold.) Yet, we know that there is a large segment of the human population in LB that will adopt (as seen at the recent Kitty Hall). If there were a strong adoption program and a foster program to get cats out of the shelter faster, they wouldn't get sick and they wouldn't get killed. Problem: Lack of a strong adoption program and foster program, not a lack of funding. - Kittens: Kittens, especially kittens that are not yet weaned, are still killed at alarming numbers. LBACS refuses to have a foster program for them - the best they do is off-the-record give DIY bottle feeding kits to people who bring kittens in and let them take them back if they're willing to bottle feed them. The fact that it's off-the-record is a hallmark of LBACS' operations, and it's the way the City placates concerned community members without ever taking true responsibility for putting in place programs to save lives. Problem: Lack of a regular foster program for weaned kittens and lack of a bottle-baby foster program for unweaned kittens, not a lack of funding. In spite of this, there are still some people who blame the public for problem and use it as a justification for the killing of animals. There is no other sector in civic life where we simply say - we have to (insert heinous act similar to shelter killing) because the public is irresponsible. Imagine if the government said that all parents have to be responsible before we can take care of children at Child Protective Services. It's ludicrous. Yet this is what many in the group of city sycophants who surround the shelter say about Long Beach ACS. Then, when these issues are brought up, there are people who say "You can't criticize the shelter. Volunteer there, then you can talk." We never say all parents have to volunteer at schools so we can clean up problems with the school system. We never say say that people have to work in a hospital or do independent audits of hospitals to reform the health care system. We pay the government to do these things, and we pay them well. It's their job to do the will of the people. Those arguments are simply another way to deflect criticism and stop doing the real work that has to be done at our shelters: putting in place strong programs, run by competent people, who are accountable to the public. This is not rocket science - it's good government, and we don't have it yet in our city and at our shelter. We'll keep advocating for the shelter animals, but frankly, Long Beach, you should be outraged. After nearly 4 years of hearing about these programs as a result of our advocacy, LBACS and the Mayor continue to take half-measures, spin the truth and kill animals needlessly. All in your name. All on your dime. It does NOT have to be this way. In a stunning display of shameless insincerity, Mayor Garcia continues to mislead the public about what’s going on at the Long Beach animal shelter. In an e-mail to Long Beach residents yesterday, Mayor Garcia reported Long Beach Animal Care Services’ (LBACS) statistics for the first 6 months of 2016, saying that the news -- specifically the news about adoptions -- at LBACS was nothing short of great. He then went on to discuss the number of animals impounded and the number of animals euthanized by LBACS. Actual numbers of adoptions were not mentioned. Stayin’ Alive Long Beach has been reporting on LBACS’ statistics since 2013, acting as a monitor on the public’s behalf of a city agency that has largely kept the public in the dark about what happens to shelter animals in our city shelter. At Stayin’ Alive, we know that the public is smart enough to understand the difference between a real adoption into a loving home and a shelter simply pushing animals off to another shelter or rescue. We know that LBACS also knows the difference because they log adoptions, rescues and transfers to other shelters as very separate things in their database. The Mayor’s Strategy – Passing the Buck Instead of Stepping Up But Mayor Garcia is either unclear on the concept, or he thinks the public is not paying attention. An explanation may help. An adoption is not shipping a shelter animal by plane thousands of miles away to another shelter for yet another shelter stay. An adoption is not releasing an animal to an overworked and underfunded rescue that is working desperately to make up for LBACS’ lack of an adoption program. An adoption is not giving an animal to neighboring SpcaLA so the animal can spend more time in yet another shelter – a shelter that according to its own website doesn’t believe in no kill sheltering and is not accountable to the City or to Long Beach taxpayers. While it’s true that euthanasias are down at LBACS, it is largely due to these “pass-the-buck” strategies that show no real commitment to getting animals into good homes, and that in many cases result in extended stays in other shelters, where the animals often fall ill and then are euthanized. Our neighbors to the north at Sacramento Animal Care Services know the difference between passing the buck and finding animals good homes – Sacramento did more than 4400 adoptions in 2015. LBACS did 471. Mayor Garcia seemed to understand the distinction between adoptions and non-adoption outcomes back during the mayoral election when he was promising folks that he would increase adoptions at our shelter. He got elected on that promise, and now he’s claiming to have made good on that promise without actually having fulfilled it, and without reporting real adoption numbers. Long Beach's Shelter Animals Are Dying Needlessly Watching Mayor Garcia dance around the adoption question would almost be comical if it weren’t so heartbreaking. Because the truth is - our shelter animals are dying. By the Mayor’s own numbers, 725 animals were euthanized in the first six months of 2016. Yet many of these animals could have been saved if LBACS had a strong adoption program and a foster program. These suggestions are not unreasonable. Sacramento has strong adoption and foster programs. LA Animal Services has a foster program. If other cities can have such programs, surely, Long Beach can, too. Actual Adoption Numbers at LBACS are Extremely Low Here are the actual adoption numbers at LBACS, obtained by Stayin’ Alive Long Beach through the California Public Records Act. These are the numbers you’ll never see in a press release from Mayor Garcia, in spite of the fact that he campaigned specifically on the promise that he would increase actual adoptions at the Long Beach Animal Care Services shelter. As you can see, adoption numbers are low across the board, and the increase since 2015, if any, has been minimal.
This Friday, Mayor Garcia is holding a “Kitty Hall” cat adoption event at City Hall. At last year’s event, LBACS reported placing 14 cats. Such events are great photo ops for our Mayor, but they’re no substitute for a real adoption program. To put it plainly – a one-time adoption event at City Hall every 9 months is like giving Batman a bicycle, when the Batmobile is all revved up and ready to go in the parking lot outside. The bicycle in this comparison is, of course, the rarely-held Kitty Hall. The Batmobile is a robust adoption program. Clearly, our shelter needs an ongoing, continuous adoption program – not an occasional event whose main function is to make the Mayor look good. It is a sad day indeed when our elected officials use shelter animals’ plight to get elected, and then abandon them once again by failing to put into effect even the most basic of lifesaving programs – lifesaving adoption and foster programs. The good news is that voters in Long Beach can mobilize the political process to elect compassionate people into City Council and the Mayor’s office so that this can change. There is hope for shelter animals in Long Beach – Long Beach is a compassionate city. It’s up to us to make sure that we elect leaders who reflect our compassionate values. Patricia Turner is an educator and the spokesperson for Stayin’ Alive Long Beach, an animal advocacy group that promotes lifesaving programs at the Long Beach Animal Care Services animal shelter. Visit them at www.stayinalivelongbeach.org or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/stayinalivelb. Knowing that the 4th of July weekend will result in many scared animals entering the shelter, Sacramento's Front Street city shelter worked their tails off and got 111 animals adopted in just about a day and a half. More are expected as the weekend progresses. One part of their success is due to the fact that the shelter is making adoption fees free this weekend. Some will look at this and protest that these people won't take care of the animals they've adopted. This is actually not true. It's not the fee that people pay that determines a good home -- it's the screening of the applicants that is key to getting a good home. Studies have shown that there is no correlation between how much a person pays for an animal and how much the person bonds with or cares for the animal. Eliminating adoption fees can bring good people into the shelter to adopt at a critical time, when they might otherwise have waited a month or two when the shelter's need was not that great. Unfortunately, on the busiest, most crucial weekend of the year for adoptions, LBACS is doing nothing special on their Facebook page. There is one mention of fireworks being illegal in Long Beach. This law is rarely enforced - my family always had to leave Long Beach on the 4th to take our dogs to a city where they actually enforced their laws about fireworks. And there is no information about how to help animals on the 4th on their Facebook page. LBACS has said that they're understaffed right now, yet they work with rescues, community members and volunteers who have expressed to us repeatedly that they would be willing to help with the LBACS Facebook page. LBACS has not taken them up on this. Our shelter animals were abandoned once, and now they're being abandoned again, by the very shelter and City that has said they would work to save their lives. Sacramento shows us that it doesn't have to be this way. Please contact City Council and tell them you want shelter reform at the Long Beach animal shelter. Here's the contact info for LB City Council and a link to other ways you can help. The longer we wait to act, the more animals will die. It's as simple as that. So...why does a city-operated shelter need to advertise adoptable pets on its own Facebook page (in addition to any other pages run by shelter volunteers or anyone else?). Because: 1. City pages attract more people. People go to the City shelter for information about adoptable animals. They'll look up the City shelter page on Facebook, not a page that is not the official City shelter page. If the City page doesn't have animals, you've lost a ton of potential adopters right there. 2. Unofficial pages are harder to find. As a corollary to #1, unofficial pages put up by shelter volunteers are harder to find than official pages run by City shelters. Pages that are hard to find obviously attract fewer adopters, and this is not good for animals. Volunteer pages in ADDITION to the City shelter page posting adoptable animals are great. Volunteer pages that REPLACE the City shelter page are a sign that your City shelter does not take its lifesaving mission seriously. 3. Cities that don't post animals are clearly not publicly committed to lifesaving. Not posting animals on your Facebook page as a City shelter shows that you are not publicly invested in adopting shelter animals out. The fact that the City of Long Beach Animal Care Services shelter now apparently doesn't put adoptable animals on their Facebook page is a HUGE red flag that shows that LBACS (and the City Manager, Council and Mayor) wants to "fly under the radar" with regard to adoptions, and be completely divorced from any appearance of networking the animals. 4. As a corollary to #3, cities that don't post adoptable animals on their Facebook pages don't want to be accountable to the public in terms of lifesaving and adopting out animals, and their JOB is to be accountable to the public. The fact that LBACS has started shifting its facebook-networking to a volunteer-run page is a HUGE indication that LBACS has no intention of being accountable to the public. 5. City shelters have larger followings than volunteer-run pages. This is usually because they are a CITY entity. It may also be because they can afford to spend more on boosting their Facebook posts (though there's no evidence that LBACS has ever done that, in spite of having a large budget and bringing millions of dollars in through license canvassing). 6. City shelter that put all the networking responsibility on volunteers and then stifle their free speech are a particularly heinous form of shelter that kills. We have heard that LBACS interferes with the postings on one of the volunteer-run pages and that people who don't comply with their posting "preferences" can be retaliated against by being dismissed from the volunteer program. Shelter volunteers' speech is protected by the First Amendment and a recent Maryland court case recently held that "a volunteer, rescuer, or any other member of the public cannot be banned from a government shelter simply because he or she has criticized shelter management, complained about the policies and practices of the shelter, or posted information online that officials believe is unflattering to the shelter." The fact that LBACS places restrictions on how volunteers talk about the shelter is a violation of their First Amendment rights and it's not okay. It is an enormous step backward to put all networking off on a volunteer-run page in terms of adopting out animals, in terms of being accountable and in terms of furthering humane treatment of animals in the community (hint: if your shelter doesn't want people to know its doing adoptions, that is a GIANT red flag that animals aren't valued by your city government. People hear that message loud and clear.) So we think it's GREAT that there are volunteer-run shelter pages. We applaud them; we value the work of those volunteers and we're grateful that they're there, working in a broken shelter that still kills animals for no good reason. But LBACS needs to take responsibility for what they have been charged to do by the animal-loving public -- not run away from it at every turn. Mayor Garcia is busy revising history on his Facebook page, saying in the last election, he promised to lower euthanasia rates at the shelter. That's not exactly it. At all. He actually promised to increase adoptions. If Garcia is trying to be an underachiever, he's really nailing it. In the year after he made that promise, the progress in adoptions was glacial. You almost have to TRY to not to do adoptions to do the lamer-than-lame job he has done on increasing adoptions. We responded to this on his page with the open letter below. So far, no response. Shocker. ***** With all due respect, Mayor Robert Garcia, you didn't just promise to lower euthanasia rates - as lbreportdotcom reported back in 2014, you promised to build a strong adoption program, which to most folks means you'll increase adoptions. Specifically, you said: "..One thing that Ted and I discussed, I'm really happy that the shelter is doing, is we're hiring this full time adoptions coordinator for the shelter, which I think is great...This person and their job is going to be first of all to view how do we build a strong adoptions program...We have obviously on the SPCA side is we have the adoption work that they're doing every single day, and we also have some adoption work that's being done currently at the shelter through our volunteers and the great staff we have there. But this person is going to be tasked also in how do we strengthen, grow and develop this adoptions program so we have a really strong adoptions program at the shelter. I'm really excited about that and I hope you guys are all excited about that too because I think it's going to make a difference..." http://www.lbreport.com/news/oct14/nokill.htm Yet, in 2015, the year you said adoptions would increase, LBACS only adopted out 68 more animals than it did the prior year. The "full-time adoption coordinator" position fell flat - how is it that with a full-time adoption coordinator on staff, LB's shelter only did 471 adoptions in 2015 while Sacramento's did more than 4400? Instead of making changes to put animals into good homes, you've moved toward band-aid like strategies that put the animals into other shelters, which is just passing the buck, and it's harmful to the animals, who should be going to homes, rather than to longer stays in shelters and rescues. You might not be aware of this, but longer lengths of stay in shelters correlate highly with higher mortality rates. This is because animals often get sick in the shelter. They shouldn't be shuttled around - they need to be adopted into homes, like many other city shelters do. When our shelter is killing 2400 animals a year, we can't afford to ignore adoptions. We can't afford to ignore any positive solutions. I hope you'll reconsider the direction you've taken on this issue, especially since you promised more than 200 animal advocates in that Town Hall Meeting back in 2014 to "build a strong adoption program." People who voted for you for this issue deserve better representation, and our shelter animals deserve a better chance. Irvine has placed a ban on the killing of healthy and adoptable animals. While this is good news overall, there are a few points to notice about this case. Two are instructive and one is cautionary. 1. The first thing is the involvement of the City Council and the fact that they 1) formed a Council sub-committee to study the issue and 2) called for a study of the shelter by an outside consultant. This shows that Irvine really wanted to get to the bottom of the matter. 2. Second - the fact that this was all brought about because shelter volunteers complained to the city. From the article: "In response to the concerns of the volunteers, city officials halted all euthanasia – unless medically necessary – for 60 days in early 2015." Folks who see disorganization, unclear and poorly executed policies, retaliatory behavior and poor decision-making at their shelters are the ones who are the most effective at getting the City to respond. They need to speak out. As you can see, City Councils have the power to declare policies on killing -- even halt euthanasia -- but they won't do it unless they are pushed to, especially in Long Beach. 3. Third - and these are caveats, while Irvine is moving in the right direction, placing a ban on killing healthy and adoptable animals is only a start because it still allows for the killing of treatable animals. Many of the animals that are killed in the Long Beach shelter are very treatable: they stay in the shelter too long (because of a non-existent adoption program) and they get sick and then they're killed. Limiting it to adoptable animals allows the shelter to have a gigantic loophole in saying that that kitten that sneezes is not adoptable because he/she has a very treatable upper respiratory infection (aka 'a cold.') The protections need to be extended to healthy and TREATABLE animals, and a strong adoption program needs to be put in place so that animals can get out of the shelter BEFORE they get sick. We're moving toward a future where no healthy or treatable animal will be killed, or where city shelters will do everything in their power to protect healthy and treatables -- how long will Long Beach fight that?
Mayor Garcia has said on a rescuer's Facebook post that he will "look into" the newest issue that has come to light about the rigid rules and restrictive policies that SpcaLA imposes on our city shelter - this time, it's about LBACS animals not being allowed to play in an SpcaLA play area.
Let's be clear about this: Mayor Garcia knows exactly what the issues are with SpcaLA. Stayin' Alive brought these issues to him during the last election, and he said he would "look into" them, then, too. In March of this year, we also submitted a letter to him regarding untrue statements his staff was making about LBACS' save rate and the relationship with SpcaLA - again bringing up the issue of the cherry-picking of the most adoptable animals that SpcaLA engages in. Mayor Garcia knows, but he's done nothing about it, and since he was elected, more than 5,000 animals have been killed at LBACS. Lies and inaction aren't new for Mayor Garcia. In fact, he promised to 200 animal advocates in a town hall meeting back in October 2014 to increase adoptions - he also implied during that meeting, in direct response to a question about the issue, that he would put a stop to the way SpcaLA manipulates the City. However, from the moment Garcia was elected, he jumped right into the Pat West lie-fest, spinning shelter numbers and allowing SpcaLA to continue cherry picking the animals. One of the biggest whoppers Mayor Garcia has told was that he would increase adoptions in 2015 - a promise he still has not kept almost 2 years after he was elected: "[Mayor Garcia]...One thing that Ted [Stevens] and I discussed, I'm really happy that the shelter is doing, is we're hiring this full time adoptions coordinator for the shelter, which I think is great...This person and their job is going to be first of all to view how do we build a strong adoptions program...We have obviously on the SPCA side is we have the adoption work that they're doing every single day, and we also have some adoption work that's being done currently at the shelter through our volunteers and the great staff we have there. But this person is going to be tasked also in how do we strengthen, grow and develop this adoptions program so we have a really strong adoptions program at the shelter. I'm really excited about that and I hope you guys are all excited about that too because I think it's going to make a difference..." (from LBReport.com 10/14/14). These were empty promises. In 2015, the year Garcia said he'd increase adoptions, the shelter did 471 adoptions, up from a paltry 434 the year before. Sacramento Animal Care Services, in contrast, did nearly 10 times that number (see the chart for December 2015, cumulative numbers). Not only did adoptions not increase in any significant way, Mayor Garcia continued to pander to SpcaLA - muddying the waters even more by transferring adoption duties to the non-profit, and also, we've been told, giving the bursting-at-the-scenes non-profit the revenue from those adoptions. Rest assured: the Mayor knows about the SpcaLA mess and has done nothing to change it. Has anyone ever noticed that it's an SpcaLA pet that Mayor Garcia shows at City Council meetings and not an LBACS animal? SpcaLA has almost double the revenue stream and $34 million in assets and while our shelter animals are dying by the thousands, we're spending City time on showing SpcaLA animals. Make no mistake, SpcaLA animals need homes, too, but at the very least, the spotlight should be shared with an LBACS animal as well at City Council. In the following video from May 2015, we see Mayor Garcia bringing (for the umpteenth time) SpcaLA up to show a pet, and of course, in the video we see that SpcaLA has gotten its hands on some more puppies. In fact, SpcaLA uses LBACS as a puppy mill, taking 75% of LBACS' puppies, while taking in only 19% of LBACS' kittens.
Those who are new to the SpcaLA/LBACS debate need to know that Mayor Garcia's record on shelter animals is dismal. He got elected on the backs of shelter animals, saying that he would increase adoptions, and then he did exactly nothing. Needless to say, anything Garcia says should be taken with a massive grain of salt.
Mayor Garcia says he'll "look into" individual issues like a play yard, but animals lovers of Long Beach need to keep a healthy skepticism about anything Garcia says about improving the shelter animals. And know this: Until the City commits to a full adoption program and writes its commitment to a 90% save rate into City law, Mayor Garcia's offerings are nothing more than band-aids to stem the flow from a gaping wound. |
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An initiative to make Long Beach a No Kill community. Categories |