Editorial: Sterilizing pets is key to reaching L.A.’s no-kill goal at shelters

In the fiscal year that ended June 30, Los Angeles city shelters took in 57,225 animals — mostly dogs and cats — and euthanized 14,084 of them. As heartbreaking as these numbers are, the total is less than half the amount killed annually about a decade ago. But no animal should be killed for lack of shelter space, which is exactly what City Controller Ron Galperin said when he released an audit that his department conducted on Los Angeles Animal Services’ statistics — the grim accounting of the animals that come in and the ones that get out alive.

The audit found the statistics that the shelter system makes available online to be “reasonably accurate.” Not perfect, but not distorted to make the city appear to be doing a better job of adopting out animals than it was, as some advocates had alleged.

At the same time, though, Galperin lamented — rightfully — that the system was still killing healthy, adoptable animals to free up shelter space, which it did to 414 cats and 1,231 dogs from July 2013 to June 2014. Becoming a “no-kill” shelter system has, for years, been the goal of the current Animal Services’ general manager, Brenda Barnette, and her predecessor, the previous mayor and his predecessor.

One of the challenges is that many people don’t comply with the city’s mandate to spay or neuter their pets, which increases the number of animals that wind up in the shelters. The department provides spay-neuter services at most of its shelters, hands out vouchers to use at some private clinics and contracts with nonprofits to offer free sterilization services to qualifying pet owners in underserved areas, including South L.A., where incomes are lower and veterinarians are few. But as Galperin’s audit notes, the city can do more.

The department should get more vouchers out into underserved communities. It may be cost-effective to have a now-shuttered shelter building in South L.A. refurbished and run by a nonprofit group. The city should also allow at least one existing shelter to have evening hours for adoptions. Meanwhile, city officials need to find a way out from under a 2010 court order barring Animal Services from facilitating the trapping of feral cats for neutering and releasing back outdoors. The order has led to a surge in the population of kittens.

The no-kill goal is humane, and just striving for it yields benefits. Impounds in L.A. city shelters have trended down over the last several years. But the city has limited financial resources, which shouldn’t be spent indefinitely warehousing animals. It’s crucial to work toward sterilizing pets so that fewer unwanted ones end up in the shelters, and those that do get adopted quickly.

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