Stemming the Tide of Dead Animals : Humaneness: Pound animals will continue to die in San Diego County as long as economic interests of veterinarians continue to block low-cost spaying and neutering.

The issue of pound seizure stirred passionate debate for months before the November election. In the end, voters decided, by a huge margin, that the county Department of Animal Control should continue to sell animals “which will die anyway” to UC San Diego for research purposes.

With the constant refrain of “they will die anyway” in my ears, I waited for anyone on either side to question why these animals had to die. But no one asked what crime they had committed or even why they’d ended up in public shelters. No one bothered to wonder why 25,000 dogs and cats, puppies and kittens leave county pounds as corpses every year.

As one who has held the dying and injected the lethal dose, I refuse to accept their deaths, and I’m not alone. Across the country, people are finally acting to stop the killing.

Those numbing numbers do not need to be an unavoidable fact of life.

Kim Sturla, the director of the Peninsula Humane Society in San Mateo County, tried for years to educate the public with the statistics: Of the 16,000 animals entering that shelter every year, 3,000 are claimed and 3,000 placed in adoptive homes. The rest, all 10,000 of them, are killed and their bodies tossed in barrels.

But Sturla has changed her tactics. In October, the San Mateo Humane Society placed inserts in 178,000 Bay Area newspapers and treated readers to the sight of some of those barrels of bodies. She then invited members of the media to witness the execution of four kittens, a cat and three dogs.

The Humane Society also convinced a county supervisor to introduce an ordinance that would ban breeding until the county achieves “zero pet overpopulation.” Despite jeering denouncement from local breeders and pressure from the powerful pet industry, including the American Kennel Club, other supervisors have pledged to support the legislation.

Other counties, including Santa Cruz, are considering similar legislation. Santa Cruz already has a law requiring that any dog impounded more than once be altered.

In a number of communities, animal control agencies have opened their own low-cost spay/neuter clinics despite initial vocal opposition from veterinarians. The Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation led the way and now operates four clinics, which charge $20 or less for surgical sterilization as well as vaccinations.

In Palo Alto, Animal Services impounded 10,000 dogs and cats when its clinic first opened. Last year only 3,200 animals passed through the shelter doors, and the body count dropped accordingly.

New Jersey has started a statewide spay/neuter program, in which participating veterinarians receive 80% of their standard fee. The program is subsidized by the people who cause the problem, through a $3 surcharge on licenses for unaltered pets.

Although these efforts have reduced the sheer numbers of animals, we still euthanize as many as 20 million cats and dogs every year in this country. The tendency among the people who operate the killing machine has been to blame everyone else. Recently, though, a few have seen the enemy within--adoption programs at shelters which unleash fertile animals into their communities.

A few states, including California, have model laws that mandate the altering of any animal adopted from public or private shelters. But the law though is only as good as its enforcement, and compliance usually hovers around 50%.

Not so in Marin County, where compliance with spay and neuter contracts has now reached 100%, thanks to the efforts of volunteers.

In other cities like Memphis, Seattle and Chicago, compliance with contracts is no longer an issue. Every animal that leaves their shelters, even those as young as 6 weeks, has been surgically altered. Those shelters are not adding even one litter to the unwanted.

In contrast, the killing goes on as usual in San Diego with only feeble attempts to stem the tide of dead animals.

Early neuter and spaying of shelter animals hasn’t even been considered. And little effort is expended on enforcement of spay/neuter contracts. Those unaltered animals and their offspring ensure the repopulation of the very shelters they come from.

No low cost clinic will open in San Diego soon. After all, we wouldn’t want to offend the vets, would we? Instead, a small percentage of veterinarians contract with the county to provide surgical sterilization at reduced rates, but the fees are far higher than those charged in New Jersey or Los Angeles or elsewhere.

Don’t look for full page ads in your newspaper or invitations to the media to view the executions of our former pets either. In fact, members of the press are banned from the “sleeper rooms” of county shelters.

As long as the slaughter goes on behind closed doors, the people of San Diego will have the luxury of not knowing. Only the dogs and cats will know--as they await their turn in line.