Daniel Steps Into the Lion’s Den of Animal Services

The question Dan Knapp’s friends keep asking about his new job as chief of Los Angeles’ Animal Services Department is: Why does he want it?

After all, this isn’t just a city department. It’s a cross between animal law and animal welfare.

In the strange world of city animal services, bureaucrats have learned to take death threats and lawsuits in stride. Animal rights advocates see each line in the budget as a matter of life and death.

Incompetence is viewed as murderous, and reformers seek not mere change but a new human consciousness reflected in city policies from New York to San Francisco.

“Think of the city’s animal shelters as Planned Parenthood,” said Gini Barrett, one of five commissioners overseeing the department. “Think of the animal rights groups as Operation Rescue,” the antiabortion organization.

Into this caldron steps Knapp, executive director of the Sonoma County Humane Society and an ordained Assembly of God minister, the first general manager to be appointed from outside the department in at least a quarter of a century.

Gentle and amiable, a minister who declines to be addressed as “Reverend” and uses phrases like “goodness gracious,” Knapp is seen as the salve and the savior for whom the department has yearned.

Named to the post by Mayor Richard Riordan, Knapp starts later this month. He is a reformer eager to bring progressive--and expensive--changes to a department that struggles to perform basic functions.

Chief among these is “100% adoption of adoptable animals,” a goal that could require reducing the number of animals killed in Los Angeles’ shelters by about 24,000 per year. “I’ve been called crazy. . . . But everyone who has had a dream is seen as crazy,” Knapp said. “Look at Noah and the ark.”

Knapp takes control of one of the largest animal services departments in the country at a time when an animal control model handed down from the 19th century is being shaken to its roots by an increasingly influential animal welfare lobby.

Historically, animal laws were rooted in public health policies aimed at preventing people from dying of rabies. The policies were carried out with an efficiency and determination that tended to eclipse animal welfare concerns. That model established one stereotype that still rankles animal workers today: “the ‘Li’l Rascals’ dogcatcher,” as one advocate put it.

Today, professionals are realizing they “should not just be about picking up and killing stray dogs,” Barrett said.

Central to the new ethic are new “no kill” and “low kill” policies, based on the belief that it is unethical to euthanize thousands of animals yearly simply to make way for the next batch.

From a more practical standpoint, private humane societies, which in many areas provide municipal animal control, increasingly object to draining money from other programs to fund the killing of animals.

So in recent years, mainstream humane societies have risen in revolt against euthanizing healthy animals, saying, “We won’t do your killing anymore,” said Joyce Briggs, spokeswoman for the American Humane Assn.

In New York, San Francisco and elsewhere, humane societies have ended public contracts and forced cities to create separate shelter systems. San Francisco’s humane society has been known to spend thousands of dollars on training and medical treatment for individual animals to make them suitable pets.

“What you have here is a humane community growing and ever increasing in enlightenment,” said Richard Avanzino, president of the San Francisco branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The changes in New York and San Francisco have galvanized animal rights advocates to press for stronger measures against animal overpopulation. Mere public education won’t do anymore, in the view of many advocates.

Known for his business acumen and public relations skills, Knapp has been at the forefront of reform, first as executive director of the Humane Society of Humboldt County and then in Sonoma County, considered to have “one of the better systems in the country,” said Ed Sayres, director of the Phoenix-based Pet Smart Charities.

A former seminarian at Simpson College, Knapp studied organizational development at the University of San Francisco. He has been pastor of Assembly of God churches in San Jose, Santa Monica and Huntington Park.

In the church world, his expertise was as a turnaround specialist, called in to straighten out financial and other problems, he said. He made a jump from religion to the corporate world when he was asked to resolve financial difficulties at a Silicon Valley high-tech firm.

From there he went to the financially troubled Humboldt County Humane Society and then to Sonoma County. Knapp, 42, and his wife, Suzanne, have a teenage son, a teenage daughter and a dog named Pugsly.

The combination of management specialist and minister has served him well, said Sonoma County Humane Society President Nanci Burton. She said Knapp excelled at such diverse tasks as raising money and comforting pet owners who came to shelters to have ailing dogs euthanized.

When Knapp talks about animals, it is the only time he sounds faintly like a minister.

“A great disease, if not the greatest, is loneliness,” he said. “Animals heal that.”

In Sonoma County, he is credited with helping to push through ambitious new regulations, including restricting dog leashes to 6 feet, requiring all outside cats to be spayed or neutered, and mandating that dogs be sterilized if they are impounded more than once--whether the owner consents or not.

Knapp also helped develop guidelines for an unusual “cat colony” management strategy in the region, using public and private funds to trap and sterilize feral cats, then return them to the wild.

Marc Richardson, assistant city manager in Santa Rosa, where Knapp also served as animal services director, said Knapp had a knack for getting different groups to agree and support the plans. “[His] biggest strength is his communication skills,” said Richardson.

Nowhere are such skills needed more than in Los Angeles, where animal welfare groups and the city department are locked in a seemingly intractable standoff acknowledged as harmful by all sides.

“It’s almost like this silent Cold War,” said Joyce Pieper, an advocate for the group Fund for Animals. “What’s missing is this spirit of ‘We are in this together.’ ”

Lacking funds and popularity, the Los Angeles Department of Animal Services, its name recently changed from Animal Regulation, has made stabs at instituting more progressive policies.

The commission has been working on a “vision” plan to reduce pet populations, and on Monday will consider competing proposals to revamp spaying and neutering policies.

But the department has also come under fire for failing to fulfill more traditional functions.

Despite mounting pressure, the agency still killed 57,868 animals last year, more than 70% of the total that entered its shelters, and 58% of those deemed “adoptable.”

Los Angeles shelters are 50% over capacity, and lack of kennel space is the main factor in animal deaths. Budget cuts have diminished the ranks of officers on the street. The department has 180 employees and a $7-million budget, and until recently had just one veterinarian to handle 81,000 animals per year.

The city, meanwhile, offers a particularly nettlesome combination of dense population, poverty, cultural differences and politics. And a dedicated group of activists, increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress, has harried the department in recent years with letters, protests to the commission, lawsuits and threats of lawsuits. One insider said the acrimony has occasionally brimmed over into anonymous threats.

The general manager’s post is, in short, “the toughest job in the world,” said Madeleine Bernstein, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the SPCA.

Knapp says his goals will be to meet with advocates and listen to their concerns, and to foster ties with private groups and donors, since city funds alone cannot pay for more humane treatment of animals.

Despite the divisions over the department, Knapp’s appointment is being welcomed by everyone from animal rights activists to the employees union.

Animal rights advocates, especially, have anointed him. “Oh, my God. Bless him,” exclaimed one, Joyce Forest, when his name came up.

But, warned Pieper, “they will expect him to work miracles. And if this poor guy makes a mistake, they will crucify him.”