Shelter Short of Time : County Animal Facility Is up Against Deadline for Neutering Adoptees

His jowls swaying in the breeze, a salt-and-pepper Great Dane squinted into the sun at the Orange County Animal Shelter Friday afternoon, casting a stately but disgruntled profile on the walls of his metal cage.

“I came by earlier, and he gave me a big woof,” said Tricia James, the shelter’s public education officer. “I don’t think he’s very happy about being here.”

The old boy doesn’t know the half of it. Of the 19,000 stray or abandoned dogs that will arrive at the shelter this year, fewer than 12,000 will make it out alive. The rest, either unadopted or deemed not adoptable, will be killed--a heartbreaking conundrum that, in Orange County, is getting more complex by the day.

On Jan. 1, a state law written to contain the hordes of stray animals roaming California will go into effect, requiring all shelters to spay or neuter dogs and cats before they can be given up for adoption. The Orange County shelter is scrambling to meet the deadline--and is failing miserably, by some accounts.

In March 1998, anticipating the new law, Orange County began having cats--statistically speaking, America’s favorite pet--neutered or spayed by outside veterinarians before putting them up for adoption.

But, apparently because it waited too long before starting, the county has no similar plan to meet the deadline for spaying or neutering the 4,500 dogs adopted each year, said Robert Newman, a Santa Ana attorney and member of the shelter’s advisory board.

The Orange County shelter serves 2.6 million people and received 34,573 dogs, cats, opossums, birds, skunks and other critters last year. The county appears to be the only urban area in the state that can’t meet the law’s requirements.

Animal shelter managers will hold an emergency meeting Wednesday to show the public their latest plan to meet the deadline. The advisory board, after hearing that plan, will eventually make a recommendation to the Board of Supervisors, which must approve it.

“It’s called sleeping at the switch,” Newman said.

“We’ve all known about this for a long time. Month after month after month, the advisory board, as well as members of the humane community, as well as members of the public, sat in front of the animal shelter at each meeting, saying: ‘What have we done to get ready for this? What is our plan?’ The party line was: ‘Don’t worry. We’ll be ready.’ ”

County officials deny that they have mishandled the deadline and remain optimistic that they will be able to put together a plan for complying with the new law before January.

The law is the latest move in a decades-long struggle to reduce both the number of stray animals and the number of animals that have to be killed at shelters because officials can’t find homes for them. An estimated 600,000 animals are euthanized each year in California.

“Euthanasia rates are abhorrent,” Newman said. “Adoption rates are not enough. And overpopulation runs rampant. We shouldn’t have waited.”

Not all officials connected to the dilemma think it’s a disaster--including Assemblyman Edward Vincent (D-Inglewood), who sponsored the law in the first place.

In an interview last week, Vincent said he would be willing to ask his colleagues in Sacramento to give Orange County an extension.

“If they need some time, they should have it,” said Vincent, who sponsored the measure before it became law a year ago. “We just want to do something to not have animals needlessly put away, needlessly euthanized. But I can understand. There’s going to be a lot of people not ready for Y2K.”

Mark McDorman, interim director of Orange County Animal Control, did not return repeated phone calls to his office last week. But Carole Newstadt, a spokeswoman for Orange County’s Health Care Agency, which oversees the operations of the shelter, insists the last-minute scurrying is a nonissue.

“We don’t perceive ourselves as having difficulty at all,” she said. “We are very confident about where we are in the process. Regardless of what you might hear, that is not a concern of our organization.”

According to Newman and others, it should be.

Earlier this month, animal shelter managers unveiled their first plan to meet the deadline: to farm out the task of spaying and neutering of more than a dozen dogs a day to area veterinarians.

That plan, Newman said, was “a fiasco,” and was immediately attacked as unreasonable and unrealistic. Managers acknowledged, for example, that they did not know of any vets who wanted the job.

The second plan, officials said, which will be released Wednesday, will call for the shelter to build a sterilization clinic, officials said.

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Even before it’s been made public, that plan is under attack too. For example, because the shelter is funded by taxpayers, it probably will have to accept bids for additional neutering and spaying services that it will perform. That bureaucratic process alone takes weeks.

And Jackie Keener, president of the Animal Assistance League of Orange County, said the Orange County shelter doesn’t have enough room to establish a sterilization clinic.

“We will make room,” James, the shelter’s education officer, said Friday. “We’re going to be in compliance.”

In the meantime, the shelter risks becoming the target of state sanctions if it allows the public to continue adopting dogs that haven’t been neutered or spayed.

On the other hand, the shelter could become the target of the animal rights community if it suddenly cuts off adoption services altogether and becomes overcrowded. The shelter already runs nearly at capacity, James said.

The rock-and-a-hard-place scenarios don’t end there.

Initially, when it became clear that Orange County might blow the deadline, there was a concern that the county would have to resort to increasing its rate of euthanasia to accommodate the crush of animals who could not be adopted.

But that’s not likely either, because a different law that went into effect this summer requires animal shelters to try harder to get dogs and cats adopted, lengthening the period of time animals must be held in shelters.

All in all, Keener said, “I don’t know what the solution is.

“We’re looking for one,” she said. “This is a concern of the whole animal community.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Shelter Strays

A neutering law scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1 is designed to cut down on the number of stray animals and the number of animals that are euthanized at shelters. The Orange County Animal Shelter took in 45,708 animals during fiscal 1998-1999. A look at the numbers:

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x LIVE ANIMALS CLAIMED BY OWNERS ADOPTED EUTHANIZED Dogs 18,898 5,360 4,865 7,704 Cats 12,038 254 2,011 9,535 Other* 3,637 122 494 2,150

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*includes opposums, birds, skunks and coyotes

NOTE: The shelter, located in Orange, serves 2 million people in the following areas: Anaheim, Brea, Cypress, Fountain Valley, Fullerton, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, Laguna Hills, Laguna Woods, Lake Forest, La Palma, Los Alamitos, Orange, Placentia, San Juan Capistrano, Stanton, Tustin, Villa Park, Yorba Linda, La Habra and unincorporated areasof Orange County. La Habra also contracts with the shelter for limited services.

Source: Orange County Animal Shelter