Innovation
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 1995:
“By the end of 1995, the Progressive
Animal Welfare Society shelter will stop killing
healthy, adoptable dogs and cats,” executive direc-
tor Craig Brestrup announced on February 24. He
pledged to accomplish this through increasing adop-
tion promotion, beginning to offer free and low-cost
neutering to the public, expanding use of foster care,
and introducing an “outplacement” program to assist
people who must for some reason give up a pet.
“Animals deserve better from us than a painless
death,” Brestrup continued. Other changes at PAWS
include “a mostly new shelter staff,” and a promise
that, “While the PAWS phone system will continue
to offer voice mail and recorded messages, your calls
will be answered by a knowledgeable, friendly, hon-
est-to-goodness real person.” Founded in 1967, the
PAWS shelter serves King County, Washington.
ARK Online: News of Animal Rescue and
Adoption at Home and Abroad, a multimedia elec-
tronic magazine, was to debut March 15 via World
Wide Web, edited by Paige Powell, longtime associ-
ate of the late artist Andy Warhol and former editor of
Interview magazine. ARK Online is an outgrowth of
Powell’s Ark cable-access TV show, broadcast from
Portland, Oregon. Powell began the program to help
place dogs taken from animal collector Vikki Kittles
[see Court Calendar, page 17], after spending
$9,000 in ultimately successful attempts to get them
released from custody.
The Luv-A-Pet Clinic, a high-volume,
low-cost neutering clinic underwritten by PetsSmart
and operated by the Animal Foundation International,
debuted February 14 in Phoenix. Free surgeries were
offered to the first 500 clients. Regular prices range
from $15 for male cats to $30 for female dogs. The
original AFI clinic, in Las Vegas, has performed
more than 50,000 neutering operations since 1989,
cutting the city euthanasia toll from 22,000 per year to
15,000. The toll in Maricopa County, Arizona,
where Phoenix is located, has fallen from 80,000 to
57,652 during the past five years, but Luv-A-Pet
aims to bring it down even faster.
Identification
Schering-Plough Corp. and the American
Kennel Club on March 8 announced they will jointly
develop an AKC Companion Animal Recovery
Database as part of the Schering-Plough animal health
division’s new HomeAgain Companion Animal
Retrieval System––the latest and best-financed yet of
many attempts to promote a national pet identification
registry via collars, tattoos, or as in this case,
microchip implants. ANIMAL PEOPLE survey data
compiled for the North Shore Animal League indi-
cates that while 26% of pet owners license their ani-
mals, only 8.4% join registries, and no more than
1.4% join ID registries.
The Royal SPCA pet ID program got a
boost on March 7 when Queen Elizabeth had her two
cocker spaniels microchipped. The RSPCA has
micro-chipped over 125,000 animals since 1992.
