Joint effort aims for no-kill in Albuquerque

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1999:

ALBUQUERQUE––They didn’t
quite offer a Spay Day USA deal to match
Dallas, where PetFixx and The Fund for
Animals paid high school students age 18 and
older $5.00 on February 11 for each dog or cat
they brought in to be altered, or New York,
where The Fund clinic offered a “Neuter
Benny for a Penny” promotion to senior citizens,
welfare recipients, people with disabilities,
and animal rescuers––but the third annual
“Neuter Scooter for a Nickel” day organized
by the People’s Anti-Cruelty Association/
Albuquerque Animal Rescue did unite
Albuquerque Animal Services, New Mexico
Animal Friends, and the Animal Humane
Association in a pilot effort to “help this city
get started on the road to becoming no-kill,”
said PACA/AAR president Jane Long.

Long credited the organizational
impetus to Animal Services director Bob
Hillman––who had a good week, as city judge
Judith Nakamura on February 5 dismissed an
attempted private cruelty prosecution of
Animal Services kennel supervisor Bernadette
Garcia Sanchez on grounds that activist Marcy
Britton was not authorized by either the local
district attorney or the attorney general of New
Mexico to bring the case for “the people.”
Britton charged that Sanchez on at
least four occasions choked cats with an animal
control stick. In a separate suit, still
pending, Britton contends that Hillman and
his supervisor, city Environmental Health
Department chief Sarah Kotchian, failed to
properly train and discipline staff.
Hillman formerly directed wildlife
programs for the Animal Protection Institute.
Britton in mid-1997 complained to
various organizations and authorities that a
purported defacto “no-kill” policy was in
effect at Multnomah County Animal Control,
in Portland, Oregon––an agency often criticized
by other activists for supposedly being
too quick to kill allegedly dangerous dogs.
PETA director of research, investigations,
and rescue Mary Beth Sweetland
wrote to Britton that feral cats should be killed
immediately, as per PETA policy, instead of
being held for six days, but doubted that a
campaign could be built on the issue. “I can’t
guarantee,” Sweetland wrote, “that everyone
will think feral cats should be euthanized.”

No-kill vs. all-kill
The five-member San Diego city
council Committee on Natural Resources and
Culture in early February recommended to the
full council that a new animal control shelter
should be built on the site of the old one––and
that the city should pursue a five-year plan to
achieve no-kill animal control, in part to
become eligible for Maddie’s Fund grants (see
page 15). An announcement that the plan was
under consideration brought a flood of donations
to the shelter building fund, the S a n
Diego Union-Tribune reported.
But while momentum toward no-kill
builds elsewhere, the Muskegon County
Animal Shelter in January moved in the
PETA-recommended direction, terminating a
four-day holding period for cats. All cats
entering the shelter are now to be killed immediately.
According to Muskegon Chronicle
staff writer John S. Hausman, the no-hold policy
was imposed after the Michigan
Department of Agriculture advised shelter officials
that their cat holding facilities were inadequate.
The shelter hopes to forestall public
objections by enlisting 16 local veterinarians to
provide free neutering for pets of the poor.