On the animal news beat

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2002:

ANIMAL PEOPLE has received messages from several different
Ohio activists and organizations crediting WOIO-Channel 19 television
reporter Scott Taylor, of Cleveland, and Carolyn Lyders of
WBNS-Channel 10 in Columbus, with helping to expose and halt animal
control dog shooting and gassing with vehicular exhaust in several
rural counties. Taylor was praised especially for his reporting
about Vinton and Morgan counties, which alerted other people who
were in a position to help. Wrote Michael Sangiacomo of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer, “Jeff Driggs shot 600 dogs to death in
Morgan County last year. The dog warden did nothing about it.

That’s because Jeff Driggs is the dog warden.” Appalled, Cleve-land
Animal Protective League president Jeff Kocian told the Morgan County
commissioners that APL would take all their strays. Making their
first Morgan County dog pickup on May 16, Kocian and APL deputy
director Matt Granito came away hopeful that most of the dogs can be
rehomed in Cleveland. In December 1996, ANIMAL PEOPLE noted that
“The neighborhood surrounding the Animal Protective League and
Cuyahoga County animal control shelter is so overrun with stray cats
that the situation recently made the cover of the ‘B’ section of the
Sunday Plain Dealer.” A neuter/return program funded by the Kenneth
A. Scott Charitable Trust has now brought the cat problem in hand,
reported Fran Henry of the Plain Dealer on May 2.

The October 2001 Indianapolis Star series “Destined to Die,”
by Bill Theobald and Bonnie Harris, exposing a lack of leadership by
the Humane Society of Indianapolis and Indianapolis animal control
department in responding to pet overpopulation, has received a Sigma
Delta Chi Award for Excellence in Journalism award from the Society
of Profes-sional Journalists. The series earlier won the George Polk
Journalism Award for metropolitan reporting. Theobald and Harris
were also guests of honor at the recent “No More Homeless Pets”
conference hosted by Best Friends in Chicago. Publication of
“Destined to Die” immediately preceded a continuing steep decline in
Indianapolis shelter intakes and killing, formation of the animal
rescue coalition Indy Pets Alive, increasing use of the FACE
low-cost pet sterilization clinic in downtown Indianapolis, and
changes of management at both the humane society and the animal
control department.

Responding to a request from local activist Wendy Irvine,
with endorsements from the Sacramento SPCA, local animal control
agencies, and the Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights,
the Sacramento Bee on April 24 ceased accepting classified ads that
offer pets “free to a good home.” With an average daily paid
readership of 290,000, the Bee is the 32nd most read newspaper in
the U.S., and may be the largest paper that ever routinely carried
paid free-to-good-home ads to begin refusing them.