From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

The U.S. regions where the first low-cost and free dog and
cat sterilization programs started, between 30 and 50 years ago,
still are making the fastest progress in reducing the numbers of dogs
and cats killed in animal shelters.
The 13th annual ANIMAL PEOPLE projection of the U.S. shelter
killing toll shows that the rate of killing per thousand humans
appears to have fallen back to the low of 14.8 that was achieved in
2000-2001, after a steep rise in 2001-2002. Because the U.S. human
population and the numbers of dogs and cats kept by humans have all
increased, the current annual toll of about 4.38 million dogs and
cats killed in shelters is still about 180,000 higher than the toll
of five years ago.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

Longtime Massachusetts SPCA vice president Carter Luke has
been promoted to president, succeeding Larry Hawk. Luke has served
the MSPCA in various capacities under every MSPCA president since
Eric H. Hansen, the fourth president of the 138-year-old
organization, who was hired in 1942. Recruited from the American
SPCA in 2003, Hawk resigned in March 2006.
“Hawk increased revenue and took a more businesslike approach
to running the organization,” laying off 20 employees and
eliminating 32 vacant jobs, reported Sacha Pfeiffer of the Boston
Globe. Among Hawk’s first major actions was killing the
award-winning but money-losing Animals magazine, begun as Our Dumb
Animals by MSPCA founder George Angell.
However, Pfeiffer wrote, “several former MSPCA employees
said Hawk left after persistent concerns that his brusque management
style damaged morale without doing enough to improve the MSPCA
finances. Hawk also hired his wife and two children to do paid
consulting,” at total cost of $37,000, about 10.5% of Hawk’s own
salary, “and outsourced fundraising activities that resulted in
donations not being acknowledged. The MSPCA endowment has lost
nearly a third of its value since the late 1990s,” although Hawk
doubled direct mail expense, “and for years,” Pfeiffer wrote, “the
MSPCA has been violating its own spending policy by bypassing limits
on the percentage of endowment gains that may be used to pay
operating costs.”

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:

ELIZABETH, N.J.–New Jersey Superior Court Judge Thomas
Lyons on June 14, 2006 barred Patrick G. Jemas of Woodbridge, New
Jersey, from fundraising within the state, fined him $330,804, and
ordered him to help the state Division of Consumer Affairs to locate
and remove hundreds of coin collection canisters that Jemas placed in
businesses throughout New Jersey in the name of the “National Animal
Welfare Foundation.”
Lyons did not have the authority to dissolve the National
Animal Welfare Foundation, or to stop Jemas’ reported fundraising
activities in New York and Pennsylvania.
New Jersey Attorney General Zulima V. Farber and Consumer
Affairs Director Kimberly Ricketts alleged that Jemas “collected
$70,795 in canister donations, but spent $75,891 on fundraising,
payroll, meals, automobiles, printing, and other undefined areas.
In only one fiscal year,” they said, “did reported donations exceed
reported expenses.”

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