Animal shelter leadership transitions

Bill Bruce, 58, director of  Calgary Animal & Bylaw Services since 2000, retired on August 3, 2012.  Dubbed “Bylaw Bill” by Sherri Zickefoose of the Calgary Herald, Bruce worked for the City of Calgary for more than 31 years. Like his predecessor as animal control chief, Jerry Aschenbrenner,  who headed the department for 25 years, Bruce advocated incentive-based animal control.  Under Aschenbrenner, Calgary achieved by far the highest rate of dog licensing compliance in North America and perhaps the world, exceeding 80%, more than twice the highest rate ever achieved by any U.S. city of comparable size.  Bruce boosted compliance to more than 90%. 

Contending that enforcing the licensing law and other conventional dog ordinances could prevent dogfighting and dog attacks without any need for breed-specific laws, Bruce came under increasing criticism after 2009, when dogfighting emerged locally and pit bulls were repeatedly released from vans to attack residents of East Asian descent, injuring a three-year-old, a four-year-old, and men aged 70, 78, and about 55.  A 27-year-old woman pleaded guilty in connection with three of the attacks.  Additional suspects were beyond Calgary jurisdiction.  Total reported dog bites dropped, but three disfiguring attacks by pit bulls occurred in Calgary during Bruce’s last three months as animal control chief, along with a fatal attack on an infant inflicted by a husky.

Indianapolis Animal Care and Control chief Amber Myers on September 14, 2012 left the agency to accompany her fiancé Frank Straub, formerly Indianapolis public safety director, to Spokane, Washington, where Straub was recently named police chief.  Indianapolis mayor Greg Ballard named Daniel T. Shackle to succeed Myers.

Shackle, the fifth Indianapolis Animal Control chief since 2008, is an attorney who since 2010 had been program manager for the nuisance abatement section within the city department of code enforcement.

Warren Cox, 77,  on July 11, 2012 announced his retirement effective on September 28, 2012,  after five years as executive director of SPCA Florida in Lakeland, his 25th leadership post in a humane career that began when he took a job as a dogcatcher in Lincoln, Nebraska after high school graduation in 1952.

Cox, who recently remarried following the death of his first wife, told ANIMAL PEOPLE that he plans to return to Lincoln.  “Just how long I will be able to stay retired, I don’t know.  I have had  a lot of fun over the last 60 years,” Cox said, “but sure would do a lot of things differently.”   A longtime vegetarian, Cox as animal control director in Cedar Rapids,  Iowa in 1958 became apparently the first person to use TV to promote shelter adoptions.  Cox at various times headed the Humane Society of Missouri, the Oregon Humane Society, and the SPCA of Texas, where he spent 14 years.

The Cheyenne Animal Shelter on July 25, 2012 “announced that [executive director] Rick Collord, who was first hired in late 2007, was no longer employed there,” James Chilton of Wyoming News reported.  “The release gave no details as to the nature of his departure, and Wyoming Secretary of State Max Maxfield,  the president of the shelter board of directors, offered no additional insights,”  Chilton added.

Ed Carleo, a 31-year employee of the Cheyenne Family YMCA who retired in 2009 , was named interim Cheyenne Animal Shelter director. Collord, who was previously executive director at humane societies in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Washington, had reportedly cut shelter killing in Cheyenne by 24%.