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There are two new websites dedicated to watching and reporting on public shelters in Southern California:
www.sheltertrak.com and www.shelterwatch.com.
I do not know whose sites they are or whether they have any political bent or bias. I do note that LA County impounds twice as many animals as LAAS and has a much higher death rate, which, according to the stats on these sites, is trending upwards, not down.
This is from an email sent to me about www.Shelterwatch:
ShelterWatch.com is a website we started two years ago to track the progress made in the groundbreaking lawsuit against the County of Kern when we sued them. We just won the case a few months ago and the final judgment just was signed a few weeks ago.
Now, we intend on reporting truth about the various shelters in California whether it's good truth or bad truth, nonetheless, we want the site to have the highest integrity and only truth backed up by facts, impound numbers, verifiable statistics.
Believe it or not, there are shelters WAY worse than LA City and LA County. They are these little unwatched shelters in central California, small shelters in Riverside and San Bernardino County, humane socieites in more rural areas, etc. where nobody is watching them. We will be.
We (shelterwatch.com) intend on having a rating scale which will be a fair, and measurable method of rating the shelters in California. This is a project that is in the works, as is our website which will be changing to reflect many shelters violating the law as well as shelters who are going above and beyond what they legally have to do to save animals and have limited budgets. We will be profiling both as we emerge into a new era since winning the first ever lawsuit against a government for violation of the Hayden and Vincent Laws.
Because there are no overseers of shelters in California (i.e., no agency watches public shelters and SPCA's with a contract which receive government money) we have decided to come forward to educate the public with the truth; not a distorted and exagerated lie, but the truth.
With regard to ShelterTrak.com, this is the brainchild of another rescuer named Brad. Brad tirelessly performs public records acts (which is a California government code section) which allow Brad to receive data directly from shelters.
While some shelters fight him and refuse to release information, and some humane societies refuse to give information because they say that they are exempt, Brad methodically plots along gathering data and putting it in useable charts and graphs so we can see the truth.
Christy
My comment: This is exactly the kind of intelligence we need to get a handle on pet macrodynamics as well as assessing the success or failure of the various municipal shelters.
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