Boks Snows Council, a Rebuttal

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Ed Boks lied big time in his presentation to Council in June 20. They bought his lies, hook line and sinker. I am ashamed of Rosendahl.

Boks told them that euthanasia is down. It's down 1%, but the number of animals dying in the shelter has doubled during the past 12 months. The number of animals leaving the shelter dead has not changed. AND. the number and percent leaving alive is down. He completely snowed council.

June 20, 2007 City Council meeting
http://lacity.org/cdvideo_wm.htm and click June 20 video.

Boks: Thanks Zine (Z) and Cardenas (C) for making the motion so I can share things with you and address your concerns. I will talk about lowering the kill rate and success with volunteers. We are trying to broaden our program to reach into the community to create a Humane LA.

I was recruited to help transform LA into the first major metropolitan city to be nokill in the US. What is nokill? In LA, or the 46,000 brought in each year, 18K killed, a 40% kill rate, lower than the state average.

Boks stated that the most scientific way to define nokill is the number killed per thousand people.

He stated that when you get to 5.0, most in the animal community feel that this is nokill.

Rebuttal:

This is nonsense. A few consider it no kill, especially Boks himself. But big cities have fewer animals per household and thus a lower number per 1,000 people end in a shelter. For example, New York is over twice as big as LA but impounds and kills about the same number of animals. Therefore, their rate per 1,000 is about 2.5 versus LA at 5.0. No one in their right mind considers New York No-Kill.

While GM of Maricopa County, in 2002 Boks stated he wanted the County to be No-Kill by 2007. He defined No-Kill then as 3.0 euthanized per 1,000 population.

For him, no kill was 3.0 back then, now he lowers the bar to 5.0/1,000. I’ll also mention that Maricopa Co. never even came close to 3/1,000 kill rate. Currently, just for their County shelters, it is 9/1,000, three times greater that his then definition of no-kill.

Besides, we are only talking about the municipal shelters there. There are private shelters, as in LA. Each of these shelters kill animals, meaning an extra 1/1,000, 2/1,000, etc.

In Maricopa Co. the kill rate is about 11.5/1,000 using the combined euthanasia numbers of all shelters in the area. In order to get down to 3/1,000 in Phoenix, the municipal shelters alone would have to cut their killing by 80%.

A much better measure of No-kill is that used by the father of No-Kill, Nathan Winograd, whose own shelter had a euthanasia rate of 8% of all live animals brought in. Applied to LA, this would mean less than 3,700 animals killed each year, instead of 18,000.

I would note that Winograd has consulted several other smaller shelter systems and each have been brought to an 8% kill rate within about a year. It seems the area around 8-9% euthanized is the best any municipal shalter has done.

In Philadelphia, Winograd brought the killing down from an estimated 90% to 46% in 2 years with a budget of $3,900,000 and 46 employees.

Boks:

There will always be sick or aggressive animals that must be killed.

Rebuttal:

Yes there always will be, but who can believe 40% of all animals impounded, over 18,000, are sick enough or vicious enough to require killing? No one.

However, Ed is only talking about cats and dogs, he does not mention the kill rate for rabbits is almost triple what it was under Stuckey, and the in-shelter deaths due to sickness and injury has doubled for dogs and cats, while the in-shelter deaths for other animals, such as birds, turtles, hamsters, etc., has gone up by 600%.

Boks:

The US average is 14.8. LA is 4.5. We are lower than that thresh hold. There has been a 50% decline in the last five years in euthanasia. This is the most rapid decline in killing in any major city in the US. Jan to May an extra 22% decline.

Rebuttal:

Misleading. He is reporting only kill figures for cats and dogs. The death rate for all animals other than cats and dogs has increased by the same rate as cat and dog deaths have decreased. No net gain.

In addition, 18,000 euthanasias a year means 1,500 per month. If you overcrowd 1,500 additional animals into the shelters, you can reduce the kill rate by 33% for any given quarter. But the killing resumes in the summer after all extra space has been squeezed.

As of July 1, 10 p.m., the LAAS website lists 2,446 animals in the shelter under the category "lost," and a smaller number up for adoption. It does not list the number of animals in the Annex. So, we are talking 3,000 animals. That is two months of intake.

Boks:

We placed 22K dogs and cats in 12 months. We are the #1 pet adoption agency in the world!

Rebuttal:

He said that about Maricopa County too. In 2003 (the latest figure I have) they, along with private rescue partners, adopted out 21,425. During the past 12 months, LAAS with outside rescue groups have adopted out 20,728. I also understand he said NYC was the largest adoption agency also when he was there.

Boks:

We will have 3 vets in a few days, 6 within a month.

Rebuttal:

We’ll see. It is not promising that this is a week and a half since that meeting and we still have just 2 vets.

He said we would have a partnership with a vet school in San Bernadino. That never happened.

Rosendahl: Great report; great leadership.

I wish Rosendahl would get his staffers to actually look at the Boks operation and the Boks numbers.