Boks and Merritt Underestimate County Kill Rates

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This post is something all LA County activists should look at and follow up on with Sue Freeman.

A day ago Ed Boks sent out a pre release showing County was killing 8.5 animals per 1,000 residents and LA City was killing 3.7 per 1,000.

Boy did Merritt Clifton and Boks get it wrong about the per 1,000 residents kill rate for the County. They both did Mayeda a HUGE favor.

Merritt, seconded by Boks, assigned the County a kill rate of 8.5 compared to LA City, with 3.7. Even by these stats, County was killing at a rate 230% of LA.

Don’t show this to the Supervisors, their eyes will glaze over.

However, Sue Freeman, a well-known LA animal community person, pointed out whoever did the stats merely subtracted the LA City and Long Beach populations from County and based the County kill ratio on a population of 5.1 million people.

In fact, Sue pointed out, there are many areas in LA County that are under contract with non-County organizations, and the real population they alone serve as animal control, is really 3.6 million, raising the true County kill ratio to 12.0/1,000, better than TRIPLE LA City!

Merritt has responded to Sue that this was irrelevant to the problem in Long Beach and he was more interested in “trends.” You think he’d be more interested in which agency is doing better than another agency rather than the trend of one agency vs. another. He focused on Long Beach even though LB only killed 6,000 animals vs. a combined 58,000 for LA City and County combined.

He said the real problem from his perspective, is the higher rate of cat kills in LB compared to County and LA. Yet, LB killed only 4,500 compared to LA and County with 35,000. How much is Ed and Mayeda paying this guy? I'll post his email and my responses to his illogic later.

Sue did point out that Santa Monica has a 1.6/1,000 population kill rate, which may be the best in the nation.

Please contact Sue for all of her stats and reasoning.


supurr@rescueguide.com