New County Animal Shelter Opens

The new Orange County animal shelter will open to the public on March 24.

THE NEW SHELTER

I had the opportunity of visiting and I was impressed. The new shelter has just about everything you’d look for in a progressive shelter –

• Adequate medical facilities
• Good cage sizes
• Ability to go inside and outdoors
• Congregate playing areas
• Areas for prospective adopters to bring their own pets to see if the pets are compatible
• Completely separate areas for admissions, visits, and animal control.
• Reasonable privacy so that pets aren’t staring at each other all day.
• A volunteer area that makes it comfortable for volunteers to relax.
• Fully functioning ventilation systems to decrease the chances of illness.

Check out the pictures accompanying this article.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD SHELTER?

But is having a new shelter enough?

To be successful, a shelter should have (1) good physical environment, (2) good management, (3) high quality care, and (4) high quality services. Check off (1), the good physical environment. The remaining three factors have yet to be determined. In the past, the OC shelter has been criticized by the Grand Jury and others for failing to succeed in all these area. Is a new environment a panacea? Probably not. But they recently changed the management and are looking for a new administrator. Perhaps that will solve the deficiencies noted by the Grand Jury in this area. That still leaves quality of care and services that need major improvements.

What works against the success of the new shelter is the decision by the Board of Supervisors to go with a single large monolithic shelter serving the entire County. No other county our size has a single shelter, and even counties smaller than us have multiple shelters. Why does this matter?

WHY SIZE MATTERS?

A few years ago I googled “animal shelter statistics california” and went through the first 10 pages of search results looking for California shelters that produced recent results. I found 25 shelters as follows:

• Under 2,000 – 8 (Alameda, Rancho Coastal, Berkeley Humane, Mission Viejo, Santa Clara, Nevada County, City of Berkeley, El Cajon)
• Between 2000 and 5,000 – 5 (Antioch, Easy Bay SPCA, Yolo, Salinas, SF SPCA)
• Between 5,000 and 10,000 – 4 (Ramona Humane, San Francisco, , SD Humane, Merced
• Over 10,000 – 8 (Stockton, Pasadena, San Jose, Monterey Cty, Kern, Riverside, Orange County, SD AWC,)

Here is the average euthanasia rate for each group of varying size –

• Under 2,000 – 9% (Range 3% to 17%)
• Between 2000 and 5,000 – 17% (Range 6% to 42%)
• Between 5,000 and 10,000 – 30% (Range 20% to 41%)
• Over 20,000 - 36% (Range 22% to 50%)

It's pretty clear from the data that the more admissions an animal shelter has, the higher the kill rate. At about 20,000 per year, the new OC shelter joins an undistinguished group of the largest shelters\ seemingly dooming us to continue the high kill rate, even if the environment in which they live is substantially improved.

Not every large shelter has a very high kill rate (e.g., San Jose admitted 15,000+ but only killed 22%) and not every small shelter has a very low kill rate (e.g., Antioch admitted 3,128 but killed 26%), but the trend is certainly there and the exceptions are few.

SUMMARY

We now have a beautiful, well equipped, modern physical environment for the animal shelter and the Board of Supervisors is looking to appoint a new administrator. These are two major steps forward that many have advocated for years, even decades. But the rubber hits the road when we examine the quality of care and the quality of the services provided a,d that's what we'll have to examine closely in the next months.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest where he serves as Mayor. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook. His Twitter handle is @DrJimGardner. His comments are not meant to reflect official City Policy.

Dr. Gardner has office hours every Tuesday from 4 pm to 6 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a town hall meeting every quarter. The next meeting will be May 17 at 7 pm at the Lake 1 Clubhouse (Ridge Route).