More about the cowards at THLN

This comment was posted by Bett Sundermeyer of No Kill Houston in response to the previous post. Bett is more than a commenter; she helped schedule the debate.

Since you have to click on Comments to see it, I decided to copy and paste it here so no readers would miss it.

I worked with Vegan World Radio to schedule this debate. Vegan World Radio has been supportive of No Kill issues in the past and wanted to talk about Nathan's Phyllis Wright Awards, of which Monica Hardy was a "winner". But VWR was trying talk about the issue in an unbiased way. That's why an open debate format was suggested...so each side would have equal opportunity to present their opinions. The questions were entirely unbiased. Considering that THLN took a lot of deserved criticism after they opposed us regarding Texas CAPA i.e. Hope's Law in 2011, one would think that they would have jumped on the chance to openly discuss their stance regarding CAPA.

THLN should have easily agreed to answer those question. And, if they didn't like the questions or the format, they should have made suggestions regarding changes instead of dropping out of the debate completely. 

Personally, I think THLN has a lot to hide and debating Nathan Winograd would have exposed it. They would have been roadkill by the end of the show. 

THLN needs to be open and honest with the public. The public deserves to know the whole agenda of organizations that they have supported.

Nathan Winograd 1, Monica Hardy 0. New balls, please.

Unlike the professional committee-sitters who comprise THLN, DCAP and similar groups - all of them as much use to animal welfare as an ashtray on a Vespa - Nathan Winograd is not a mealy-mouthed sort and lets the chips fall where they may. 

When asked to debate Winograd, the THLN's Executive Director, Monica Hardy chickened out when faced with the potential embarrassment of these topics:

1. During the last Texas Legislative Session, a controversy arose over the introduction of House Bill 3450, known as (CAPA) The Texas Companion Animal Protection Act. Please explain your understanding of the meaning and significance of this bill and what sparked the controversy?
2. What are your feelings about this bill and legislation similar to it?
3. Why did CAPA fail to pass in your opinion, and can you offer any suggestions regarding this bill and others which would most help the animals for the next legislative session?
4. In the interest of benefiting the animals, please offer any constructive suggestions you may wish to share with each other, as well as any ideas regarding animal legislation.

I didn't see anything particularly scary within these softball topics.  Did anyone else besides Monica?

Read all about it here at Nathan's blog.

DCAP's Five Year Co-option Plan

The city shelter in Seagoville, Texas has been one of the most impressive shelter turnarounds - if not THE most impressive - I've ever seen. It proved that the No-Kill Equation is within every shelter's reach, even those with small premises, few paid staff and a high intake.

So...wouldn't it make sense for the City of Dallas to sit up and take notice?

Instead, the Dallas Companion Animal Project, aka DCAP, is insisting they need five years to implement no-kill - and they aren't even 100% sure it will happen. As I've mentioned before, DCAP is a textbook example of co-option as explained in Nathan Winograd's book Redemption.

Recently, the Web site dallascityhall.com posted a PDF of a DCAP presentation made in January. You can download it here. DCAP's presentation begins on Page 8 of the PDF.

DCAP's summation page of their five year plan was as follows:

 Now…
 Request Quality of Life and Government Services Committee support
of the Dallas Companion Animal Project.

 First year
 Focus on the detailed one-year business plan and multi-year strategic plan
 Finish prioritizing and begin implementing programs and initiatives
 Determine related costs and funding

 Years Two - Four
 Continue to implement, expand and build momentum

 Year Five
 Celebrate Success! If all major initiatives have been successfully implemented, our community will be one of the largest no-kill communities in the country.

(I particularly like that Get Out Of Jail Free clause at the end - "IF all major initiatives...".)

How about Dallas simply follow Seagoville's lead? True, the DCAP folks and some of the Animal Services Commission would have to do some things they wouldn't enjoy. Things like:

1. Mend fences with all the local rescue groups they've ostracized.
2. Smarten up and stop sleeping with the enemies - the HSUS and THLN. Neither support no-kill.
3. Admit that Nathan Winograd might have a point. Note: NOBODY in DCAP attended Winograd's recent local presentation. Only Jody Jones was spotted in the audience.
4. Get off their butts and spend more time with hands-on volunteering. Nobody needs further "education".

The folks at Seagoville skipped the presentations, the photogenic/useless Advisory Board, and months of committee sitting. They just made up their minds to stop the killing. Does this really take five years to decide?

Mark Twain: Do not steal the kittens!

This is an actual note left by Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) to potential burglars. Click on the link below to be taken to the Letters of Note blog.

Besides being a brilliant writer, Twain was very fond of cats.

To the next Burglar

Yesterday's Animal Shelter Commission meeting

I'm kind of glad I wasn't able to go.

According to this Dallas Observer article, the proceedings were just as painful as ever.

Some highlights of the meeting:

The shelter is still short 30 employees, as it has been since October 2011. Joey Zapata's excuse: "they want to make sure they get the right people". So why did they shitcan some of the better employees last year?
Animals are still disappearing from cages. Joey Zapata blamed the public for this.
The shelter is still euthanizing around 75% of animals admitted for "shelter".
Dwaine Caraway is now contributing.
The Shelter Commission gave the Dallas Companion Animal Project "approval to move forward". Huh?

I see nothing in place that will improve things one bit, especially when you look at DCAP's faults. They're in bed with the HSUS, run by a professional committee-sitter, and have an Advisory Board full of folks with NO experience in transforming kill shelters into no-kill shelters.

Dallas goes into overdrive to stop shelter killing. (Backwards.)

By the looks of the city of Dallas' Companion Animal Project (aka DCAP), I don't think they could be getting any further away from lowering the shelter kill rate.

Let's look at the DCAP Facebook page. Instead of announcing any changes to the current m.o. down at Dallas Animal Services, we've been treated to excerpts from Wayne Pacelle's worst-selling book The Bond. From the Dec 29 posting:

From "The Bond": "Right now, slightly less than 25% of all dogs in American households come from shelters or rescue groups. That means that roughly three out of every four dogs come from other sources - from pet stores, puppy mills, small-scale breeders, or friends adopting out litters. There's still a stigma associated with shelters, the vague, sometimes snobbish, and always uninformed view that something is wrong with shelter animals." Here is what each of us can do: tell our friends to adopt from shelters or rescue groups! The dogs in shelters are just as wonderful as those in pet stores!

That's right, DCAP! Just tell her our friends to adopt from shelters and everything will be hunky-dory.

Over at thte DCAP Web site, the Advisory Board just gets weirder and weirder. New members include:

An architect, whose usefulness totally evades me. He is also often photographed with his purebred bulldog - a breed that's been infamously overbred over the decades.
Someone who runs an SCPA in Virginia (like that'll do a lot of good).
Someone who's stinkin' rich and owns Six Flags - a place that relies on smaller local rescue groups to help them manage their feral cats.
Someone who's already professionally committee-sitting (ie., no dirty work please, it'll fuck up my manicure) on another local animal "advocate" group.

Let's see what goes down at the Animal Shelter Commission meeting this afternoon.

An apology to my readers

Readers of this blog have noticed that I don't publish a lot of updates any more. This is because things at Dallas City Hall took a nasty turn a few months ago with the formation of the Dallas Companion Animal Project, an exercise in Let's Preserve Our Positions By Promising No Kill, But Never Delivering.

Ever since the Dallas Companion Animal Project (DCAP) was launched, the hopeful kept hoping that things would change at Dallas Animal Services (DAS). But look who's chairing DCAP:

Rebecca Poling, the Chair of the Task Force OPPOSED lifesaving legislation in Texas which would have banned the cruel gas chamber, mandated collaboration between Texas pounds and rescue organizations by making it illegal to kill animals when qualified rescues were willing to save them, required transparency in how taxpayer monies were spent by requiring shelters to make their statistics public, and would have made it illegal for shelters to kill animals based on arbitrary criteria.

In addition, Poling’s tenure on the Dallas Animal Shelter Commission has been marked by staggering neglect and abuse at Dallas Animal Services, which is not only underscored by the fact that the agency routinely and needlessly puts to death tens of thousands of animals every year (24,793 of the 34,399 animals it took in), but allowed a cat to starve to death within its walls, while every single employee looked the other way at his cries for help. In short, you cannot create a true and authentic blueprint for No Kill success by empanelling a Task Force chaired by a person who has no track record of success and who opposes the very approach necessary to end the killing of savable animals.

You can keep hoping this will change. But they won't. I am willing to bet any sum of money on this.

Since DCAP came into existence, Poling and Co. have done nothing of value. Instead, they recycle old stories online at Facebook and the Net while kissing each other's bottoms until they're soda-cracker white. And since she has no real news to publish, Poling has recently begun to resort to publishing pretty photos of her friends, complete with their arms around their pets. The photo ops are getting downright nauseating.

Perhaps Poling should show us what's really going on at DAS. This is what is going on every day as DCAP pursues nothing of value:



(Note: This photo is from several years ago. The photo my ex took some 15 years ago was considerably worse. Animals were stacked in wire containers and some smaller bodies were falling out of the sides. She took it while visiting the now-closed DAS Forney Road shelter.)

But none of this is changing anything down at DAS. The killing goes on, day in and day out. Or, as Bruce Campbell would say,

"You ain't leading nothing but Jack and shit. And Jack left town."

At least the public is no longer banned from pointing out how the No-Kill Equation has worked in other cities and counties. Or are we?

From the DCAP Facebook page:

Also, please note - months of research has been conducting up to this point, so while we appreciate the sentiment, general comments like "look at what Richmond did", keep in mind that we've already researched Austin, Richmond, San Antonio, San Francisco, and many, many more.

From the DCAP Web site:

If you’ve got a suggestion, please let us know. We’re looking for specific programs and initiatives that have been used successfully in other areas, lessons learned from personal experiences, and unique, “outside the box” ideas that we may not have seen before. We want your input.

So...what are we waiting for?

Nathan Winograd described DCAP's real agenda - that of preserving the status quo, while only giving lip service to no-kill - accurately in his book Redemption. Specifically, the chapter Co-option.

Winograd also wrote a letter to the mayor of Dallas everything we need to know to stop the killing here in his blog - several months ago.

Does anyone know if our mayor ever responded to the letter?