Letter to the Editor |
| The rest of the story on spay/neuter laws I appreciate your reporter’s effort to offer a balanced account of the debate over mandatory spay/neuter laws, but I was disappointed by the lack of concrete detail to help your readers fully understand the issue, and how it applies to Santa Barbara County. The article makes reference to Santa Cruz’s ordinance, passed in 1995, indicating that “supporters say the results have been significant.” It then talks about “fuzzy” state statistics regarding shelter animals. Santa Cruz’s numbers aren’t fuzzy, or hard to get: they are available directly from Santa Cruz County Animal Services, and they are very clear. In the nine years following passage of Santa Cruz County’s ordinance (1995 to 2004), the number of dogs impounded at its shelters went from 3247 to 1503; the number of cats, from 4578 to 2165. The number of dogs and cats euthanized dropped even further: from 906 to 257 for dogs and from 2688 to 1051 for cats. If you do the math, these are huge declines. (In 2004 the county increased its population by 20 percent, annexing Watsonville, with its 55,000 people and all their unaltered pets — this temporarily reversed Santa Cruz’s astonishing beneficial trend.) The opponents of these laws, and your reporter, fail to note that both AB 1634 and the proposed county ordinance give veterinarians absolute authority to exempt a dog or cat for health reasons, which keeps the medical decision absolutely between caregivers and their veterinarian. (Since spayed and neutered pets have a dramatically reduced risk of several diseases, cancers, and behavioral problems like roaming and aggression, most vets routinely recommend the surgery for healthy dogs and cats.) Nor does the article mention the fact that Santa Barbara County’s proposed ordinance would exempt all registered purebreds, regardless of age: this solves the problem of those people complaining that they don’t know if their 6-month-old bearded collie is ready to show or able to herd. The ordinance proposed for this county would target the problem population that has led to record shelter overcrowding: true mixed breeds, the kind that languish and die for lack of enough interested adopters. A good law would reduce their numbers to something closer to the demand. There’s a reason that Lompoc, Los Angeles, Lake County, Clearlake, unincorporated L.A. County, Agoura Hills, Santa Clarita, La Puente, Walnut, Palmdale, Pacific Grove, Denver and the entire state of Rhode Island all have some sort of mandatory spay/neuter laws, with more municipalities in the works. We have hit the wall with voluntary compliance, especially in areas such as Santa Barbara County, where we have been applying the No Kill Advocacy Center’s formula for decades, and still take in roughly 9,000 dogs and cats each year. It’s time to put responsibility where it belongs, on careless pet owners, and take it off the tax-paying animal lovers who don’t want their money spend subsidizing suffering and death. Paula Kislak, DVM |