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Shelter Skelter

I am wondering whether she actually believes this. According to Gonzalez, more than 100 animals are put down every day citywide during the summer crunch. In Manhattan, animals are selected for euthanasia twice a day. "For every animal that I held onto, four may have had to go down because of space," he says. "Each animal is holding a cage -- it's simple mathematics."

And it gets to people. One kennel worker took home a puppy scheduled for euthanasia and bottle-fed it for a few days. The pup turned out to be a lost pet and was returned to its owner; the worker was fired.

Gary Kaskel, a passionate animal activist, is the sharpest thorn in the CACC's side. Kaskel has been watching the CACC, documenting its every blunder, since his first battle with the agency, over the disposition of ferrets. He is also co-chair of the Shelter Reform Action Committee, a coalition of organizations and individuals that is determined to get a humane animal-control program for New York.

"The city is covering up a despicable program, financed by tax dollars," he says. "The CACC claims it's not a city agency, yet what kind of private, not-for-profit organization allows the mayor to kick directors off its board?"

Kaskel is working on a lawsuit that will challenge the city's creation and operation of the CACC. In the meantime, the SRAC is running an anti-CACC campaign in the New York Times to educate the public about the fate of shelter animals. Kaskel has also gotten the D.O.H. and CACC to respond to more than 50 Freedom of Information Act requests and open up CACC board meetings to public scrutiny. Everything you never wanted to know about the CACC -- documents, articles, reports on meetings, press releases -- is gathered together on the SRAC Website. Along with others in the humane community, Kaskel wants Haggerty-Blohm fired. "She's an inexperienced city hack," he charges.

When the CACC's first three-year contract with the Health Department was up in 1997, City Council member Kathryn Freed called a hearing to investigate the agency's performance.

"The majority of the animals weren't -- and still aren't -- being sterilized," says Freed. "There was, and is, no education program, no fund-raising, and no real effort is made to adopt out animals. All they do is kill them." But Dr. Benjamin Mojica, commissioner of health, didn't come to the hearing, and Freed canceled it in disgust after about a half-hour of interviewing a flunky who knew nothing relevant to the questions at hand. Her next option was to subpoena members of the DOH, but in the meantime, the CACC's contract was quietly renewed.

It's not as if Giuliani would have to reinvent the wheel to build a decent shelter system. Other cities have managed to shelter animals without the Sturm und Drang that affects the CACC. Municipal shelters routinely round up strays, deal with public-health issues such as rabies, efficiently license animals, and perform euthanasia on a high volume of pets (approximately 20 million dogs and cats are put down each year in the U.S.). But these shelters are also working with hundreds of independent humane societies and rescuers to lower euthanasia rates.

The only way to stop the killing is to prevent the animals from being born. Spay-and-neuter is the law at most shelters. Although the CACC pressures owners to sterilize their animals (or pay $285) when they redeem them from the lost-and-found, it hands out thousands of dogs and cats that are intact to rescue groups. Some CACC animals are sterilized each week at the Fund for Animals's midtown clinic, but there are no plans for a surgery inside the CACC, de rigueur in shelters that have made a difference.

In 50 cities across the country, breeding and sterilization will both soon be subject to law, but not in New York, despite the fact that it is cheaper to sterilize animals than to shelter, feed, and kill them; over time, the intake would go down, allowing the shelter to house animals for a longer period and find them homes. In Las Vegas, Mary Herro, a pioneer in the field of sheltering and currently the president of the Animal Foundation, is close to reaching a "zero-kill" goal for adoptable animals. She has built a high-volume spay-neuter clinic in her shelter and has plans to build a new $5 million facility across the street. But Herro has Las Vegas mayor Jan Jones solidly behind her, raising money and public consciousness.

At the moment, San Francisco has one of the country's model programs. There, several groups work together, despite inevitable tensions. "We don't all like each other, but that doesn't matter," says Carl Friedman, director of the Department of Animal Care and Control -- San Francisco's CACC. "The goal is to save as many lives as possible."

The well-funded Bay Area SPCA is a Disneyesque facility that looks more like a country club than a pound. But the spectacle draws the public, which finds clean, well-fed, and exercised animals. Every dog and cat is kept in its own "condo," as if each had an independent trust fund (a few have roommates). Each condo comes with furniture, and paintings hang on the walls. The operative illusion is that the shelter is a home -- not a prison. The SPCA has a list of 2,000 volunteers.

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I watched a group of Persian cats lounge on a sofa watching a video of goldfish swimming in a bowl. The cats looked a little bored, but people were amused. "If you want to do adoptions, the public has to have a happy experience walking through the shelter," says Michael Arms, who, when he was with Long Island's North Shore Animal League, managed to get 3,000 families going through on an average week. "The CACC is a warehouse where animals are stacked in boxes and hidden away."

Next door to San Francisco's animal palace, the Bay Area facility described above, is the city's municipal shelter, where Carl Friedman must accept every animal that comes his way. (The SPCA, on the other hand, has the privilege of picking and choosing its residents.) But the two agencies have an agreement. When space runs out for any healthy, adoptable animals at Care and Control, they are moved across the street to the SPCA, which does not euthanize -- it's a "no kill" shelter. One facility is a palace, the other a tenement, but the animals are well cared for in both places. Staff are friendly and available. In comparison, New York's CACC is an armed camp.

"The Manhattan facility is a disaster," says Friedman, an ex-New Yorker familiar with the CACC's problems -- he is the co-author of a scathing report on the New York system, commissioned by the CACC when it first took over from the ASPCA. "The pressure is on them to improve conditions, yet they have no resources to do it. If all the New York humane agencies don't begin to work together, instead of fighting with each other, the animals will never benefit." (Haggerty-Blohm told me she is in close touch with Friedman and other municipal-shelter directors; Friedman says, "I can't recall speaking with her. But I talk to many people.")

Haggerty-Blohm can get the mayor to hold a puppy for a photo op. But can she get him to understand that city animals deserve better? "I have a direct line to the mayor's ear," she says. "That's exactly what the CACC has lacked."

Humane activists are skeptical. "The problem is that we need someone who can shame the city into putting more money into animal control," says Gary Kaskel. "Haggerty-Blohm's allegiance is to the mayor -- not to solving this crisis. All she wants to do is keep the lid on a very volatile situation."

Kathryn Freed is currently drafting a spay-neuter law for New York City. This alone could make a dent in euthanasia statistics, but it will not affect how animals are treated during their stays in the pound. And Freed is pessimistic about transforming the CACC into a decent Humane Society.

"How many millions do we have to spend before the taxpayers understand that there hasn't been an iota of progress for the animals in this city since the CACC took over?" she asks. "If dogs and cats could vote, the mayor might pay some attention."