Animal Advisory commissioners examine threats of ‘euthanizing for space’ at city shelter

At their most recent meeting, members of the Animal Advisory Commission questioned whether the city’s new strategy for finding homes for difficult-to-place dogs is working as intended.

The shelter’s urgent placement list, which was introduced in March, is designed to highlight the most at-risk residents at the shelter in hopes of placing them in homes. Dogs on the list are there because of a history of biting, behavior that could lead to a future bite or because of an extended length of stay at the shelter.

Commissioners raised questions about the lack of information about the animals on the list, the criteria being used to place animals on the list and whether “urgency” was being conveyed appropriately by the Animal Services Office. 

Foremost among the concerns expressed by commissioners and the Austin public was the notion that dogs were being euthanized because of a lack of space. Though Chief Animal Services Officer Don Bland told commissioners that the shelter had not euthanized any animals due to lack of space, and hadn’t in many years, language used in promoting the urgent placement list did not allay fears that could be the case in the future. 

Commissioner Lotta Smagula pointed to the language framing the list online, which reads, “We are sharing this in an effort to find homes for these dogs as quickly as we can so that we do not have to euthanize them because of how full we are.”

“That sounds like space kills,” Smagula said. 

Commissioner Paige Nilson said that of the 25 dogs currently on the list, 19 have a bite history, including a bite that killed another dog. She said that it was disingenuous to claim that dogs on the list would be euthanized for space, and the current, perpetual overcrowding was a direct result of no-kill policies. 

“We are so far from that that we’ve forgotten the meaning of these words. We’re having to ‘euthanize for space’ because we haven’t been euthanizing anything at all, essentially,” she said. “We don’t have space. … So we are now going to have to euthanize dogs that are really difficult to find homes for because they have bite histories or have killed other dogs. And we’re calling that ‘euthanizing for space’ as if it were the same tragedy as it was in the ’90s. We need to stop being misleading.”

Complicating the discussion was the repeated invocation of a matrix that will be used to place dogs on the list and, potentially, determine which ones will be euthanized. 

Bland acknowledged that dogs could be euthanized using the matrix to determine which are “most challenging” or most likely to create a public safety issue. He said that the matrix was “almost finalized” and currently being tested.

However, commissioners remain in the dark on what the matrix actually looks like and what criteria it employs.

Commissioners also raised concerns about the information associated with dogs on the urgent list, which is sometimes foggy and currently inconsistent. Smagula asked that the vague “bite history” now associated with dogs on the list be replaced with more precise data once the the city adopts the Dunbar Bite Scale officially. The scale categorizes bites on a spectrum of severity, from Level 1 (“aggressive behavior but no skin-contact by teeth”) to Level 6 (“victim dead”). Bland said they would have to “see if the system will pull that information,” but said that he thought they would need to disclose that information.

“We tell adopters everything we know about (an) animal,” Bland said. “If we can be upfront with that, yes, absolutely.

“I think we’re trying to be as transparent as possible,” he said. 

For his part, Chair Ryan Clinton said he was deeply affected by the use of length of stay as a justification for euthanasia and noted that there was nothing in city code that said they cannot kill because of lack of space, just a goal of 95 percent live outcomes.

“I don’t think length of stay, without some kind of bite history, is a reason to euthanize an animal. I don’t think it should be in a matrix, I don’t think it should be a reason. And if we are killing because of length of stay, then we are just plain killing,” he said. “It’s not a euthanasia at that point, it’s an execution.”

Exacerbating matters are complaints from the public and commissioners about operations at the shelter. Clinton said it was hard to hear that people were being turned away from fostering and adoptions due to poor customer service when animals’ lives hung in the balance.

He said that the use of the urgent list and threats of euthanasia was “negative marketing” that conveyed a message to the public that “the animals are bad at the animal shelter” by focusing repeatedly on dangerous dogs. Positive marketing, he said, was much more effective in increasing adoptions, and he pointed out that the city was not doing the positive marketing that they had done in the past.

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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