PG Desert, and Weekly Round-Up

Last week saw several notable events hereabouts.

First, a new blog was launched on the Upper Marlboro Patch.  The first post covers the recent NO KILL CONFERENCE and PG County's role there.  The annual event hosted people from across the globe, and took place near the end of July in Washington, DC.  If you missed the conference, be sure and read and subscribe to the new blog!

Also afoot is a court case, to litigate the confiscation of a beloved and necessary service dog for a person with disabilities who lives in PG County.  That story is both heartbreaking and infuriating.  And litigating against an entrenched bureaucracy in PG as you may know, ain't easy! Read about the journey here.

And finally, do we live in the desert?  You may be  a food desert-dweller, according to the USDA's new map.  Food deserts, where people have no, or limited, access to grocery stores with fresh, non-pre-processed food, exist in the County.

You can learn a lot more about it, from USDA.

Change makers - first, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you ...

Nathan Winograd has, again, offered a stunning insight into the ways of those in the "animal control industry" and most pounds (aka "shelters") in the US today.  In his blog entry about reform in Austin TX and the role (or obstacle) of the ASPCA you see the difficult path to making pounds work as true shelters.  You learn from this chronology just how hard a community has to work in order to create a No Kill Community, and just how spiteful the large, monied forces always behave, towards the real people's movement. 

Prince George's County citizens love their pets, as much as Austinites.  However, Prince George's County citizens do not enjoy the enlightened council that Austin does.  Our County Council has hardly a moment for issues of protection for animals unless it involves the Almighty Dollar.  In fact, when you check out the slightly informative monthly report archive on our animal control web page, you are struck right away by the line reading "Total Revenue" placed before you see any information whatsoever about the lives and welfare of even one animal.

We're changing this, though.  For a very long time, it is true, there have been attitudes of tolerance of whatever the county wanted as far as animals are concerned.  Funders from outside Prince George's County offered only small grants for any animal welfare programs launched by private efforts.  The business climate in the County has long worked against establishing a thriving pet products or care sector.  Further, county policies and laws have the effect of encouraging dissent and a scarcity mindset among any organizations that might dare to take animal welfare seriously. 

Ryan Clinton, one of the up-and-comers in No Kill, has written about how fearful rescue groups are about seeming to criticize a pound if they hope to save the lives of animals already impounded there.  This is nowhere clearer than in Prince George's County.  Not only are many pound animals a difficult sell because they are exposed to dirt and disease in the pound.  Rescues also must meet absurdly stringent "rules" which can change from hour to hour, to be "allowed" to rescue a dog or cat.  Rescue group leaders sometimes understand the horror of supporting the status quo but, like sufferers of the Stockholm Syndrome. they can't quite help themselves, and stay silent about what is wrong.  Rescue groups pay dearly trying to rescue the entire pet population of Prince George's County, because animal control continues to hunt neighborhood pets, impound them, then extort high fees and fines (in the name of that all-important Total Revenue) from owners trying to redeem them.

But the tide is turning.  Just like the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, Prince George's County pet owners are no longer meekly submitting to the whims of the Commission FOR Animal Control.  The County Attorney's Office is now keeping quite busy with the next step -- fighting us.

You likely know someone in Prince George's County, who has appeared before that Commission.  If they have a story to tell, we'd like to hear it.  While the Commission seems blissfully ignorant of its own record, we're putting it ON the record and what we're seeing is not pretty.

Same old worn-out excuses

County Executive Rushern Baker campaigned on taking Prince George's County from GOOD to GREAT.

But time and again, Baker's County Government lets Baker, and his constituents, down.  George of Denmark was recently provided access to an exchange between a County resident and Mr. Samuel E. Wynkoop, JR., Director of the Department of Environmental Resources.

The subject of the letter is the "euthanasia rate" as Wynkoop phrases it -- or rather, the rate at which animals are killed -- at the PG pound.  Coming as Wynkoop does from another era, an era long ago, maybe it isn't surprising that he offers platitudes and placating excuses.  He offers no evidence that he comprehends the idea of setting goals and devising steps that will reach or exceed them.

It struck me, that Wynkoop solicitously protects the staff in AMD by describing what was done to a thousand, seven hundred and thirty-nine animals in the month of June 2011, as "euthanasia."  Yet not one of the component numbers that Wynkoop then cites as "causes for" killing the animals in question, would truly qualify as "euthanasia."


But more fundamentally, it struck me that, IF ONLY Wynkoop would act to put work in motion to stop the killing, he would not NEED to shield his employees by prettying up the killing by reframing it as euthanasia!

Here is the awful rundown of what Wynkoop and his people have achieved:

• Failed in 81 instances to establish a behavior training program 
• Failed in 143 instances to provide adequate veterinary treatment
• Failed in 55 cases to provide for independent, qualified assessment of owner relinquished animals
• Failed in an astonishing 204 instances to provide or refer to community cat control programs
• Failed in 36 instances to competently distinguish dangerous animals from "pit bull type" physical characteristics
• Failed in 161 instances to provide simple foster care for young puppies and kittens -- shameful!
• Failed in 193 instances to seek proactively to reunite pets with owners or place them in new homes

 Uh, well.  At least those numbers DO sum to 873, which is the portion Wynkoop claims of the 1739 intake that were "domestic animals."  What the others are, among "cats, dogs, small mammals, reptiles, wildlife, livestock and carcasses," Wynkoop makes no mention.   Yet THEIR number apparently amounts to a significant 866!  It's puzzling to me why this agency just can't provide a full answer to any question at all!  No mention whatsoever is made of any intelligence that Wynkoop grasps even after accounting to the resident in this way.  That's pretty amazing for a presumably wise old man.

After the litany of "woulda coulda shoulda" that he offers with those statistics, Wynkoop goes on to say that "Our mission and goal has always been to reduce euthanasia by reducing the intake of animals."  Well, that simply isn't factual.  The mission of DER has been stated, in budget documents produced by Wynkoop, as to protect public health, or to safeguard people and animals, that kind of thing.  Not once under Wynkoop's tenures (either then, or now) has "reducing intake" been a publicly-stated goal.  Not only that, but even as he makes the claim about "mission and goals" to us, he then contradicts himself, saying that the "current goals are listed below" and not indicating any connection between the three "goals" he lists, and the "mission and goals" intake reduction he mentioned earlier.

For curious readers, here is the stated mission from the County DER website today:  "The mission of the Department of Environmental Resources is to protect and enhance the natural and built environments of Prince George's County by enforcing Federal, State and County laws to create a healthy, safe and esthetically pleasing environment for all residents and businesses of the County."  The Animal Management Division pages offer no mission or goals whatsoever, by the way.

It is a cardinal rule that keeping your goal in mind helps you to act to reach that goal.  Keeping multiple, conflicting goals is practically a formula for failure.  And Wynkoop and his DER and AMD continue to bear that out.

Seasoned observers of the Department and of AMD have noticed that whenever questions arise about metrics or outcomes, and particularly around budget reporting, the response is to change the goals!  Yes, that's right, they just play a shell game with PG Citizens!

In order to stop the killing (and we don't object to Wynkoop wanting not to inflict harm on his staff BUT we insist that he face the fact that they are killing animals, NOT "providing euthanasia" services in MOST instances), DER and AMD need to act on what AMD managers should have learned, when they were provided with the benefit of attending last year's No Kill Conference.  They need to do the work of launching real programs that stop the killing.

It's very simple to know what needs to be done.  It's not anything that hasn't already been done and proven by dozens .... and dozens .... of places both near and far where communities have taken their pounds back from the killers.

We don't want excuses. 

PG County Pound to Residents: Killing is OK as long as Revenues rise!

As you can see from the latest monthly report detailed on this page, Animal Control saw a bit of a rise in revenues to the County General Fund -- they're making dough from our love of animals.  Yet we saw a record number of animals destroyed.  This is NOT okay with me.  I hope and trust it's as offensive to you, dear reader. 

Models and able people who can run them are literally EVERYWHERE now.  Look to Washington, DC, or Baltimore, MD or Austin, TX or Alexandria VA or ... heck, look in any direction and you find No Kill communities and you find places where the pound is no longer a kennel where animals are impounded.  It has become a shelter, where each animal is provided care and exposure so a new owner can find and adopt it. 

We have all of the components necessary here in Prince George's County, to become the next No Kill Community in the US.  But we lack the Compassionate Director.  It's time we change that.  Want to help even more?  Follow this recipe

No Kill Comes to the Metro Area

The No Kill Conference, a national gathering of advocates and practitioners of an approach to animal welfare that harks back to the time of Henry Bergh, lands in D.C. again this year THIS WEEKEND.  Attendees have already started arriving from distant locations.  I'll be trying my wings tweeting just a bit from the Conference, and will hope to have some tidbits here on the blog during and right after the event.  There will be sessions on legislation, some on how to structure programs, and on specific issues that can be sticking-points for shelters or communities that want to stop killing most of the animals that are impounded.  Several of the blogs we follow here at George of Denmark will also cover the Conference, so check those out on the sidebar!