Dogfight pits rights groups vs. county
Maricopa agency’s animal shelter has a lot of pit bulls, and critics say many other species are moved out of state
Maricopa County Animal Care and Control shipped more than 4,000 dogs and cats to animal shelters in Utah, Washington, Idaho, New Mexico and beyond over a span of 19 months.
County leaders claimed they were animals Arizona families don’t want: Pit bulls, chihuahuas and pets with medical or behavioral issues.
But an Arizona Republic investigation found the county also sent 308 cairn terriers, 159 poodles, 126 Labrador retrievers, 91 German shepherds and a thousand other mostly small dogs that local animal rescue groups say Phoenix families are looking for and can’t find.
Currently, the vast majority of the
dogs listed on the Maricopa County shelter website for adoption are adult pit bull mixes, leaving few options for residents interested in puppies or other breeds.
Major organizations such as HALO Animal Rescue and Arizona Animal Welfare League say the county’s transport program has depleted the pet supply in Phoenix to the point that they’ve started shipping animals in from rural Arizona, other states and Mexico to meet the demand of local adopters.
The seemingly unnecessary shuffling of animals across state lines has left the animal welfare community at odds, with the community’s most vulnerable — the homeless pets they’re supposed to serve — at the center of an ugly debate.
Is the transport program life-saving?
Mary Martin, the director of Maricopa County Animal Care and Control, said the transport program is essential to saving animal lives and is the reason the county shelter’s euthanasia rate has fallen over the past two years.
Martin became the head of the county shelter system in October 2016.
Before that, the county shelter occasionally sent animals to out-of-state shelters when its own facilities reached capacity. At the time, the euthanasia rate was near 30% and county leadership said they had to put animals down to make space in the shelter.
But it wasn’t until Martin’s arrival that the county ramped up the transport program, with shipments of animals leaving the state on planes and in vans almost weekly.
The two county shelters — in Phoenix and Mesa — are frequently at capacity. Instead of euthanizing animals to free up space for new strays, the county partners with national transport organizations including Dog is my Co-pilot, Wings of Rescue and American Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Martin said.
The nonprofits cover the transportation costs, but county veterinarians, administrative employees and volunteers spend a significant amount of time arranging the transports, evaluating the animals, loading them in travel kennels and processing paperwork necessary to transport them across state lines.
Martin said the staff time and taxpayer money invested in the transport program is worth it for the payoff.
She said the transport program is one of the main reasons euthanasia rates have dropped to near 5%.
“If you’re interested in the welfare of all of the animals in the shelter, then it’s very difficult to argue with the success of the transport programs,” Martin said.
She said they can offload 80 to 100 animals in one transport, which alleviates the time and resources the county would have spent feeding and caring for those animals while they awaited local adoptions.
Caring for animals costs the county about $32 per animal per day, Martin said.
‘She wanted the dog’
No one in the animal adoption field wants the county to euthanize animals.
But Heather Allen, president and CEO of HALO Animal Rescue, said the transport program is not the only way to save animals — and it’s not the option that’s best for pets, potential owners or taxpayers.
She also said that the number of homeless animals in Maricopa County is down because of robust spay and neuter programs, which she said has had more of an impact on the declining euthanasia rate than the transport program.
“The goal is always to get the animals out of the shelter as fast as possible with the lowest cost possible,” Allen said. “Are we saving lives as fast as (we) could? For not a second longer than they need to be in the shelter?”
Assembling 80 to 100 transport-appropriate animals doesn’t happen overnight. Often, animals stay at the shelter for days, and in some cases more than a week, waiting for transport.
Between January 2018 and July 2019, animals spent an average of 5.4 days in the county shelter after they were selected for transport, according to The Republic’s analysis of county data.
Once animals are tagged for transport, county staff typically will not allow anyone to adopt them.
Martin said staff is instructed to allow the animals to be adopted as long as they have not yet received a health certificate (the medical paperwork needed to transport animals across state lines) — but county volunteers and would-be adopters interviewed by The Republic indicate that instruction was not often followed.
Phoenix resident Lori Swaffard’s mom tried to adopt a 2-year-old chihuahua mix in August but was told he was already booked on a flight to an out-ofstate shelter the following day.
“I’m standing right here. I’m a home that would take this dog,” Swaffard said, recalling her experience.
The dog was never made available to local adopters.
“It was just a horrible situation. My mom was in tears. She wanted the dog,” Swaffard said. “Local people should have a chance.”
It’s unclear how many of the transport-tagged animals would have been adopted out of the shelter system quicker had they been available for adoption.
About 2,700 of the 4,000 animals shipped out of state between Jan. 1, 2018, and July 30, 2019, were never given an opportunity to be adopted locally before they were placed on transport hold, according to The Republic’s analysis.
This irks local groups that say they would take the animals the county is stockpiling, which would decrease the number of days the pets have to spend in the county shelters and the amount of resources the county has to spend on the animals.
Arizona Animal Welfare League President and CEO Judith Gardner said priority should be given first to local adopters who come into the county shelter, and then to local rescue groups that will work to adopt them to local families.
“In my mind, they’re community animals. They belong to this community,” Gardner said.
Looking for a ‘good mix’ of pets
Martin said the county gives out-ofstate shelters priority over local ones because they take dogs with behavioral and medical needs. The local groups only want “highly adoptable” dogs because they’re more profitable for their organizations, she said.
She said the county requires the outof-state shelters to take three difficult pets for every “easy peasy” one they get. Martin said she’s offered the same deal to local rescues and they’d refused.
“Our local groups had relied heavily on us as being the wholesaler for animals and we felt as though we really needed to step up and help the animals ourselves,” Martin said.
She said the county’s transport program has disrupted the revenue streams of local rescue groups, which is why they don’t support it.
However, data collected by the county doesn’t reflect Martin’s claim that out-of-state shelters are taking pets that in-state ones wouldn’t.
In 2018, 2,614 of the 2,801 animals transported out of state were ranked a two out of six on the adoptability scale, with one being “adoptable with no issues.” A two ranking may indicate a minor medical or behavioral issue, county spokesman Fields Moseley said. The remaining 187 animal were given one of the five other ranks.
In its 2019 data, the county didn’t use the scale but documented health and behavioral issues.
Almost 1,900 of the 2,274 transported animals from January through midSeptember had no medical issues. Of the animals with medical issues, the most frequent problems were dentalrelated.
About 500 of the animals were documented as having a “behavioral” issue. But according to the data, more than 400 of those animals’ behavioral conditions were described as “fearful.”
Local groups would take difficult dogs
Allen said dental issues are extremely common, especially in small dogs. HALO takes in dogs with dental issues “every week” and provides treatment, she said.
She said it’s also not unusual for dogs to be “fearful” in a shelter environment. Many of the dogs she brings into HALO are fearful, she said.
Rescue groups do typically like to have a number of easy-to-adopt dogs on hand so they can quickly generate revenue. They use that money to help care for other, more difficult cases that may need medical care or training, said Anita Osa, executive director of Sunshine Dog Rescue Inc.
Her rescue group typically charges $400 for puppies and other highly
adoptable dogs. After expenses, she said, that’s about $250 of revenue.
It typically costs about $1,000 to treat a dog with Parvo or other common medical issues. Parvo is a highly contagious virus spread from dog to dog through contact with feces. It is often fatal if left untreated.
In other words, the rescue needs to adopt four healthy puppies to cover the cost of one medical case, Osa said.
“I know we’re not here to pull all the little fluffies and little adoptable dogs. However, if we’re only asked ... to take dogs that are significantly at risk, we can’t exist very long,” Osa said.
Allen and Gardner said their rescue groups don’t shy away from dogs with issues. But since ramping up its transport program, the county only wants the local rescues to take pit bulls and dogs with severe medical and behavioral issues, which are more costly to care for, harder to adopt and sometimes too large to house in their available kennels.
“It’s been a really hard pill for us to swallow,” Allen said. “They would rather partner with other partners outside of our state.”
More pets being shipped into Arizona
AAWL and HALO have started their own transport programs — but instead of sending dogs out of the Valley, they’re bringing them in.
Gardner and Allen said since they’ve had difficulty getting rescues from the county, they had more interested adopters than they did pets.
AAWL started a “rural rescue” program, sending vans to rural parts of Arizona to collect strays and bring them to Phoenix.
HALO partnered with ASPCA — one of the same groups the county uses to ship dogs out of the Valley — to have dogs shipped in.
Watching ASPCA take dogs from the county shelter out of Arizona, and then bring out-ofstate pets to Arizona for HALO is frustrating, Allen said.
“It’s a waste of ASPCA’s resources,” Allen said. “It felt very uncomfortable to me.”
Asked why the county is transporting animals out while other rescues are transporting them in, Martin said, “It makes no sense to any of us.”
She again pointed the finger at the local rescue groups, saying that if they took “a good mix” of difficult animals from the shelter, they wouldn’t have to operate their own transport programs.
County leaves Alliance for Companion Animals
In 2012, the Valley’s major animal welfare organizations, with the support of the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust and PetSmart Charities, came together under the Alliance for Companion Animals to spearhead the countywide “Fix. Adopt. Save.” campaign.
The program, which promotes pet adoption and spay and neuter programs, is widely credited as the reason euthanasia rates and animal intake numbers have plummeted in the county.
The alliance was created as a way to get all of the major players in animal welfare working on the same trajectory, Allen said.
But the alliance is missing a major player now.
Martin pulled the county out of the alliance in late 2017, shortly after the transport program ramped up.
“I think it all started to fall apart when we started questioning the transport program. We were not allowed to discuss it,” Gardner said.
Martin confirmed that the questioning of the transport program was the reason she decided to stop participating in the alliance.
“This was the constant topic of conversation and I was unwilling to keep having that conversation when there’s much bigger problems to address,” she said.
Steven Hansen, president and CEO of Arizona Humane Society and chair of the alliance, said his organization hasn’t been directly impacted by the county’s transport program because they take in sick and injured animals. They still take those animals from the county shelter for rehabilitation.
But the conflict between the county and local rescues has taken a toll, he said.
“It would be nice to have even more of a relationship between other organizations and Maricopa County,” he said.
Gardner said the county’s departure from the alliance is ironic, since it was formed more than a decade ago to help the county shelter, which was overrun with homeless animals and euthanizing thousands of pets every year.
“That’s been our focus: Help county. That’s come to a screeching halt,” she said. “I think it’s very, very sad. I’m very sorry to see that happen. I think as a group, when we collaborate together, we just have so much more success.”