DOGGONE CONTROVERSY
Alderman complains that rescue groups unfairly get dibs on purebred pets at city pound — but is that really a bad thing?
Dog-loving Ald. Ray Lopez (15th) demanded Monday that Chicago’s chronically troubled Animal Care and Control shelter stop allowing animal rescue organizations to “cherry-pick purebred or premium” animals picked up by city crews.
Lopez said of the 14,000 dogs processed by the city last year, 8,000 were “first-picked” by animal rescue groups given dibs.
“Why do these groups have preferential choice over Chicago residents and taxpayers? There’s nothing wrong with rescue groups taking dogs. But if they’re only taking specific dogs and leaving us all the dogs nobody wants and can’t adopt out, we wind up in unsafe situations, as we’ve seen this year, where our shelter becomes inundated with leftovers,” the alderman said.
“That also leads to why we have so many pit bulls in our Animal Care and Control. All of the other dogs — the Huskies, the German shepherds and what not — are cherry-picked out before anyone else has a chance to look at them and adopt them.”
But at least one rescue group called Lopez “behind the times” on the reality of what rescue groups do.
“I will tell you rescues spend A LOT of money on getting these dogs the care they need,” said Lisa Baize of Foster Pet Outreach in Peoria, which takes 100-150 dogs from the Chicago shelter every year.
Not long ago, Lopez said one of his constituents, Leonardo Cisneros, had a Husky named Smokie that got loose when somebody broke into his backyard.
Before Cisneros even got to the pound, the dog already was on a “Pet Harbor” website that allows rescue groups to “put a hold” on dogs they want to adopt.
“They never called to tell us they had our dog. We found out through a police officer, who found him online for adoption. They put him up online nine hours after he got loose. They already had somebody picking him up a couple days after,” Cisneros said Monday.
Smokie had a microchip, Cisneros said: “They could have called us if they were trying to find the owners. But they weren’t trying to find the owners. They were trying to give him up for adoption. We got him back — only after we went to court three times.”
Lopez fired off an email to Kelley Gandurski, the city’s acting executive director of Animal Care and Control, and said Gandurski agreed to revisit the policy of giving rescue groups first dibs.
Gandurski said Monday it’s her understanding that, from their last conversation, she and Lopez are “on the same page.”
But Gandurski told the Sun-Times she disagreed with the assertion that animal rescues get to “cherry pick.” She said many dogs are not suitable for pet adoption — because of behavioral or medical issues — and rescue agencies are often best able to deal with them.
Asked about putting a hold on an animal, she agreed rescue organizations do get first choice, and some may turn out to be adoptable.
“We have hundreds of dogs. So it’s impossible for my medical team of, like, three veterinarians and our staff to evaluate for behavioral purposes and medical purposes every single dog that comes through the shelter all at the same time within the first three to seven days,” Gandurski said. “So we make every dog immediately available for rescue to keep the numbers down,” Gandurski said.
Each year, the Chicago shelter’s “Homeward Bound” placement program transfers about 7,000 animals a year to outside shelters.
Baize, of Foster Pet Outreach in Peoria, said her group avoids breeds they are not as savvy about, because those dogs “are best served by people that understand the breed and can rehab them and place them in proper homes,” Baize wrote in an email to the Sun-Times.
She’s taken some senior purebreds and dealt with others in poor health who never have would have been adopted — one, she said, needed 19 teeth pulled. Her fur was a “matted mess,” and she had a respiratory infection.
“I would be happy to share some of our vet bills,” Baize said.
Lopez argued that “cherry-picking doesn’t help the city. It feeds into the reputation that, if you want to adopt a pit bull, you go to [Animal Care], where you get it for $75. Or, you can go to one of these boutique rescues that specializes in particular breeds and pay a couple hundred dollars for an animal that, more than likely, taxpayers have already footed the bill for a lot for the medical issues on.”
The executive director of the Bucktownbased One Tail at a Time, Heather Owen, disputed the alderman’s claim that taxpayers are footing the bill for rescue groups and asserted that the city covers almost nothing in veterinary costs if a rescue group decides to step in, aside from usual vaccines.
Owen said her shelter spends nearly $300,000 on average a year on veterinary care for dogs — providing treatment she said the city can’t afford and doesn’t have the number of personnel to handle. She said her shelter’s $300 adoption fee is often dwarfed by the cost each dog incurs, from treating everything from deadly disease to injuries to abuse.
“I think [he] makes it seem like we come and flip these dogs for a profit . . . [but] it’s completely untrue,” Owen said. “[It’s] not like we’re getting perfectly happy healthy dogs . . . we’re taking in dogs that need a lot of care.”