The Companion Animals Taskforce (NSW) is in the media today spruiking its grand plan to the state government;
Annual pet registrations tipped for NSW
Pet owners will have to register their dogs and cats every year under recommendations being considered by the NSW government.
…
Liberal MP and vet Andrew Cornwall, who chaired the task force, conceded that push would be “contested”.“Of animals that are on the register, we believe anecdotally that some 50 per cent of those details are incorrect,” he said.
“We feel it was a mistake that was made by the previous government going for lifetime registration … (This recommendation) feels right, but trying to unscramble that omelette may be too difficult.”
Yearly animal registration is a good idea. Resourcing effective animal management departments give them the ability to implement proactive programs which save the lives of animals (the Calgary model relies on good income from pet owners in return for offering an extraordinarily good level of care for the community’ pets). That said, in this instance, it won’t save more lives.
Really? But if 50% of microchipped pets have the incorrect details, then surely it would help?
The 50% claim is derived from the experience that about 50% of dogs are claimed from pounds. Somewhere around the same amount aren’t, most likely because their microchip details aren’t correct. Like this;
So the obviously conclusion is OMG 50% of our dogs aren’t microchipped with accurate contact details for their owners – major FAIL!
Except.
We know that people who are genuinely ‘irresponsible’ tend towards non-compliance with other ‘responsible’ pet ownership behaviours – like keeping dogs appropriately contained. It would be fair then, to assume that ‘irresponsibly’ owned dogs are significantly overrepresented in the pound population.
It’s hard to believe that half of all dog owners, whose dogs don’t enter the pound, are also non-compliant in keeping their microchip details up to date. And even if they were, their dogs didn’t enter the pound – so microchip or no microchip, their dogs didn’t contribute to high shelter kill rates.
We know that some dog enter pounds and shelters in NSW (about 60,000 dogs a year*)
While the rest of the dogs in the state don’t (overall population for NSW 1.1 million dogs**)
This means, just 4.5% of NSW’s population of dogs are entering the pound in any year.
Which looks like this;
The Taskforce is proposing that changing the way ALL dogs are handled, will effect the dogs entering pounds and who remain unclaimed. They are changing the rules for all dog owners to target 2.25% of the dog population. Which seems like an enormously inefficient use of resources, because it is.
Well smarty, what can we do then?
Above is the outcomes for all dogs in all of the local council pounds in NSW*. Just five regions are doing 54% of the killing. And it’s no coincidence that all five also have the lowest rates of animal sales (adoptions). Basically, these operations are set up to bring dogs in – and then fuck it, let’s just kill them.
Some are kind enough to let rescue groups do some of their work for them. Isn’t that nice? Which is basically the only thing keeping them from being almost totally effective pet-slaughterhouses.
If the Companion Animals Taskforce was interested in truly making a difference for pets, it would say to these pounds – pull your damn finger out. In 2013 having pounds who place 2%, 4%, 6% of dogs into new homes and kill up to 56% of them is an utter disgrace.
The killing of the state could be dropped by pretty much half, if the pound management in these location started from-pound adoption programs, instead of just killing and blaming ‘the community’.
Disappointingly, the Companion Animal Taskforce only really mentions re-homing direct from pound once in its Discussion Paper;
The re-homing of animals from pounds is a critical strategy employed by councils to reduce the number of animals euthanased in their facilities. However, pound managers face substantial obstacles in doing so, particularly as pounds compete with pet shops and breeders as sources of animals and often do not have the resources to advertise animals in their care widely to the public.
A digital camera costs a couple of hundred bucks. A PetRescue account is free and reaches several hundred thousand willing adopters every month. The idea that ‘cost’ is the prohibitive factor in implementing a pound rehoming program is implausible. Much better, says the Taskforce, than trying to compete with pet shops, than we just accept killing instead.
Instead of looking at the pounds who are doing 50% of the killing, the Taskforce is continuing to chase the tiny fraction of dogs who enter pounds AND remain unclaimed. The ‘2 & a bit’ percent.
Rather than get bang for their buck, the animal lovers of NSW have gotten 42 pages of the same-old-failed thinking. Blame breeders. Blame owners. Restrict ownership. Make it more difficult to be a pet owner. Keep doing what we’ve always done. And whatever you do, don’t mention the elephant in the room – pounds who fail to do anything at all to help animals survive being impounded.
No one wants to kill pets. Sure, its catchy, but when you run a critical eye over the stats, it is also clearly totally wrong. There are pounds who don’t only want to kill pets, they’re continuing to kill pets and they’ve now been given the cover they needed to keep doing so, by this pseudo Taskforce.
*source: Analysis of Council Data Collection System for Seizures of Cats and Dogs 2010/2011 + RSPCA NSW Annual Figs (intakes were 11,989, with 4,862 dogs killed).
** source: Contribution of the Pet Care Industry to the Australian Economy – 7th Edition
