Just How Shady Are Things at L.A. Animal Services? City Controller Aims to Find Out in New Audit

Regardless of what people are doing at L.A. Animal Services, the animals of Los Angeles still need lots of help.  If you are looking to adopt an animal in the LA area, check out http://www.foundanimals.org/pe... , where you can search through all kinds of animals ready to be adopted.

There will always be people out for themselves. But Wendy, with tens of thousands of euths at LA shelters (not properly documented) shouldn't lowering those numbers be our primary concern? Shouldn't we be educating people on what is happening to our abandoned animals? Shouldn't we put more focus into promoting shelter and rescue adoption? Shouldn't the evaluations be focused on WHY this city can't get it's act together to lower the number of great dogs and cats PTS?!? The city has cut funding to the point where there aren't ample resources to internally do much of anything besides keep the doors open and make some minimal difference. L.A. should be ashamed!

What i'd really like to see them audit is the cost of adoption vs. killing. they seem to be pretty kill happy in our lovely LA shelters, esp LA County! i have no problem with people stealing pets out of the shelter as long as they can no longer breed. better off stolen than dead. and essentially my friends, that's where MOST of them end up... dead. Oh, btw, each dead animal costs tax payers $400. the math is 25,000 dead animals in LA x $400....$10M.

I'm just curious where those statistics are from.  Can you point me somewhere?  I'm not clear on how they euthenize animals in LA, but I'd imagine if it is that expensive it's probably because of the level of humane-ness required in the process.  I'm sure it'd be cheaper if we could just shoot them like ol' yeller, but that's not really a good option either.

Why, is it that investigative news reporters always seem to expose City departmental problems before City Controller Wendy Greuel does?   Especially dealing with our precious pets.  Even the FBI is beating her to the punch, on the more serious matters at City Hall.  Why don't we just do away with her position, since she really didn't want to stay there full term anyway?  Let the investigative reporter's do her job, since their so good at it?   The Animal Shelters can then be managed by the Zoo department, even if it gets privatized. 
 
Her ambition of running for mayor just gets in her way of conducting through, bona-fide investigations !

I'm David Barron
A real civil servant
 

All pets are altered coming from the shelters. Or supposed to be. There is another side that needs consideration. The old shelter policy was that only an employee had keys to kennels/cages, a volunteer had to ask an employee for access. Recently Brenda Barnette gave keys to the volunteers, and there went any accountability. And all those emails from rescues floating around saying tht 400 animals would be euthanized. These types had more reason to take the dogs than the few bucks one might get for selling a non papered dog you can easily get at the shelter for a few bucks. Think about it, who has more to gain, an employee who would lose a good job with benefits or a "savior" volunteer(s) who think to save that dog at any and all cost/risk. 

I'm just kind of curious...

Okay.  So we have a stray animal/unwanted pet problem.  We have the city animal shelter to care for these pets and give them away to people who want pets.  This is a good thing.

So what is happening is that allegedly someone is stealing these animals and selling them to people who would rather buy a pet than go to the pound.

And this is bad because...?

Let's say I walk into the city pound and find a purebred Japanese Akita.  Heck, I can get $1500 for that dog.  So I adopt the dog and turn around and sell him to someone who wants to buy the dog, making a cool $1500.  Where's the harm?

I'll admit--I'm somewhat ignorant of the adoption procedure.  Does the animal shelter do a background check or something--make sure I'm not a known animal abuser?

One reason I could think of right off the bat is that all of the animals that get LEGALLY adopted from the city shelters must be sterilized before they can go to their new homes. This and basic vaccinations, of course. Spaying and neutering homeless animals is a big deal and is a large part of why we have such a huge population of shelter animals to begin with.

These are really great questions. I'm going to see if our resident animal adoption expert can give us some insight. I'd like to know, too. I do believe you pay to adopt an animal from a city shelter, so if they are being stolen & sold "on the street" that is a possible revenue loss, because the City paid to care for the animal until it was taken. Let's see if we can explore this a bit more!

I hope this problem isn't widespread throughout the system. We had a wonderful experience at the West Valley shelter when we adopted our dog nearly two years ago.