“No Senator, this is not about saving dogs and cats.”
—Ed Boks, General Manager of Los Angeles Animal Services, testifying before the California Senate in support of mandatory spay/neuter — admitting it doesn’t save lives
Leaders in the shelter reform movement have been saying for years that mandatory spay/neuter laws backfire. Instead of saving animals lives as advertised, these laws actually increase the killing.
Despite the warnings, the city of Los Angeles passed a draconian mandatory spay/neuter ordinance in early 2008. No Kill movement leader Nathan Winograd explains the tragic result here:
Los Angeles Animal Services (LAAS) General Manager Ed Boks made headlines in his support last year of Assembly Bill 1634, California’s mandatory spay/neuter bill when he admitted that the legislation was more about expanding the bureaucratic power of animal control than saving animals. During a legislative hearing, a Senator asked Ed Boks, the General Manager of Los Angeles Animal Services (LAAS) and one of the bill’s chief proponents: “Mr. Boks, this bill doesn’t even pretend to be about saving animals, does it?” To which Boks responded: “No Senator, this is not about saving dogs and cats.”
Not content to wait for the state (which did not pass the measure), Boks convinced the City of Los Angeles to pass its own version. He also demanded more officers to enforce it. The end result was predictable. Almost immediately, LAAS officers threatened poor people with citations if they did not turn over the pets to be killed at LAAS, and that is exactly what occurred. For the first time in a decade, impounds and killing increased—dog deaths increased 24%, while cat deaths increased 35%.
Since the Cardenas pet killer bill was passed, Los Angeles City shelters have increased the rate of animal killing, the first such increase in better than a decade. And killing is not only up, it is skyrocketing with 35% more cats and 24% more dogs losing their lives. In effect, Cardenas is asking for something that is not possible to do—there is no “success” to report. Instead, the law has been an abysmal failure, something that was not hard to predict.
Here’s the Los Angeles Animal Services – 2008 Statistical Report with the hard data.