Finish Off the Quick Kill Bill!

Posted on February 24, 2012 by jbsibley

spacer We’ve had some good developments in fighting the Quick Kill Bill lately. We’ve enlisted the help of Assemblyman Joe Lentol to kill the bill, informed the office of Speaker Sheldon Silver, and today the first ad opposing the bill appeared in the major newspaper of sponsor Amy Paulin’s district – and I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to animal lovers all over the world who donated to place that ad and inform her constituents of her intentions.

Despite all of that, the bill is not yet dead. Assemblywoman Amy Paulin has made noises about reaching out to opponents of the bill, but has not actually done so as of yet – indeed, when experts pointed out some of the more obvious flaws in her bill at the beginning of the process, she rejected their input and later labeled opponents of her Quick Kill Bill misguided, uninformed and uneducated. It’s time to put this horrible legislation away.

Every bill before the New York State Assembly gathers sponsors and multisponsors; assemblypersons who sign up to support and cheerlead for the bill. Our efforts have caused three sponsors/multisponsors to withdraw their support, but several remain. WE ARE GETTING RESULTS! IF YOU ARE A NEW YORKER, and especially if you are a constituent of one of the remaining sponsors, please follow EACH of these three links and email to remaining sponsors of this bill asking them to withdraw their sponsorship. Text has been provided, but as always adding your own heartfelt and polite message is helpful. These sponsors are not necessarily the enemy; most are merely uninformed as to the true intent of this legislation.

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3

If you can do even more, please call their offices in addition to sending email, especially if you are one of their constituents or know someone who is and will call, and politely request that they withdraw their sponsorship of A05449, Amy Paulin’s Quick Kill Bill.

spacer Remaining legislative sponsors of the Quick Kill Bill:
Margaret Markey (Queens) 718-651-3185
Robert Sweeney (Suffolk Cty) 631-957-2087
Matthew Titone (Staten Island) 718-442-9932
Francisco Moya (Queens) 718-458-5367
Felix Ortiz (Brooklyn) 718-492-6334
Peter Rivera (Bronx) 718-931-2620
Naomi Rivera (Bronx) 718-409-0109
William Boyland (Brooklyn) 718-498-8681
Richard Gottifried (Manhattan) 212-807-7900
John McEneny (Albany) 518-455-4178
Joan Millman (Brooklyn) 718-246-4889
Michelle Schimel (Nassau Cty) 516-482-6966
Fred Thiele, Jr (Suffolk Cty) 631-537-2583

If any of these offices say that they have withdrawn their support, please contact me so I can confirm, announce, and remove them from the list! Thanks!

If you are NOT a New York State resident, please continue to contact the Chair of the ASPCA board to let her know how disappointed you are with her organization for their support of the Quick Kill Bill, and let Assemblywoman Paulin know that the opposition to her bill is national in scope.

Let’s get this done so we can move on to the next step – passing CAARA and SAVING more of New York State’s animals!

Be Sociable, Share!
  • spacer
spacer
  • Tweet
Posted in ASPCA, Cats, Dogs, No Kill, Politics | 8 Comments

Vicious Destiny Arrives at Pets Alive

Posted on February 22, 2012 by jbsibley

Vicious Destiny, the cat deemed too violent to be adopted to the public by New York City’s Animal Care and Control, arrived at Pets Alive today. She is reportedly affectionate and attention seeking and not at all scary.

spacer

spacer

spacer

Be Sociable, Share!
  • spacer
spacer
  • Tweet
Posted in Cats, New York City, No Kill, NYCACC, Pets Alive, Politics, Shelter Stuff | 4 Comments

Hoarders, Hoarders EVERYWHERE!

Posted on February 21, 2012 by jbsibley

spacer One of the arguments that the ASPCA and others frequently use to fight shelter access legislation (or support their own legislation to strengthen the ability of shelters to keep rescue groups out) is the risk that animals will go to hoarders. To hear them tell it, there are hoarders everywhere, hiding under every rock, every nook and cranny!

That argument is always a red herring. Here’s why: there are very few animal hoarders in the world, even though the ones who manage to collect many animals are always news stories because of the shocking visuals. It’s unusual enough that it was not formally defined in public health literature until 1999 and still lacks distinct classification as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychiatry. Today, I did a search on pet-abuse.com, a website that tracks animal cruelty cases in the US. I searched for a radius of 10 miles of my zip code, which would include all of New York City and a heavily populated area of New Jersey as well. Since Jan 1, 2011 in one of the most populated areas in the US there were two cases related to animal hoarding.

Shelters who do a lot of killing will tell you that one of the reasons they don’t work more with rescue groups is the risk of hoarding, but that risk as we can see is extremely low. My local shelter is New York City Animal Care and Control, which has a kill rate of around 1/3 of intake. They and the ASPCA and others will tell you that one of the reasons they need to control rescue access is hoarding, to the tune of killing 1/3 of the animals in their care to prevent it. 1/3 that might – very rarely – end up with a hoarder, getting a definite death instead to prevent that very slim possibility.

It should also be noted that a well-run shelter is a difficult place to hoard animals from. There are fees involved, paperwork, chips implanted to track animals – the shelters I volunteer with stay registered on the chips for their animals and will help them if they are ever found to be in trouble, wherever they are, even if they have to send someone to get them. It would be much easier for a hoarder to acquire “free to good home” animals from the classifieds, pick up free kittens in Wal-Mart parking lots, or even just hang a shingle outside saying “Joe’s Animal Rescue” and watch them come pouring in.

I’m not saying there aren’t hoarders in the world, there certainly are, and we need to learn a lot more about the psychology of animal hoarding and how it can be helped and cured – because untreated the recidivism rate among hoarders is near 100%, making legal intervention a temporary fix at best. I’m not saying that there aren’t hoarders posing as rescuers and rescues, even No Kills, in the world, and they should and are rejected by legitimate rescuers and the No Kill philosophy for the scams that they are.

What I am saying is this: the number one cause of death for dogs and cats in America is shelter killing. It is the largest health risk a dog or cat faces. Hoarding doesn’t even make the list. To defend shelter killing using the slim risk of hoarding as a justification is nothing less than a lie.

Be Sociable, Share!