DAS itself has been trapped between two opposing attitudes toward its work: The old dog catcher mentality of "catch, cage, kill," which focuses on rounding up strays, keeping them a short time and euthanizing them quickly, and a more animal welfare-influenced philosophy that focuses on humane treatment, adoption and live release. Animal rights activists blame city managers and city council members for sending out conflicting messages about what it wants the shelter to be. But when city leadership is predominantly concerned with street sweeps and numbers, viewing animals as they would high weeds or graffiti, compassion gets lost in the mix.
"This has come full circle a couple of times," says Andy Allen, a former chairwoman of the Animal Shelter Commission, a city council-appointed citizens advisory panel that oversees the shelter. She recalls the shelter suffering from the same problems a decade ago. "We have to stop this circle."
Mark Graham
Jonnie England, who served on the Animal Shelter Commission for a decade, volunteers a couple times a week at the shelter, taking photos of cats and dogs in hopes of finding them new homes with adoptive parents or rescue groups.
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The interim shelter division manager, Lieutenant Scott Walton—a Dallas police fix-it guy who was assigned to restructure the DPD property room in the wake of the fake drugs scandal nearly a decade ago—is preaching a gospel of "compassion" to employees, but is that really all that's missing at the shelter?
Critics, including current and former members of the Animal Services Commission, say Assistant City Manager Forest Turner, who oversees the Department of Code Compliance under whose purview the shelter falls, has mismanaged his position, putting golf buddy Tyrone McGill in a job he was unqualified to fill; also, Turner has refused to provide the commission with straight answers about city shelter operations. For the past three years, under Turner's leadership and that of City Manager Mary Suhm, relationships between shelter workers, the commission and management have become, according to one former ASC member, "very adversarial."
Turner says the city "strives for continual improvement" and has placed the best employees in positions for which they are well suited. But critics wonder why Suhm, who declined to be interviewed for this story, hasn't gutted the department. They believe City Hall has forgotten that even though the animal shelter is under the Department of Code Compliance, dogs and cats can't simply be dealt with like bulk trash and unmended fences.
Most of all, some past and present commission members wonder why it has been ignored when they have been calling for reform and offering concrete solutions for years. The only answer they can come up with: Bad politics trumps good policy in code compliance.
With its $16.3 million price tag, courtesy of a late-'90s bond election, the new municipal animal shelter that opened in 2007 at the corner of Westmoreland Road and Interstate 30 in West Dallas was supposed to solve many of the problems that stalked previous shelters.
A decade ago, when Dallas Animal Services was called Dallas Animal Control, it didn't fall under the purview of the Department of Code Compliance but under Streets and Sanitation Services. Former commission chairwoman Andy Allen calls that organization structure "a terrible idea."
"That sent the wrong message to the public," she says, "that the job of animal control is to pick up dead animals off the streets." At the time, Dallas actually had two shelters, one in Oak Cliff near the zoo and another on Forney Road in Far East Dallas. Both shelters were aging dank, dark places with leaky roofs and serious rodent infestation problems.
Workers at the time seemed to have little knowledge of progressive animal control philosophy and procedures. At the adoption desk, for example, Allen says "there was no screening all around," neither for the animals chosen to be put up for adoption nor for the citizens who came into the shelter looking for a pet. Quality of life for the animals housed at the shelter was poor at best.
In fairness, workers at animal shelters can develop a hardened attitude toward their work just to survive it. Daily, they must deal with aggressive dogs, clawing cats, emotional owners who have lost their pets or can no longer control them and irate owners who have been cited for anything from dog-tethering complaints to animal cruelty. Some staffers suffer from "compassion fatigue," which sets in when people are asked to deal with trauma—like the euthanization of dozens of animals a day, for example—on a consistent basis.
"The people in this business are some of the most compassionate that I have ever met," Allen says, "but they can be beaten down." In order to deal with the reality of an 80 to 90 percent euthanasia rate, one current kennel worker, Eddie Hopper, says he reads the Bible every morning. "You've got to get your mind right or it can get real bad."
The call for the first Humane Society of the United States audit came in 2000, not as the result of any isolated incident, but from a general sense that the department was in terrible shape.
"Overall mismanagement would be an understatement," Allen recalls. When HSUS released its first report in December 2001, it confirmed what many had known for a long time: "The DAC has been a ship adrift for years," HSUS auditors wrote. In the eyes of both city government and community members, the report continues, "DAC is considered little more than a kennel or 'dog pound.'"
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