Animal shelter to do about-face on its policy on pet adoptions

Thursday, Feb. 15, 2007 | 7:17 a.m.

The Lied Animal Shelter's practice of crowding as many dogs and cats as possible into the facility to try to save more lives was a mistake that backfired and is being corrected immediately, the chairwoman of the foundation operating the shelter said Wednesday.

Janie Greenspun Gale, chairwoman of the Animal Foundation, said the crowding fostered the spread of contagious disease that forced the shelter to destroy 1,000 animals in the last week.

"It was a misguided effort to save every animal," Gale said in an interview. "The Humane Society told us that we had created a situation that was so traumatic for the animals because they had to be put in cages with other animals and were getting sick."

The shelter is shifting its policy to one that saves only those animals deemed adoptable, she said. Others will be destroyed quickly.

The Animal Foundation also will urge government officials to adopt policies to curtail the number of unwanted pets.

The foundation discovered its problems after signing a contract with the Humane Society to perform a review of the regional shelter at 655 N. Mojave Road. The Humane Society team completed its work last week and caught the foundation board members off-guard with the severity of their criticisms, Gale said.

As a consequence, the shelter destroyed 150 diseased animals and 850 others that had been exposed to or were in close proximity to the sick animals.

"The Humane Society said this was a terrible place, not a safe place, for animals, and they tore our hearts out," she said.

The shelter also has temporarily closed its adoption, spay and neutering, and immunization services at the Mojave Road location as the facility undergoes a thorough cleaning. Those services are to resume by early next week. The services at the shelter's two satellite locations were not affected and have remained open.

"We had the best intentions and love for these animals," said Gale, a member of the Greenspun family, owners of the Las Vegas Sun. "But we have seen the light and we will end up with a better shelter.

"Instead of saving all animals, we will spend our energy saving only the healthy and friendly ones," she said. "We will put animals to sleep if they're aggressive, or if they are sick and we can't treat them, or if they have suffering of any kind.

"Our philosophy is shifting 180 degrees."

Since 1989, the foundation has placed 90,000 animals into adoption. But after building its existing shelter in 2005 and expanding it the same year, Gale said, the foundation has been flooded by animals at a rate far outpacing adoptions.

Last year the shelter took in 51,889 animals but adopted out only 12,646, with an additional 4,550 pets reclaimed by owners. The shelter destroyed 8,000 sick or severely injured animals, 3,300 vicious animals and 3,462 feral cats.

"It became a numbers game," Gale said. "There are so many unwanted animals. But you can't save all of them."

Gale said the foundation will try to curb the number of unwanted pets by urging public officials in Clark County and Las Vegas and North Las Vegas to adopt mandatory spay and neutering ordinances. Henderson has its own animal shelter.