Dear Supervisor Mandelman:

I am reaching out in order to report an experience with Animal Care and Control that demonstrates that they are not ensuring cats are cared for, particularly in facilitating reunions between owners and their lost animals as required in their mission statement. On Monday, February 14th, I was denied service from Animal Care and Control to help reunite a lost cat with his owners.

At 8:30am, I called Animal Care and Control to schedule an appointment to bring in a lost friendly, male, ginger cat and spoke to Marta DeLeon at the front desk. After hearing that I found the cat in a busy intersection off Bayshore Blvd and that I believed the cat to be lost, not a free-roaming feral, due to its friendly personality and dirty coat condition, Ms. DeLeon first insisted that I return the cat, sight unseen, immediately to the intersection where I found it. Ms. DeLeon refused to scan the cat for a microchip, and then refused to accept the cat into their system. She instead insisted that I keep the cat and post on the social media site Nextdoor to try to find the cat’s owners, instead of using Animal Care and Control’s services. Her explanation was that it was “unfair” to the cat to put it in the shelter, and that Animal Care and Control does not accept “free roaming” healthy cats, which is nowhere stated on their website or in their mission.

When I replied that Animal Care and Control states on their website that it is an open admission shelter, and also states that reuniting lost domestic animals is one of their missions, Ms. DeLeon replied that they were “not responsible for reuniting lost animals with their owners.” She informed me that this was their policy and that the same message was being told to all members of the public calling about potentially lost cats. When she finally conceded that she couldn’t deny this cat assistance without even scanning for a microchip, which would connect to the owner’s contact information, she insisted that while they would scan for a chip, even if a chip was found, that I would need to take the cat back, and that they would give the owners my contact information so that I would be responsible for reuniting the owners with the cat. When I explained that I did not have room to hold a cat indefinitely in my home, she again insisted that I should return the cat to the original intersection. When I clarified that Ms. DeLeon wanted me to bring the cat into the shelter to be scanned, but that I should then put the cat back into the intersection where it was found, and if a chip was identified that ACC would contact the owners and tell them that their lost cat was in an unknown location having been dropped back by an intersection, Ms. DeLeon became more antagonistic. She repeated the same directions multiple times, insisting that I be responsible for reuniting the cat with its potential owners. After she again stated that it was unfair to bring the cat into the shelter system, and I asked her to clarify why their shelter system was unfair to bring a cat in need into, she hung up on the call.

This interaction clearly violates several of San Francisco Animal Care and Control’s mission, including “shelters homeless, neglected, and abused animals and [offer] a variety of services to the community”, “aids domestic animals in need”, and “reunite domestic animals with their guardians.” The unheard of policy not to accept healthy free-roaming cats in our city, cited by Ms. DeLeon in order to deny service to a lost cat wandering in a busy intersection, is a blatant violation of this mission, and is both vague and completely unjustified.

Animal Care and Control has recently moved into a new facility with much more space, equipment, and resources. Our taxpayer money funded this $77 million dollar, 65,000 square foot facility, designed to double the space from its old facility in order to provide more “safe, sanitary, and humane conditions” for animals, according to Mayor Breed. Unlike other shelters in the Bay Area, San Francisco Animal Care and Control is not overburdened with animals. At the time of my call, according to their website, there were only 9 cats listed as in shelter, and only 1 cat available for adoption. It seems contrary to both the Animal Care and Control mission and the City of San Francisco’s significant investment into a new shelter to deny their services to one cat lost in an intersection, and instead insist that members of the public serve a role that ACC is both responsible for and perfectly capable of providing.

There is no excuse for an open admission shelter to refuse a lost cat in need of re-connecting with its owner.  By shifting the responsibility for lost, abandoned, or adoptable animals to the public, SF Animal Care and Control is not fulfilling its mandate to care for animals. Every effort should be made to determine if cats and dogs are pets who belong to someone and can be reunited with their owners, especially when something as simple as a chip scan may help to locate their homes. Our taxes fund Animal Care and Control in order to receive this service. As a pet owner, my pets and I rely on them as the only shelter in our city that provides this service. While I was willing to help get a pet and its owner back together, it was frustrating not to get help to do this from our public servants who are hired to take on this role.

This is also not the first time Animal Care and Control has insisted on rejecting cats in need. At another time, even as I was assisting Animal Care and Control with a delicate project concerning traumatically injured cats living in dangerous conditions in a PG&E lot, I was told by another Animal Care and Control staff member to return a litter of completely adoptable 5 week old kittens and their unfixed mother to a yard where they had been attacked by a mastiff.  San Francisco, sadly, has many abandoned, feral, and dumped cats that also need care, and this unjustified “policy” concerning “healthy, free-roaming cats” is dangerously vague and easily used to deny service to cats in need. By putting responsibility for these cats in public hands, instead of the specially staffed facilities at the shelter, they are also leaving the animals of San Francisco to untrained care in unregulated conditions, the opposite of the high quality care their new facility was built to provide. If left to the public, without access to the technology and training Animal Care and Control has, fewer of the hundreds of cats lost in the streets of San Francisco will be reunited with their owners, and owners will have no centralized location to turn to for guidance on getting their cats back. As members of the public, we are not equipped to serve the cats of San Francisco in our homes, and we should not have to when our local Animal Care and Control is both completely equipped and able to.

I hope in the future this omission of service for the cats of San Francisco will be rectified.

Regards,

Alena Ja