Dear Supervisor Mandelman:
I am writing to you because I am extremely concerned about what is going on with our new $77 million animal shelter, San Francisco Animal Care and Control. The taxpayers of San Francisco are the ones paying for it and yet we are the ones who are asked to take stray and abandoned animals into our OWN homes to take care of them, rather than taking them directly to San Francisco Animal Care and Control.
I am a native of San Francisco and have been involved in doing trap neuter return (TNR) and rescuing feral cats for over 20 years. During those years I have trapped well over 200 cats to get them spayed or neutered, and have rescued at least 50 lost or abandoned cats from the streets of San Francisco.
You may not know that 30 years ago, there were HUNDREDS of cats in Golden Gate Park. Yes, that is one of the places where people dumped unwanted cats. Devoted volunteers started humanely trapping them to get them fixed (paying for spay and neuter out of their own pockets) and thankfully in 1993 the SPCA established their free feral fix program. The result of TNR in San Francisco, almost always done by volunteers who don't get paid a cent for their time and work, is that there are now very very few cats in Golden Gate Park.
Five years ago San Francisco had gotten very close to ZERO population growth for feral cats. There was a system that worked well! Members of the public who saw mothers and kittens, or lost animals, called ACC or SPCA, who called volunteers, who went out and trapped mother cats and kittens, as well as unfixed, sick and injured cats. ACC and SPCA and volunteers worked closely with members of the public. It was a very successful system, because as usual San Francisco was in the vanguard on dealing with the feral cat problem, as we are on so many issues. People from all over the world traveled to San Francisco to learn how we San Franciscans care for our animal population.
In 2019 this started to fall apart, and we have come to a low point. Both ACC and SPCA now have very strict policies regarding intake of kittens, and ACC is now not accepting healthy stray, lost and abandoned cats. We taxpayers are told to either put the animals BACK where we found them (even if it's in the middle of a dangerous intersection, as happened on at least one occasion) or take them home and care for them OURSELVES, rather than taking them to a shelter where qualified staff will take care of them. ACC refuses to even check these animals for a microchip and puts the whole responsibility for taking care of a lost animal in the hands of a member of the public, who may not be able to take an animal in and who may have no idea how to care for that animal!
San Francisco was once in the vanguard, and now we are going backwards! Putting unfixed cats and kittens back on the street means that we will once again have a huge population of feral cats and will end up like shelters in the Central Valley! We know what happens in these shelters: In general, there is no spay neuter program for the public, and there is a huge population of unfixed cats and dogs, resulting in large numbers of perfectly adoptable animals being killed at the shelters because of limitations on space. That is not the case in San Francisco. We have a new shelter with plenty of space, foster homes and rescue partners. ACC does not need to euthanize for lack of space.
Yet the administration of San Francisco Animal Care and Control has decided to implement these cruel new policies, which come supposedly from "national experts" in the animal welfare field. Those guidelines are based on so many shelters around the country that are crowded and underfunded, like many of the shelters in the Central Valley. Why should those guidelines apply to San Francisco, where we have a brand new shelter with many foster homes and rescue partners and plenty of volunteers who are willing to go out and spend their own time trapping animals that need to be fixed, and kittens who can be adopted? Why should those guidelines apply in San Francisco, where they are absolutely unnecessary and are hurting our animals?
These new policies will lead our city backwards, and will result in huge numbers of unfixed cats and kittens. We could once again see hundreds of cats in Golden Gate Park! Is this the direction our forward-thinking City wants to go in? This makes no sense!
I hope that you will take my concerns and those of other volunteers in the animal rescue community in San Francisco very seriously and act to change the situation. We need to go back to the policies that existed before 2019, when we could bring in ANY lost, stray or abandoned animal to San Francisco Animal Care and Control, AN OPEN ADMISSION SHELTER, and could be assured that they would get medical care, food and shelter, and if adoptable, would be placed in loving, adoptive homes. Those who are not deemed adoptable, such as truly feral cats, can be fixed and returned to the place they were found. Or, if ACC reinstates their "CIP (Call Interested Party) Hold," those of us who bring animals to the shelter would be informed, after the five-day stray period is observed and behavioral evaluations are done, that those animals are not adoptable and would be allowed to take them home to find an adoptive home ourselves, thus saving an innocent animal from death. This system worked very well for many years. Why oh why is this CIP Hold no longer allowed? It saved lives! Because I was able to put a CIP Hold on animals I brought to the shelter in the past, I was able to rescue from death row three cats who were deemed "not adoptable" for behavioral or medical reasons. I took them home, took them to my vet, paid for their care myself and found them wonderful homes!
It is yet another example of a system that worked very well, a system we all hope we can go back to.
San Franciscans CAN be proud of our shelter once again if its intake policies return to the way they were prior to 2019, and I hope that that will soon be the case. Thank you in advance for your consideration of this very important matter.
Sincerely,
Nadine May