At last night's Stonnington Council Meeting, the decision on whether to award a tender to it's Animal Management Services, including it's current no-kill animal shelter run by Save-A-Dog Scheme (SADS) was deferred for 2 weeks, and will come back for a decision at the next meeting of council on Monday 12th May, 2025. Both our petition was tabled and Kerrie Nasser's (of Stonnington Dogs) petition was tabled, and 3 of us spoke in the Community Questions period. The Mayor, Melina Sehr also tabled more than 50 individual letters she received on this matter as formal correspondence.
The recording of last night's council meeting is now available to watch here:
https://webcast.stonnington.vic.gov.au/archive/video25-0428.php
I wanted to thank Councillors who supported this deferral (noting that Cr Jami Klisaris is on an approved leave of absence at the moment and was absent at last night's meeting), as there clearly are many questions that need to be answered, and also clearly communicated to our community. This tender may be relatively small in terms of its dollar value to the council, but it's vitally important to our community.
Cr Stefanopoulos asked some questions of Council Officers during the deferral debate, including seeking clarification on the rates of animals euthanised by the Lost Dogs Home. Council stated that the Lost Dogs Home has changed how it is reporting it's euthanasia rates to exclude mandatory euthanasia rates, which has resulted in them reporting a lower euthanasia rate for the 2023/2024 figures. I have not been able to find any figures for 2023/2024 at all on the Lost Dogs Home's website.
However, as noted in this petition (and in the image in this update), the Lost Dogs' Home reported on their own website on their roadmap page (which is currently for 2022/2023), they "humanely euthanised" 30% of cats and 10% of dogs in their care for the 2022/2023 period.
Here's the link to the Lost Dogs Home page: https://roadmap.dogshome.com
This raises some really important questions for Council.
1. Why is the Lost Dogs able to change how it reports on euthanasia rates, and just suddenly decide to not include some animals it has euthanised its reporting numbers?
2. How can Council be confident in the accuracy of information given to it by the Lost Dogs Home, given they clearly can just decide and change for themselves on what animals they are including in the their euthanasia rates and how they choose to report euthanasia rates?
3. Why is Council willing to tender its currently no-kill shelter to the Lost Dogs Home when, according to the Council's answer to a question at last night's meeting, the Lost Dogs Home (when excluding "mandatory" euthanasia) made the decision to euthanise 12.3% of cats in their care in 2022/2023? Does this mean that the Lost Dogs Home is claiming that 17.7% of cats in their care in 2022/2023 were "mandated" to be euthanised due to State Government requirements or court orders, given they reported in their 2022/2023 roadmap they "humanely euthanised" 30% of the cats in their care?
4. What confidence can our community have that if the Lost Dogs Home is awarded this tender, they won't euthanise any terrified and traumatised lost pet cats that end up in our pound after the minimum 8 day period because they deem they have "temperament" issues? Will these poor cats be given a fair chance to be reunited with their owners or rehomed, and how can Council ensure they will be?