07
Dec
2004
Bali Guerrero is effusive, passionate, and energetic, and the only thing keeping her from her dream of being an "animal cop" is the prospect of euthanizing dogs and cats.
Guerrero is a kennel tech at the Moline animal shelter, which is run by the city. She started volunteering in January 2003, and started working there part-time in May of that year. She now works 20 hours a week.
"I started here because I wanted to be an animal cop," she said last week. "One month of volunteering, and already I had a dog" from the shelter, she said.
Still, she claims to love all the animals equally, and she gets attached to them. "They're all my favorites," she said.
But in spite of her affection for the animals she deals with every day, she no longer wants to be a police officer on the animal-control beat. "I'm here only for the animals," she said. "I'm not going to put an animal down."
Guerrero is actively trying to reduce the number of animals euthanized in the shelter where she works. She has several special events planned over the next few weeks to generate publicity for and awareness of her animals' plights, and already the kill rate for the shelter is down dramatically this year. It is, in fact, lower than the rates for other shelters in the Quad Cities.
But in her quest to prevent animals from being euthanized, Guererro is also discovering the challenges of dealing with government bureaucracy. The shelter's hours were cut several years ago because of a tight municipal budget, and as a result animals in the Moline shelter face more obstacles than those in other facilities.
The Moline animal shelter is small, with room for 15 cats and 12 dogs. In a pinch, the shelter can take an additional five cats and four dogs.
Because it's a municipal shelter, it must accept all stray animals from within city limits, as well as pets that Moline residents release into its care. "We don't have a choice," Guerrero said. "We can't say, 'We're full. We can't take your dog.'"
As a result, when the shelter is full, animals get killed.
Hard Decisions
You might not think of animal shelters as competitive enterprises, but they are in one essential way: When it comes to adopting stray or abandoned animals, the public is going to go where it's most convenient.
And among the animal shelters in the Quad Cities, there's nothing as inconvenient as the Moline animal shelter. The Moline shelter is open from 7 to 11 a.m. weekdays, with no regular evening or weekend hours. If you call, even when the shelter is open, you're as likely to get an answering machine as a human being.
And because of that, a lot of animals die. People interested in adopting pets will go elsewhere, because there's no shortage of adoptable pets in the Quad Cities.
The hard fact about most animal shelters is that some animals need to be killed for no reason other than there's no room for them. And in shelters throughout the Quad Cities, thousands of animals are put down each year, many for space reasons.
"A lot of hard decisions get made here," Guerrero said. She thinks a lot of those deaths could be prevented.
Guerrero said the shelter has "horrible hours" and lists off the times that other shelters in the area are open. They're typically open afternoons, and all have at least some weekend hours. During Moline's hours, Guerrero said, "everybody's sleeping or working."
For comparison, the Rock Island animal shelter - which is also a unit of municipal government - is open from noon to 5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; noon to 2 p.m. Wednesday; and noon to 4 p.m. Saturday. The Quad City Animal Welfare Center - a private no-kill shelter - is open from noon to 5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday; and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. (Because the Animal Welfare Center is no-kill, it's more selective about the animals it accepts.) And the Humane Society of Scott County is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.
And while the municipal shelters of Rock Island and Moline give pet adopters certificates good for discounts on spaying and neutering pets, those services are part of the adoption fees at the Quad City Animal Welfare Center and the Humane Society of Scott County.
Moline also comes up short when it comes to volunteers. The facility has nine volunteers - four active - and sometimes uses community-service workers. The Humane Society of Scott County has 156 volunteers, including 20 "core" helpers. The Quad City Animal Welfare Center has 50 people who volunteer at the site, and several hundred others who help it with fundraising events.
All those things put Moline at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to adopting animals.
In addition, the shelter - at 210 35th Street - is in poor condition. "Our kennels are literally falling apart," Guerrero said. Rust has eaten away joints, and one kennel has no latch. "Yes, the animals have gotten loose before," Guerrero said.
And although Moline has three community service officers who are involved in animal-control efforts, they're also charged with dealing with abandoned vehicles, crossing-guard duties, and more. "All those things go above the animals," Guerrero said.
Those are all functions of the city's tight budget. The Moline shelter used to be open from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., said Lieutenant Jerome Patrick, who oversees the Moline shelter in the city police department's services division. Reducing the hours "was a decision that had to be made because of budget constraints" in 2001, he said. And the shelter is open those particular hours because that's when Guerrero is available.
Relief might be on the way. This week, the Moline City Council was expected to sign off on an intergovernmental agreement that would create a new animal shelter combining the operations of the Moline, Rock Island, and Rock Island County facilities. The new shelter would be located on property leased from the Quad City International Airport.
"The goal is to have it open by late spring of 2005," Patrick said. He added that the tentative plan is to have a shelter that is open seven days a week at 11 a.m. through at least 6 p.m. on weekdays and 4 p.m. on weekends.
The agreement must still be approved by other governmental bodies, Patrick said, and those governmental units will also need to decide how much money to give the shelter in operational money. Part of the construction and operations money will come from the Thomas & Helen Larson Trust, which donated nearly $1.5 million in 2000 to the city of Moline for the care of animals.
Guerrero is miffed that most of the money has been held back for the consolidated shelter instead of being used for improving the current shelter's operations. (Nearly $800,000 of the gift remain.) But without that money, Guerrero is helping the shelter compete for a $5,000 grant through the Home for the Holidays program, an effort to boost animal adoptions. Twenty shelters from across the country will be awarded grants. "That money could come in really handy," Guerrero said.
The Bottom Line: Space
As bad as conditions are in Moline, the shelter's 2004 kill rate is actually low compared to other local shelters. Moline Community Service Officer Liz Watson said last week that the animal shelter has taken in 600 animals in 2004, and 155 (26 percent) have been euthanized. That's much lower than in the past; another community service officer said that in past years the shelter was forced to kill half the animals that came in.
The lower kill rate has a lot to do with Guerrero. She tries to get as much publicity for the shelter as she can, and has helped organize special events. She's in charge of a "media lockup" from 7 to 11 a.m. on December 9, at which visitors can see local media celebrities in animal cages. And from 4 to 8 p.m. on December 13 will be an evening open house. Adoption fees will be reduced for those events.
Watson credited special programs such as those with lowering the euthanasia rate. "2004 has been a lot better," she said.
Compared with other shelters, Moline's 2004 kill rate is low. The Humane Society of Scott County in its 2003-4 fiscal year euthanized 3,000 out of the 7,186 animals it dealt with - 42 percent. And in 2003, the Rock Island animal shelter killed 643 out of the 1,032 dogs and cats it brought in - 62 percent.
What those numbers don't show is the different reasons for putting animals down. For instance, the Humane Society of Scott County only euthanized one dog and 34 cats last fiscal year because of space, according to Executive Director Pamela Arndt.
At the Rock Island shelter, however, "most of it [the euthanizations] is because of space," said Byron Reynolds, a community service officer. "When you run a kill shelter, that is the bottom line: space."
The Humane Society's rate is somewhat deceptive because it screens domestic animals when they come in for temperament. Animals that fail the test - for instance, those that startle easily or are aggressive - are euthanized. Essentially, the Humane Society is making an up-front determination of an animal's adoptability, and is therefore reducing the likelihood that it will need to kill animals for space reasons. "We're the only one [shelter] in the area that does that," Arndt said.
The Humane Society also benefits from a new, larger, highly visible facility it opened three years ago at 5001 Brady Street in Davenport. Since that building opened, the number of adoptions has increased from 1,800 a year to 1,900 a year, Arndt said. While the organization used to have 6,000 animals a year before the move, now it gets roughly 7,000 a year.
And while the no-kill Quad City Animal Welfare Center in Milan has taken in more than 1,300 animals this year and has room for 150 at a time - including 40 dogs and 60 cats - it can't take all animals, said Executive Director Patti Lahn.
"It's got to be an animal we feel we can adopt," she said. "The goal is to help as many animals as possible."
Guerrero frets that the Animal Welfare Center takes few of her animals. On November 26, she said, the Animal Welfare Center took two dogs.
"It is based on how many cages and runs we have available, and how adoptable the animal is," Lahn said. "If we have three adoptions, we go out and get three dogs" from area shelters.
Lahn said that the Quad City Animal Welfare Center draws its animals from both Iowa and Illinois, although roughly 70 percent come from the Illinois side of the Mississippi. She said the organization also works with breed-specific animal-rescue groups, including organizations in Galesburg and Peoria.
"There are people who feel they [the Quad City Animal Welfare Center] don't take enough of the area shelter dogs," Reynolds said. "Sometimes we just don't have the adoptable pet." He added that he's glad the Animal Welfare Center takes as many shelter dogs as it does. "Milan's a private organization," he said. "They don't have to do anything for anybody."
Unfortunately, there are typically far more stray, neglected, unwanted, and abused animals than there are spaces at local kill shelters, and the Animal Welfare Center tries to choose animals that it knows it can adopt quickly. For example, if the shelter has three black Labs, it's unlikely to take another until those are adopted.
And the bottom line is that the only way to prevent dogs, cats, and other animals from being killed is for pet owners to be responsible (spaying and neutering their animals, for example, to reduce the animal population), for more families to adopt needy pets, and for more people to volunteer their time at local shelters.
"The more people that are involved with the shelter, the fewer animals have to be euthanized," Guerrero said.
Sidebar: How to Contact Local Shelters
Animal Aid Humane Society (cats only): 239 50th Street, Moline, (309)797-6550
Humane Society of Scott County: 5001 Brady Street, Davenport, (563)388-6655
Moline City Animal Shelter: 210 35th Street, Moline, (309)797-0741
Quad City Animal Welfare Center: 724 West Second Avenue, Milan, (309)787-6830
Rock Island City Animal Shelter: 330 Mill Street, Rock Island, (309)732-2590
St. Francis Animal Shelter (Rock Island County): 4520 Fourth Avenue, Moline, (309)736-1600
"I started here because I wanted to be an animal cop," she said last week. "One month of volunteering, and already I had a dog" from the shelter, she said.
Still, she claims to love all the animals equally, and she gets attached to them. "They're all my favorites," she said.
But in spite of her affection for the animals she deals with every day, she no longer wants to be a police officer on the animal-control beat. "I'm here only for the animals," she said. "I'm not going to put an animal down."
Guerrero is actively trying to reduce the number of animals euthanized in the shelter where she works. She has several special events planned over the next few weeks to generate publicity for and awareness of her animals' plights, and already the kill rate for the shelter is down dramatically this year. It is, in fact, lower than the rates for other shelters in the Quad Cities.
But in her quest to prevent animals from being euthanized, Guererro is also discovering the challenges of dealing with government bureaucracy. The shelter's hours were cut several years ago because of a tight municipal budget, and as a result animals in the Moline shelter face more obstacles than those in other facilities.
The Moline animal shelter is small, with room for 15 cats and 12 dogs. In a pinch, the shelter can take an additional five cats and four dogs.
Because it's a municipal shelter, it must accept all stray animals from within city limits, as well as pets that Moline residents release into its care. "We don't have a choice," Guerrero said. "We can't say, 'We're full. We can't take your dog.'"
As a result, when the shelter is full, animals get killed.
Hard Decisions
You might not think of animal shelters as competitive enterprises, but they are in one essential way: When it comes to adopting stray or abandoned animals, the public is going to go where it's most convenient.
And among the animal shelters in the Quad Cities, there's nothing as inconvenient as the Moline animal shelter. The Moline shelter is open from 7 to 11 a.m. weekdays, with no regular evening or weekend hours. If you call, even when the shelter is open, you're as likely to get an answering machine as a human being.
And because of that, a lot of animals die. People interested in adopting pets will go elsewhere, because there's no shortage of adoptable pets in the Quad Cities.
The hard fact about most animal shelters is that some animals need to be killed for no reason other than there's no room for them. And in shelters throughout the Quad Cities, thousands of animals are put down each year, many for space reasons.
"A lot of hard decisions get made here," Guerrero said. She thinks a lot of those deaths could be prevented.
Guerrero said the shelter has "horrible hours" and lists off the times that other shelters in the area are open. They're typically open afternoons, and all have at least some weekend hours. During Moline's hours, Guerrero said, "everybody's sleeping or working."
For comparison, the Rock Island animal shelter - which is also a unit of municipal government - is open from noon to 5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; noon to 2 p.m. Wednesday; and noon to 4 p.m. Saturday. The Quad City Animal Welfare Center - a private no-kill shelter - is open from noon to 5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday; and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. (Because the Animal Welfare Center is no-kill, it's more selective about the animals it accepts.) And the Humane Society of Scott County is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.
And while the municipal shelters of Rock Island and Moline give pet adopters certificates good for discounts on spaying and neutering pets, those services are part of the adoption fees at the Quad City Animal Welfare Center and the Humane Society of Scott County.
Moline also comes up short when it comes to volunteers. The facility has nine volunteers - four active - and sometimes uses community-service workers. The Humane Society of Scott County has 156 volunteers, including 20 "core" helpers. The Quad City Animal Welfare Center has 50 people who volunteer at the site, and several hundred others who help it with fundraising events.
All those things put Moline at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to adopting animals.
In addition, the shelter - at 210 35th Street - is in poor condition. "Our kennels are literally falling apart," Guerrero said. Rust has eaten away joints, and one kennel has no latch. "Yes, the animals have gotten loose before," Guerrero said.
And although Moline has three community service officers who are involved in animal-control efforts, they're also charged with dealing with abandoned vehicles, crossing-guard duties, and more. "All those things go above the animals," Guerrero said.
Those are all functions of the city's tight budget. The Moline shelter used to be open from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., said Lieutenant Jerome Patrick, who oversees the Moline shelter in the city police department's services division. Reducing the hours "was a decision that had to be made because of budget constraints" in 2001, he said. And the shelter is open those particular hours because that's when Guerrero is available.
Relief might be on the way. This week, the Moline City Council was expected to sign off on an intergovernmental agreement that would create a new animal shelter combining the operations of the Moline, Rock Island, and Rock Island County facilities. The new shelter would be located on property leased from the Quad City International Airport.
"The goal is to have it open by late spring of 2005," Patrick said. He added that the tentative plan is to have a shelter that is open seven days a week at 11 a.m. through at least 6 p.m. on weekdays and 4 p.m. on weekends.
The agreement must still be approved by other governmental bodies, Patrick said, and those governmental units will also need to decide how much money to give the shelter in operational money. Part of the construction and operations money will come from the Thomas & Helen Larson Trust, which donated nearly $1.5 million in 2000 to the city of Moline for the care of animals.
Guerrero is miffed that most of the money has been held back for the consolidated shelter instead of being used for improving the current shelter's operations. (Nearly $800,000 of the gift remain.) But without that money, Guerrero is helping the shelter compete for a $5,000 grant through the Home for the Holidays program, an effort to boost animal adoptions. Twenty shelters from across the country will be awarded grants. "That money could come in really handy," Guerrero said.
The Bottom Line: Space
As bad as conditions are in Moline, the shelter's 2004 kill rate is actually low compared to other local shelters. Moline Community Service Officer Liz Watson said last week that the animal shelter has taken in 600 animals in 2004, and 155 (26 percent) have been euthanized. That's much lower than in the past; another community service officer said that in past years the shelter was forced to kill half the animals that came in.
The lower kill rate has a lot to do with Guerrero. She tries to get as much publicity for the shelter as she can, and has helped organize special events. She's in charge of a "media lockup" from 7 to 11 a.m. on December 9, at which visitors can see local media celebrities in animal cages. And from 4 to 8 p.m. on December 13 will be an evening open house. Adoption fees will be reduced for those events.
Watson credited special programs such as those with lowering the euthanasia rate. "2004 has been a lot better," she said.
Compared with other shelters, Moline's 2004 kill rate is low. The Humane Society of Scott County in its 2003-4 fiscal year euthanized 3,000 out of the 7,186 animals it dealt with - 42 percent. And in 2003, the Rock Island animal shelter killed 643 out of the 1,032 dogs and cats it brought in - 62 percent.
What those numbers don't show is the different reasons for putting animals down. For instance, the Humane Society of Scott County only euthanized one dog and 34 cats last fiscal year because of space, according to Executive Director Pamela Arndt.
At the Rock Island shelter, however, "most of it [the euthanizations] is because of space," said Byron Reynolds, a community service officer. "When you run a kill shelter, that is the bottom line: space."
The Humane Society's rate is somewhat deceptive because it screens domestic animals when they come in for temperament. Animals that fail the test - for instance, those that startle easily or are aggressive - are euthanized. Essentially, the Humane Society is making an up-front determination of an animal's adoptability, and is therefore reducing the likelihood that it will need to kill animals for space reasons. "We're the only one [shelter] in the area that does that," Arndt said.
The Humane Society also benefits from a new, larger, highly visible facility it opened three years ago at 5001 Brady Street in Davenport. Since that building opened, the number of adoptions has increased from 1,800 a year to 1,900 a year, Arndt said. While the organization used to have 6,000 animals a year before the move, now it gets roughly 7,000 a year.
And while the no-kill Quad City Animal Welfare Center in Milan has taken in more than 1,300 animals this year and has room for 150 at a time - including 40 dogs and 60 cats - it can't take all animals, said Executive Director Patti Lahn.
"It's got to be an animal we feel we can adopt," she said. "The goal is to help as many animals as possible."
Guerrero frets that the Animal Welfare Center takes few of her animals. On November 26, she said, the Animal Welfare Center took two dogs.
"It is based on how many cages and runs we have available, and how adoptable the animal is," Lahn said. "If we have three adoptions, we go out and get three dogs" from area shelters.
Lahn said that the Quad City Animal Welfare Center draws its animals from both Iowa and Illinois, although roughly 70 percent come from the Illinois side of the Mississippi. She said the organization also works with breed-specific animal-rescue groups, including organizations in Galesburg and Peoria.
"There are people who feel they [the Quad City Animal Welfare Center] don't take enough of the area shelter dogs," Reynolds said. "Sometimes we just don't have the adoptable pet." He added that he's glad the Animal Welfare Center takes as many shelter dogs as it does. "Milan's a private organization," he said. "They don't have to do anything for anybody."
Unfortunately, there are typically far more stray, neglected, unwanted, and abused animals than there are spaces at local kill shelters, and the Animal Welfare Center tries to choose animals that it knows it can adopt quickly. For example, if the shelter has three black Labs, it's unlikely to take another until those are adopted.
And the bottom line is that the only way to prevent dogs, cats, and other animals from being killed is for pet owners to be responsible (spaying and neutering their animals, for example, to reduce the animal population), for more families to adopt needy pets, and for more people to volunteer their time at local shelters.
"The more people that are involved with the shelter, the fewer animals have to be euthanized," Guerrero said.
Sidebar: How to Contact Local Shelters
Animal Aid Humane Society (cats only): 239 50th Street, Moline, (309)797-6550
Humane Society of Scott County: 5001 Brady Street, Davenport, (563)388-6655
Moline City Animal Shelter: 210 35th Street, Moline, (309)797-0741
Quad City Animal Welfare Center: 724 West Second Avenue, Milan, (309)787-6830
Rock Island City Animal Shelter: 330 Mill Street, Rock Island, (309)732-2590
St. Francis Animal Shelter (Rock Island County): 4520 Fourth Avenue, Moline, (309)736-1600
