TALE OF TWO DOGS AT NIAGARA SPCA: ONE GOOD, ONE NOT
By Tony Farina
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| Rhonda Donovan was pleased to learn Martin is alive. |
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Martin |
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| Zander stops to smell the flowers. “Zander was a handsome, young, healthy, gentle-spirited, curious, loving dog, whom I miss dearly” - Ashley Andrew. |
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| Amy Lewis, Executive Director of the Niagara County SPCA, greets a resident cat at the Lockport Road facility. |
A tale of two dogs, one who survived and one who is gone, epitomizes the challenge facing the Niagara County SPCA to reverse the image of a horrible kill factory under the former regime and to convince a sometimes skeptical public it is committed to the national no-kill movement that has made a 90 percent save rate its benchmark.
The dog who apparently has survived is named Martin, and he was being watched over by Rhonda Donavan of Amherst who started out as a protester against conditions at the shelter and later becoming a volunteer. That’s when she met Martin.
“Martin is a brown pit bull and he had been put into the stray section,” says Rhonda, who said she had volunteered to help clean up the kennels “and Martin got out and went down the hall and it is like death row and all the dogs started barking and jumping and he ran right out the door and jumped up on a lady.”
After that, Rhonda says Martin was put in “doggie jail,” and she then asked new director Amy Lewis “what are we going to do with Martin? And she said, ‘when we have an aggressive dog like that, we have no other alternative but to euthanize him.’
“I felt he was not an aggressive dog, just a bully, and he had been in the back room for two months without being socialized,” says Rhonda. “One day they brought him out and he had a wire mark around his neck, like he had been strangled. Another time he had a chipped tooth.”
Rhonda said she wanted to work with Martin at the shelter until he was ready to take home but she says she was not given that opportunity.
“They wanted to euthanize the dog,” she told the Reporter last week, crying during the interview. “I don’t know where he is now.” She said the last time she was Martin was Aug. 14.
I asked the shelter’s new executive director, Amy Lewis, about Martin during an interview on Saturday during the successful fundraiser at the shelter’s Lockport Rd. facilities.
“Martin is still here,” said the director. And she later told me that she had recently spoken to Rhonda and that she was coming to the SPCA this week for a meet and greet with Martin which could lead to her taking him home as a foster guardian until adoption, possibly by Rhonda herself.
Needless to say Rhonda, who had been fearing the worst, will be quite relieved to see Martin alive and well.
Zander’s tale is far different. The one-year-old Great Dane/pit bull mixhad been fostered by Ashley Andrew of Lewiston, a former volunteer, a member and donor. Since March, Ashley, as a foster parent, had Zander in her home for weeks before returning him to the shelter for internal parasites last May, just about the time the new board of directors was coming into office and during Amy Lewis’ time as interim director before her formal appointment as director in June.
“Zander was a healthy animal,” Ashley told the Reporter. “Even if we concede he had ringworm, that would not render him unhealthy.”
We have confirmed with experts that ringworm indeed is a treatable condition, but on May 19, Zander was euthanized over Ashley’s strong objections, saying she had never been given an option to treat Zander.
Director Lewis said on Saturday that at the time Zander was euthanized, the facility was not equipped to treat the dog and she so informed Ashley of that situation in a phone conversation and that Ashley never offered to care for the dog, saying she couldn’t take him home at that time.
Ashley denies that she said she wouldn’t take care of Zander.
“As Zanders foster parent, I would have done anything to preserve his life and see him find his loving, forever home with me,” said Ashley.
She said she believes the killing of Zander was used as a method to disenfranchise her as a volunteer and advocate for the animals at the Niagara SPCA. “Offering me an opportunity to financially support and care for the treatment of Zander or brainstorm ways to save his life should have been a compassionate and obvious decision….one day he was alive, healthy and full of zest and curiosity, the next day he was dead,” she told the Reporter, clearly still quite upset over the dog’s death.
Ashley insists the diagnosis of ringworm on Zander was never fully completed and, in fact, was inconclusive as a result. “If we don’t get the right diagnosis, how can we be sure they are being euthanized for the terms they are using,” she said.
Despite the tragic tale of Zander, Ashley says she will continue to support the shelter and will work with the board to reach no-kill status and establish protocol to protect the animals.
Director Lewis, a former adoptive counselor at the Erie County SPCA, says despite the dark cloud of animal abuse that led to her installation in the first place and the controversies over the handling of Martin and Zander, she has been striving to make the Niagara SPCA a no-kill shelter, and says that she believes that reaching that goal is possible with the support of the board, the staff, and the public.
“There will be a growing period,” she concedes, adding that the shelter “has not been no-kill for a long time.” While she says they were not equipped to treat Zander before he was killed, she says the shelter is now better able to deal with ringworm andcurrently has 19 cats being treated.
The SPCA suffered a decrease of nearly 50 percent in public contributions after it was rocked by the scandal of animal abuse and mismanagement late last year, but the turnout at Saturday’s fundraiser was about 600, an indication that people are willing to give the facility another chance.
David Bower, a Niagara Falls city police officer and a member of the new board of directors at the SPCA, said things have come a long way in a short time, noting that the animal survival rate has improved from 58-59 percent under the previous leadership to between 85 and 88 percent today.
“I am a 100 percent supporter of no-kill,” Bower told the Reporter at Saturday’s fundraiser. “We’re on the fringe, the new board took over in May, and from what I can gather there will be a lot less stress [among staff] if we do go [no kill], and a lot happier environment.”
Jackie Scalise, a member of the SPCA staff, says over 200 animals have been saved since March and that she supports the efforts toward the no-kill policy. “I think the staff is on board and that Amy is a great leader,” she told the Reporter.
Carol Tutzauer, a behavioral scientist at UB, is president of Buffalo Humane, a no-kill rescue group, and a member of the Niagara County SPCA.
“I think they are making good progress,” she told the Reporter but cautioned that it will take a lot of hard work to move that last 5 percent to get to the 90 percent save benchmark, and even greater effort for the last 10 percent.
“It should be a big decision to kill an animal,” she said from her home that doubles as an animal sanctuary on a rolling grassland estate in Wilson.
“The leading cause of death in the country of animals is shelters.” She says the Niagara SPCA will have to be pro-active in training, caring for, and placing animals to be successful and must communicate with the public through its website and local publications and other media to complete the job.
Amy Lewis says change doesn’t occur overnight and that there is a need at the Niagara SPCA for foster parents for the animals as they are groomed for adoption.
The new director is also pushing for a new facility and/or additional development on the existing 26-acre Lockport Rd. site to better deal with the challenges going forward.
The SPCA will have another major fundraising event on Oct. 27, the Zombie Dog Walk, which will have a number of features for visitors and their pets, including a maze and hay rides.
The no-kill movement is led nationally by Nathan Winograd, director of the No-Kill Advocacy Center in Oakland, Calif. The former prosecutor says the nation has the power to build a new consensus, which rejects killing as a method for achieving results.
“We have a choice. We can fully, completely, without reservation embrace No Kill as our future,” said Winograd. “Or we can continue to legitimize the two-pronged strategy of failure; adopt a few and kill the rest.”
Winograd is expected to come to Western New York in January for a speaking engagement.
There are clear signs of improvement at the Niagara County SPCA, most significantly the save rate of between 85 and 88 percent verses the wholesale slaughter of animals, many of them cats, that had been occurring in the past. Nationally, the biggest challenge to implementing no kill is to re-educate or retrain staffs at shelters to change the culture from killing to life saving. In some cases, that has been impossible and there has been a need to bring in new people. |