Penny Wise, Pound Foolish?

A flossy black dog with a smashed pelvis lies on the steel examining table, sluggish and whimpering. It was brought to the Ventura County Animal Shelter after a passing motorist found it sprawled beside Ventura Avenue, apparently hit by a car. With steel forceps, Dr. Craig Koerner taps its knees and pinches its furry toes one by one. It does not jerk away.

While the Ventura County Animal Regulation Department deftly handles thousands of sick and injured animals each year, it now finds itself padding anxiously along the brink of a violent financial shake-up.

From Lockwood Valley to the Malibu line, from stray kittens and beaten dogs tobeached sea lions and contraband fighting cocks, the 47-member department is the primary agency protecting residents from rogue animals and performing triage on man’s inhumanity to beast.

But the promise of cheaper animal-control service from Los Angeles County has prodded Simi Valley to rethink the $250,000 or so that it pays the Ventura County department each year for licensing, rabies control and animal shelter.

And if this largest client bows out, cities such as Fillmore, Moorpark and Camarillo are considering following domino style, rather than pay Ventura County the fees that would surely rise with Simi’s absence.

Thousand Oaks left the county system five years ago, signed a contract with L.A. County and never looked back.

The city now pays a fraction of what Ventura County would charge, has more than doubled the number of dogs licensed and has access to an Agoura Hills shelter that is more convenient for many residents.

“We’ve had very good reports on them from a variety of standpoints,” City Manager Grant Brimhall says.

Simi Valley’s switch to the L.A. County Department of Animal Care and Control could save the city $50,000 a year over the $253,000 it expects to pay Ventura County next year, officials predict.

But it would also saddle Ventura County government and any cities that remain in the system with the bulk of the $2.3-million annual cost of handling the county’s strayed and spayed, its road kills and rejects, because much of the work is mandated by the state.

Ventura, for one, would see its bill rise from $294,000 to $362,000 if Simi Valley leaves.

And the ensuing exodus by other cities would force layoffs, cost-trimming and probably service cutbacks within the local department, officials say.

“I’m not faulting Simi Valley,” says Ventura County Chief Administrative Officer Lin Koester, a fiscal conservative who once was Simi’s city manager. “I think all public services should be put under some scrutiny as to how they should be provided. . . . But it does shift the burden to other entities.”

Risks and Revenue

Simi Valley sees the potential for better license enforcement and more revenue from the Los Angeles County system, says Joe Hreha, the city’s deputy community services director.

“We have about 29,000 homes in Simi Valley, and only [about 7,000 dog] licenses,” he says. “If one can assume that everybody has a dog, it kind of gives you an idea that we could be doing more.”

Other cities see the risk of staying with a system that might lose crucial funding--and the potential for saving money by shifting to Los Angeles County.

The L.A. department spreads its costs over more communities and thus can charge each city less. What’s more, its aggressive pet licensing program can bring cities needed revenue.

“It is the impression of people in [Fillmore] that Ventura County Animal Regulation has done a really good job for us,” says Vance Johnson, the city’s code enforcement officer. “We kind of feel bad about even looking into it. If we knew our door-to-door licensing [fee revenue] situation was going to remain level, we’d stay with them. But we can’t depend on that.”

Meanwhile, the Ventura County department has lost 13 employees, or about 23% of its staff, to budget cuts since 1991 and is struggling to meet the 25% cut suggested this year for most county departments.

And animal control officers have begun to grumble and fret about losing their jobs to an outside agency that they see as less caring.

Says Koerner, the Ventura County veterinarian for the last 17 years, “I think there’s generally a feeling of abandonment by the county political system that wields the finances.”

The county shelter staff often puts extra work into saving sick or wounded animals and finding their owners, rather than relinquish them to the killing room, he says.

And the county reimburses private veterinarians as much as $90 for any emergency treatment they perform--compared with only $50 a case spent by L.A. County, he said.

While Los Angeles spokesman Bob Ballenger says the $50 cap is “an adequate amount for a vet to do whatever is needed to stabilize [an animal’s] condition,” Koerner begs to differ.

“I highly doubt they [Los Angeles County] would do anything we’re doing for these animals,” he says bitterly. “If you stop doing these things, if you just become a holding and killing machine, it’s not going to work. . . . And responsible animal owners are going to suffer.”

Koerner rolls the black dog over. An angry, red bruise mars its soft, pink belly. He probes its hindquarters, checking for tissue damage and nerve response. “This feels like mush,” he mutters. An assistant has already slipped on a Velcro muzzle, but the little Dachshund mix is too listless to move, let alone bite. Koerner sends it into the X-ray room.

Vast and busy, the Ventura County Animal Shelter in Camarillo is the central node for more than 17,000 animal cases and 39,000 pet licenses handled each year.

Here, the department’s broad responsibilities make it plain why it costs so much.

Like the L.A. County department, the staff must meet state mandates to suppress rabies and offer shelter and care for stray, sick and injured animals.

But it also must pay its central overhead costs out of contract fees provided by the county government and nine cities--while fees from 43 cities feed L.A. County’s department.

The shelter beside Camarillo Airport is the nerve center for disasters, providing water barrels, handlers and portable corrals for pets and livestock in times of fire, wind and earthquake.

Along with a satellite facility in Simi Valley, it is a holding facility for strays and wild animals, biters and barkers, newborns, runaways and “just-don’t-want-’em-anymores”--as many as 150 dogs, 100 cats and many dozen head of livestock at a time.

It is the headquarters and dispatch center for the 10 animal control officers who work in the field--five on each daytime shift.

And it is adoption agency, hospital, jail, police station and death row all rolled into one.

Moments after hosing out the cages and feeding the animals each day, the officers are often knee-deep--literally--in new cases.

A box load of unwanted kittens dumped on a ranch. A pedigreed chow quarantined for biting. A hapless sea gull drenched in cooking oil after it fell into a disposal vat. Two Vietnamese potbellied pigs whose owners just walked away from them.

“People are stupid. They leave their dogs in the backyard on the Fourth of July, or toss fireworks over the fence into the yard with the dog next door,” says Kathy Jenks, the gruff, gravel-voiced director of Ventura County Animal Regulation.

“You kind of get to where you don’t like people all that well. And you think the animals would get along fine if the people just left them alone in the first place.”

Out in the field, officers patrol all the local cities--except Oxnard, which has its own animal-control department, and Thousand Oaks.

They round up stray dogs, trap rattlesnakes and answer dispatch calls on sick foxes, rabid bats, treed kittens and dead possums.

They turn shifts at the shelter, feeding and treating animals that keep up a near-constant chorus of barking and yowling.

They prepare the animals for adoption, implanting them with coded microchips the size of rice grains and logging them into a central computer for future tracking purposes.

After a requisite five-day holding period, they trot them out to a grassy pen to parade the animals in front of prospective owners. They are required to offer each animal for adoption for at least two days but tend to keep them as long as possible, hoping someone will save the creatures from the “PTS Room,” where unwanted pets are “put to sleep.”

Donning lead aprons and thick gloves, Star Tuttle and Teresa Dillard stretch the young dog out beneath the barrel of the X-ray device. Two dull clicks, and radiation shoots through the dog’s hips. The white shadow of bone fractures burned onto the film, coupled with Koerner’s diagnosis, confirm the sad truth. The dog probably will never walk or regain control of its bowels. It must be put to sleep.

Ventura County’s animal control officers mark their calendar by the cycles of animal life.

November winds send skittish livestock fleeing through blown-down fences.

Late spring means beached sea lions and orphaned pups.

July 4 fireworks send dogs and horses bolting every which way in the department’s busiest week of the year.

And cats and dogs drop litter after litter of kittens and puppies in summer and early fall, driving up the department’s kill ratio.

It is a sad fact that the Ventura County Animal Regulation Department must kill the majority of the animals--sick or well--that it takes in.

Of the more than 8,300 dogs the department took in during the 1995-96 fiscal year, about 4,200 were put to death.

Cats fared worse. Of about 6,500 taken in, about 4,700 were killed.

“People just figure it’s easier to go down to the supermarket and get a new kitten,” Jenks says.

Some animals must die because they are too old or ill to carry on, others because they are too badly hurt in auto accidents.

But animal control officers say the vast majority of the animals die because some human being--by intent or neglect--dropped the ball.

“There’s more owner irresponsibility than ever before,” says Koerner, nursing an abandoned cat with a rich butterscotch coat and an abscessed tail. “I’m seeing more animals come in with more chronic neglect, abuse, long-standing injuries and illnesses that are not being dealt with.”

People give all sorts of excuses for abandoning their pets:

The pigs were left because the owners moved.

Kittens and puppies are given up routinely because their owners--who never thought to have the parent animals spayed or neutered--can’t afford to feed them.

Officer Cindy Boaz recalls one woman handing off her pooch in a huff: “Just take him. I’m tired of picking up his dog poo-poo.”

Pat Haskett, another officer, remembers, “One lady signed in her cat because she redecorated her house, and it didn’t match the new decor.”

The officers do what they can. Koerner remembers two kennel hands begging him to nurse a cat back to health and then sedate it so they could groom its matted fur, clip its claws and find it a home.

And Jenks says, “We will kill no animal before its time.” But nearly every morning, that time comes.

The condemned--but for the county-issue blue plastic leashes and coded number tags around their necks--look healthy and well-kept.

Senior Animal Control Officer James Barber has pulled euthanasia duty this morning. He is already hard at work.

The limp carcasses of three freshly killed dogs line a steel counter. Nearby stands a 55-gallon drum, half full with the remains of other unwanted dogs and cats.

Haskett ushers in the next case, a trembling German shepherd that clearly senses something is up.

He lifts her onto the killing table and firmly cradles her head, muzzling her with a few loops of leash. “That’s good,” he murmurs. “That’s a good girl.”

Barber double-checks the dog’s tag against the PTS list, then fills a thick syringe with ice-blue poison--one cc of sodium pentobarbital for every 10 pounds of estimated body weight.

He grips her foreleg, slips the needle in and squeezes the plunger. The dog whimpers and struggles.

The poison stops her heart, knocks the light out of her eyes, drops her slack body into Haskett’s arms. He carries her to the counter.

They keep coming: A small tabby cat. A beloved Australian shepherd mix that got too old and sick for its family. A goofy black Labrador mutt that frolics and plays with Haskett right up until the needle fills its veins with poison.

And eventually, the day’s PTS duty--rotated among the senior officers so they don’t have to face it too often--is done.

A few more drums packed with carcasses of the unloved line the foul-smelling freezer, ready to be carted off to a Los Angeles plant where they will be boiled down, skimmed of fats for the cosmetics industry and ultimately pulverized for fertilizer.

It has been a light day, a dozen or two animals put down. In summer, when breeding season and human irresponsibility are at their height, the shelter must kill as many as 50 animals a day, Barber says.

“Over the years, I’ve learned not to take it personally,” he says somberly. “I know that I’m not the reason why I have to put all these animals to sleep.”

After her partner checks to make sure the black dog’s description is not on the master “lost and found” list, Dillard carries the crippled dog to a cage, whispering tenderly into its furry ear. She draws a few cc’s of sodium pentobarbital into a syringe and sticks the needle into an IV plug left in place by the first veterinarian who treated the dog. She squeezes. The dog’s eyes go blank. Its heart stops within seconds. It slumps to the bottom of the cage.

The second-guessing of the Ventura County department began in 1992.

The city of Thousand Oaks, looking for a more cost-effective contractor to handle its animal-control needs, signed up with L.A. County.

So far, the service has cost Thousand Oaks an average $67,994 a year--compared with about $250,000 the city estimates it would pay Ventura County.

The L.A. program more than doubled the number of licensed dogs in the city in just two fiscal years, from 7,837 in 1991-1992 to 16,531 in 1993-1994, city records show.

Likewise, Simi Valley hopes to recoup more money in license sales through the aggressive Los Angeles County canvassing program than it has through Ventura County’s, Hreha says.

Jenks says Simi Valley could obtain that same service at any time through her department but has declined offers to send a canvassing team across the city for a relatively small fee.

“Simi Valley refused to let us put a [canvassing] crew in Simi Valley a year ago,” Jenks said. “We said, ‘Ultimately, that’ll bring you money,’ but they never took advantage of it.”

Jenks says the current trend smacks of the kind of cost-cutting expeditions other cities have recently toyed with, such as pulling out of the county Fire Protection District and library network.

But the cities considering a change say they are quite pleased with the service being offered by Ventura County. The problem is just that the city officials are under orders to watch the bottom line.

“Our City Council has instructed us to monitor what happens in Moorpark and Simi Valley and what happens with Animal Regulation,” says Larry Davis, Camarillo’s assistant city manager. “We’re certainly concerned that if Simi Valley pulls out and there’s no reduction in cost and they try to spread that cost among the other cities, that’s not fair.”

The change might even push the county to consider letting a private contractor take over the duties now handled by its Animal Regulation Department, says Koester, the county’s chief administrator.

“You can scale down to a certain degree,” he says. “But if everyone bails and the county basically runs a minimum program that’s mandated through state law--the shelter and rabies suppression--the other option is for the county to look for a contract entity to come in.”

The focus on money, not service, has left many of the animal control officers feeling unappreciated--and misunderstood.

“It comes down to the bottom dollar, what they’re looking at,” says Animal Control Officer Pat Bryan, who spent one recent hot morning picking dead animals up off the county’s sizzling roads. “If you live and work in one county, you should have all your services provided by that county.”

Barber, rinsing the poison out of his syringe, grimaces at the public’s perception of the department.

“We’re just the guys who run down the street and pick up your dog and it costs you money to come and get it,” he says. “That’s how the general public sees it, and there’s a lot more to it than that.”

Dillard feels the little black dog, hunting for any trace of a pulse. After she confirms its death, Koerner completes a detailed log of his treatment, diagnosis and decision to end the dog’s life--in case its owner ever comes calling. The staff move the dog’s body--weighing barely 20 pounds--to the disposal drum, stacking it atop nearly a dozen others bound for the rendering plant. And they swab out its stainless steel cage to make way for the next case.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

FYI

Pets can be adopted at the Ventura County Animal Regulation Department’s shelter, 600 Aviation Drive, Camarillo, or at several animal shelters around Ventura County. Animals lost in Moorpark and Simi Valley can sometimes be reclaimed at the Simi Valley shelter at 670 W. Los Angeles Ave., where they are held for two days until they are transferred to Camarillo. Most veterinarians offer spay and neuter services at reasonable prices.