City, county need to take steps to help animals

By Mark Siegel,
April 28, 2007

Thanks to the News Sentinel for a recent Sunday article on animal overpopulation in Knox County. As your article showed, the problem is getting worse and needs to be addressed.

Prior to 2001, the Humane Society of the Tennessee Valley was providing sheltering to the city and county by contract. Due to our continuous and aggressive efforts to address pet population problems, the number of animals coming into the shelter was falling every year.

As the News Sentinel showed, however, the incoming numbers are now going up every year.

Some of the increase is due to the publicity associated with the city and county opening the new shelter and would happen in any community. But that is not the whole story.

Not only are more animals coming in, but euthanasia rates are climbing dramatically. More animals are dying, whether calculated by percentage of animals brought in or by the number of animals put to sleep per thousand people in the county.

In 2000, 60 percent of incoming animals had to be euthanized; by 2006, the figure had risen to 71 percent.

In 2000, 20.9 animals per 1,000 of human population had to be euthanized. By 2006, that figure had risen to 29.9 animals per 1,000 of human population, which is more than twice the national average of 14.8 animals per 1,000 of human population.

The problem is not that the people at Young-Williams Animal Center do not care. The Humane Society, better than anyone else, knows they do care. We have been where they are and have experienced what they are experiencing.

We are doing everything we can to help them. We adopt to good homes hundreds of animals a year from Young-Williams and other area shelters that otherwise might have to be euthanized.

We spay and neuter thousands of cats and dogs each year at our Fix-A-Pet center on Chapman Highway.

The city and county need to take five immediate steps to help animals in Knox County.

They need to address the problem of owned but unaltered strays that come through their shelter, sometimes repeatedly. These animals are free to reproduce, sometimes repeatedly.
They need to address the problem of groups that bring animals into Knox County in the name of animal rescue and adopt them out from local pet supply stores without spaying or neutering them before releasing them to adopters.
They need to lower the euthanasia rates. This will require increases in the number of adoptions and the number of animals returned to owners, but it can and must be done. Their adoption numbers actually went down in each of the last two years.
They need to adopt the policy of most shelters in the area that incoming pit bulls should not be adopted out. This might not significantly impact population problems, but it is a much-needed change in their policies.
They need to support and implement the differential licensing rates the humane society has long advocated and make license fees significantly higher for animals that are not spayed or neutered than for those that are.

Let's help Knox County's animals. Let's start turning the problem around again.

Mark Siegel is a local attorney, native of Knoxville and a board member of the Humane Society of the Tennessee Valley. His e-mail address is hstvsiegel@aol.com.