In doing so, AAHS plans to relinquish its contracted responsibility to perform animal-control functions - mainly, taking in and euthanizing the aggressive and unsocialized feral cats which are brought to it - and become an “adoption guarantee” facility where every domestic animal brought in finds a home. AAHS is already at or near that point: it says it has only euthanized one “healthy, adoptable” cat in the past two years.
That hasn’t always been the case, though, and it’s been mainly through a concerted effort over the last few years that the agency has drastically reduced its euthanasia rates for healthy adoptables. AAHS hired its current director, Crystal Schultz, two and a half years ago; in the year prior to her arrival it euthanized 70 healthy adoptable cats, she says. Two changes were crucial to that improvement. One was the opening of an adoption center at Pet Supplies Plus, which adopted out 700 cats last year, twice the number adopted from the AAHS headquarters in a county building on Beaverdam Road in the previous year. The other was a decision to reduce the length of the “hold period” for which a feral cat is kept at the shelter prior to being euthanized - an inevitable step for almost every feral cat, of which there are many in the county. According to Schultz, Athens-Clarke’s five-day hold period policy means that ferals with no chance at adoption take up space and resources that can go towards saving and adopting out healthy cats. “We’re trying to lower the cage space [ferals] take up… so that we can extend the hold period for healthy adoptables and improve the chances that they can make it out of the shelter alive,” she says.
“We want to focus our resources on the animals that we can treat and save,” Schultz says. She says that AAHS’s last two ACC budget proposals have raised the question of “moving away” from its roughly 25-year-old county contract, and that the organization’s board and staff have in the past year discussed becoming an adoption-guarantee facility. “We basically had to decide, ’Do we want to continue to be ”the pound“ for cats, or do we want to be a humane society?’”
It’s a type of move that’s been happening in other communities, too, Schultz says, where humane organizations have found themselves with municipal contracts and eventually found the need to move away from those contracts. In the words of ACC Central Services Director David Fluck, whose department includes Animal Control, “There is a little bit of a conflict between their mission and our mission.”
Fluck also doesn’t deny that the AAHS proposal presents “a challenge for us.” He says the contours of a new arrangement haven’t been explored yet, and probably won’t be examined in detail until after the FY10 budget development cycle ends later this spring. Expanding ACC Animal Control staff and facilities - or contracting out feral cat management - would probably cost the government more than it has been giving annually to AAHS ($84,000 in FY08, $94,000 in FY09 and possibly $102,000 in upcoming FY10). Local feral cat policy “in the field” - much discussed lately as proponents of the Trap-Neuter-Release strategy have become more active - would not change without changes to county ordinances, but Animal Control would be responsible for taking in, holding and euthanizing feral cats - as well as renting out traps to citizens wishing to rid their property of ferals - rather than AAHS.
Mayor Heidi Davison says ACC Commissioners’ initial response to the proposal was “a mixed bag,” and says that she still seeks to understand the proposal better. If AAHS chooses to relinquish its county funding, though, it will likely relinquish its contractual obligations, too. Schultz says her organization is committed to helping the ACC government manage a smooth transition over the next year. As for its physical headquarters, AAHS intends to relocate to its present spay/neuter clinic on Mars Hill Road in Oconee County.
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