Bias in Animal Adoption Center Criteria?

Given the 139 items on City Council's agenda last Thursday, you'd be forgiven for overlooking a few. But one not to be missed was Item 96, which called on council to adopt the Animal Advisory Com­mis­sion's criteria for selecting a nonprofit partner to operate the adoption center at the site of the current – soon to be former – animal shelter. The item may have lacked the sex appeal of Formula One – or the pressing societal significance of a debate about how best to dole out the city's meager social service funds – but in Austin it's a fool who ignores the animal welfare issue, because Austin's animal welfare community never, ever sleeps.

At stake was the fate of the Town Lake Animal Center, which will no longer be the city's shelter come November, when most operations move across I-35 to the new Levander Loop facility. Under the terms of the commission's No Kill Implementation Plan, passed unanimously by council last year, the current center's Davenport building will be kept open indefinitely as one of several adoption centers. The current TLAC kennels, meanwhile, will be maintained for at least six months as a "safety net" while animal services staff make their move east. Beyond six months, things might get a little tricky, however. Longtime shelter observers will recall that it was the age of the TLAC facilities, their various states of disrepair, and their tendency to flood that motivated the movement to fund a new shelter in the first place. So if six months turns into "indefinite" and some of Austin's unadopted animals continue residing in TLAC's substandard kennels, people might start asking why officials felt the need to build the $12 million Levander Loop shelter at all.

As for the commission's recommendations, which were adopted unanimously by council, there was talk around City Hall Thursday that the criteria might favor Austin Pets Alive!, one of only two groups – Austin Humane Society being the other – that have made their desire to be the city's adoption partner known. Criterion No. 1 states that the chosen group will focus on adopting out those "animals from the City's 'at-risk list' (meaning that all other groups have passed on them) so as to complement rather than be redundant with City services." The language doesn't sound all that different from APA's mission statement: "to not duplicate work of other agencies, we focus solely on the pets who have already been passed over by other groups and the shelters' adoption programs and only take the healthy and treatable pets who are about to be killed and have no other options."

Larry Tucker, chair of the Animal Advisory Commission, says his and the commission's only hope when drawing up their recommendations was seeing the city's 90% live-outcome rate maintained, not promoting any particular rescue organization. "Any group that's capable of maintaining the shelter's no-kill status I'm in favor of," he says.