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| Don't even go there. Getting into this kind of comparison is a 100% absolutely guaranteed total loser. First of all, there isn't a city in the U.S. (or the world) that spends anywhere even ballpark close to the official HSUS recommendation of $3.50-$5.00 per capita for animal control. Hardly any even spend half the recommended amount. Second, many of the cities that kill the fewest animals per 1,000 people spend least per capita, e.g. New York City, but there is no intrinsic relationship between the spending and the volume of animals handled. None. Someone ALWAYS brings up this chestnut, or some close variant: "In the early '90s, the State of Minnesota legislature commissioned a study that found that for every $1 invested in spay/neuter programs, $20 in animal control costs are saved over 10 years." Unfortunately, what really happened Minneapolis is that in 1994 a group of well-meaning folks trotted out a ton of data projecting animal control savings, if humane services were improved, as part of an effort to raise funds for a new animal control shelter. Their estimate of projected savings on animal control through investment in sterilization was actually based on a 1978 study done in Los Angeles after five years of the L.A. city pet sterilization program. That study projected $10 in savings per dollar invested. The Minneapolis people produced the estimate of $20 in savings by taking the L.A. figures and doubling them, for inflation, without doubling the input cost because they figured that doing sterilizations in high volume would keep the input low. The Minneapolis estimates are often cited, but beyond being shaky to begin with, much less often mentioned is that the Minneapolis committee ended up having to disband and give up their fundraising effort for a new shelter just a few months later, because the Minneapolis city council looked at the numbers and said, "Heck, if spay/neuter is going to reduce our intakes and costs this much, we don't need a new shelter." Then, since nonprofit organizations were already funding sterilization work, the Minneapolis council decided against spending any money on that. About all that was accomplished was that Minneapolis animal control was supposedly obliged to stop drowning skunks in a barrel. (Nine years and many new arguments later, Minneapolis finally got a new shelter.) I warn people every chance I get that promising budgetary savings from improving humane services tends to blow up in the face of everyone who tries it, because the data will not stand up either in historical reference or in the subsequent experience of most communities. Such claims should never, ever, ever be used. Projections of savings typically use a linear projection of present per-animal animal control costs against what would theoretically happen if the department had to handle X-number more animals over X-number of years. You can do the same thing yourself with your local data, but it would be a very misleading and stupid thing to do. What is wrong with it is that-- # The actual cost of maintaining animal control departments in fact stays relatively similar, whether they are picking up 10 animals a day or 100, because all the fixed costs for maintaining facilities and vehicles, paying salaries of people already on the payroll, etc., stay almost the same. # Historically, because the costs of payroll, vehicles, buildings, etc. have all gone up faster than the rates of inflation over the past 30 years, a look backyard would appear to show that animal control agencies were working with much greater cost-efficiency back in the 1970s and 1960s, when they were killing seven times as many animals per 1,000 people as today. Back then, they didn't hold animals a fraction as long, didn't try very hard to adopt out animals, and often didn't even feed impounded animals, because they were just going to be killed within 24 hours. # Projecting forward, no animal control agency in either the U.S. or Canada has actually realized any verifiable savings whatever from reducing shelter intake of dogs and cats, because historically animal control has been such a badly underserved sector. What has actually happened is that as dog overpopulation was reduced in the 1980s, animal control agencies began responding more rapidly and aggressively to complaints about feral cats. As the feral cat population has plummeted, animal control agencies have been improving their records in responding to wildlife calls and rehoming dogs and cats. The cages are all still full, and the operating costs of maintaining full cages with animals who are held a week or two weeks and fed and advertised for adoption are actually much higher than the operating costs of holding seven times as many animals over the same period, not feeding them, and bumping them off. # If you predicate your argument for any kind of anti-pet overpopulation program on achieving greater cost-efficiency, you will shift the argument from providing better public service and improving public health and safety, to ways and means of trimming the budget, and as soon as you do that, the reactionary elements in your community will point out that just killing the animals with no holding period would be the cheapest way to go. I can't claim originality in pointing out any of the above. The late Bob Plumb, cofounder of the Promoting Animal Welfare Society in Paradise, California, one of the most dedicated and accomplished statistical analysts in the history of humane work, just about hollered himself stone deaf for years trying to get anyone to pay attention to the self-defeating nature of the cost-savings argument. So far as I can tell, I was just about the only one who ever listened, except maybe his successor, Emily Williams. I stopped using that argument after watching the Minneapolis fiasco unfold just exactly as Plumb predicted it would. -- Merritt Clifton Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE |
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