In May of last year a couple dozen people took to the streets outside the Kauai Humane Society on the Garden Isle and called for the resignation of its executive director, Penny Cistaro. ADVERTISING In May of last year a
In May of last year a couple dozen people took to the streets outside the Kauai Humane Society on the Garden Isle and called for the resignation of its executive director, Penny Cistaro.
They waved signs, waved at passing cars and shared their message to more than one news outlet.
One of the main reasons for calling for Cistaro’s job?
She was too quick to euthanize animals, they said, and the organization had been deflating its kill rate numbers.
And KHS had.
After the rallies, the organization admitted its math equation devising its kill rate was wrong: It had been including the lost dog population whose owners pick them up in the shelter’s overall population — even though the pets would spend a day, or just hours, at the shelter before returning home.
So when they took that population out of the equation for the number of overall animals the shelter housed, the shelter’s euthanasia rate went up. But, in a funny twist, they’d been incorrectly counting those lost dogs for years. So when they recalculated their rate with the correct numbers, even though their kill rate went up across the board, the downward trend of euthanasia rates that the shelter had been experiencing over the years still remained.
“The accusations of poor animal care is an insult to the staff and to me,” Cistaro told the local paper during the heart of the firestorm. “For some of us, this is our life’s work and it’s painful.”
Leaving the Garden Isle, there’s more.
Such as this headline from Oahu from the Hawaii Reporter: “Hawaiian Humane Society Under Fire for Euthanizing Several Thousand Animals Each Year.”
Even the gold standard for no-kill animal shelters — San Francisco’s SPCA — has its critics.
Said Alan Hopkins, founder of the Save the Quail campaign, to a Bay Area news outlet about a dispute the sides had over protecting birds: “You’d think the SF/SPCA would be against cruelty to all animals, but that isn’t the case.”
Which brings us back home, as the Hawaii Island Humane Society has been caught in its own controversy, one that doesn’t advance but rather just seems to resurface. Even though it’s been in this newspaper’s headlines recently, it’s a fight that’s been going on for months.
Numbers are at the heart of the problem, although there’s bad blood beyond that.
But let’s stick to the numbers.
Fueling the divide is the fact that HIHS’s contract with Hawaii County bookmarks a set number of euthanized animals — performance standards as they are called — that spells out 14,000 euthanized animals each year among the tasks HIHS is expected to perform as part of its $1.9 million agreement.
Included in HIHS’s number of euthanized animals is some 2,300 adoptable dogs, which is hard for many to accept.
The 14,000 figure is more of a benchmark than anything, according to Donna Whitaker, HIHS executive director. It’s the volume that the number estimates it will see among the euthanized population, including mongooses, and isn’t tied to the money directly. As in, if HIHS ended up euthanizing, say, 8,000, it wouldn’t be docked financially. It isn’t incentivized to put down adoptable dogs.
But reworking the language of the contract won’t solve the issue.
Instead, working with the county will. Because this is, at the heart, a county issue. If the holder of the purse strings would like to tie money to adoption-level benchmarks, it should. If public outcry makes the county want to invest more in spay and neuter, such as aquiring fleets of mobile vans, it should. It is much more difficult and expensive to educate and enhance spay/neuter than it is to put an animal down, so if the public clamors for change, addressing policymakers is more productive than repeated public teeth kickings.
Because the problem really boils down to a question of resources, which is exactly what every problem boils down to when figuring a budget — which the county is currently doing.
But that’s really boring.
Alas, rare is the time emotions don’t circle a humane society. Is it because societies have run the table on hiring deviants who enjoy animal death? Hardly. Part of it is because some animal advocates can’t fathom euthanizing any adoptable pet and hard-line stances make any conversation difficult, especially one about business decisions. Mix in that many others can be more comfortable working with animals than people, and you can see the recipe for combustion.
As far as the bad blood over the different sides, we won’t retread that here. Instead, we suggest looking forward, at next year’s contract, and what can be spelled out and invested in to make any change a reality.
What became of Cistaro on Kauai?
She’s still there, more than three years on the job. It’s the same position Sherry Hoe once held a few years before Cistaro, but she was fired after a high-profile controversy regarding the society’s numbers. After she was dismissed, all KHS’s employees quit as in a dramatic act of support, but that’s another story for another day.
