Pet Overpopulation Still a Problem in Austin

I spent a portion of the Thanksgiving holiday at Austin Animal Center looking for a friend for my senior dog. Sure enough, a sweet, sad face peered meekly out at me from a row of kennels. A face so sweet that I called her Sweet Pea and began signing adoption papers. To my surprise, her adoption fee, which included spaying, a microchip, and vaccinations (a normal cost of $200), had been waived. According to Austin Animal Center's web page, they have taken in more than 700 lost dogs and cats since November 1st, 600 of which remain at the overfilled shelter.

90% of these animals, thanks to Austin's status as the largest "no kill" city in the United States, will eventually find homes. Unfortunately, the designation of "no kill" still allows for up to a 10% euthanization rate. In an act of desperation to rehome these animals and free up space in the shelter, the center has waived adoption fees to make them available to more people under the guise of Black Fur Day (a day only available on Black Friday). However, an adoption specialist admitted to me that they had been giving away thee animals for weeks to compensate for the overcrowding. I entered the shelter unaware of the overcrowding or the waived fee... simply to open my heard to another dog.

My instinctual suggestion to humanely resolve the problem of animal homelessness plaguing Austin was for the city to enact Spay/Neuter laws. The feral cat population alone is nearly unmanageable due to "cat mathematics," which is the horrifyingly real possibility of one intact female cat multiplying into 370,000 cats over the course of 7 years!

This potential exists because female cats go into heat every 3 months after the age of 6 months. The Austin Humane Society battles this potential for a feral cat explosion with its free Trap-Neuter-Return program. A mandatory spay/neuter law for pets seems like the obvious solution in order to eliminate the possibility of intact cats mixing, breeding with, and contributing to the feral cat population, but the statistics for cities with spay/neuter laws show an overwhelmingly reverse effect. Overcrowding, homelessness, and euthanization actually appear to increase in such cities. This effect is likely due to harsh fines for the failure to spay or neuter a pet causing poorer families to give up their pets.

So what is the solution? Calgary, Canada is the closest to an existing Utopian model for no kill cities. It has no mandatory spay/neuter laws, no specific breed legislation, no pet limit laws, no anti-tethering laws, emphasis on responsible pet ownership through education and public relations campaigns, and law license fees with a modestly higher licensing rate, meaning lost pets do not clog the shelter and instead are directly returned home by Animal Control.

Austin certainly is on its way to becoming a Calgary, but it needs a more organized and aggressive effort among the city's shelters to make the animal overpopulation problem understood by the public. Emphasis should be placed on currently available low-cost services (i.e. microchipping and neutering). The last great frontier for Austin in regard to addressing animal homelessness is completely ending breed discrimination. Pit bull breeds -- the bulk of the shelter population -- are alienated from the adoption process because of so many rental homes following archaic breed restrictions. When I discovered Sweet Pea, labelled as a lab mix, I was forced to overlook every potential pet labelled as a pit bull mix. As a progressive city and one of the most dog friendly in the nation, it is vital to focus on lowering the 10% euthanization rate of shelter pets to 0%. This can be achieved through more aggressive public education and, perhaps counter intuitively, leniency with spaying/neutering and breed restrictions.

My Resources:

Does the Future of Austin's 'No Kill' Animal Policy Lie in Creating a 'No Birth Policy?

Austin Animal Center waives adoption fees as continued pet influx increases overcrowding

Free Cat Spay/Neuter Program to End For Those Outside Travis County

The Best Animal Control Program in North America

My Mutts:

Trumped up & wimped out

Considering the average student loan debt college graduates must heave along with them at the start of their careers is $26,250 in Texas, I would say that a full-ride scholarship for student athletes is adequate compensation. According to the New York Times, "the cost of attendance, typically several thousand dollars more than a traditional scholarship, accounts for the financial demands of additional activities like traveling home and back and paying cell phone bills." So college athletes receive a free education, are compensated for their basic needs, and gain the recognition that may later allow them to join professional sports teams to make nauseating salaries.

Lifting the Bar's "Pumped up & pimped out" likens this compensation, which multitudes of college-bound hopefuls salivate over, to "... enslaving some one to work on your farm but saying it's fine because you're teaching them to read and write." He suggests that athletes receive paychecks from their colleges, like professional athletes, for participating.

Corruption already abounds in, for example, college football. An endless list of coaches will continue to face scandal for bribing players, yet players should be paid? What about the love for the sport? Should all players be compensated equally? What happens when the cross country team unionizes and demands the same pay as the football team, even though the football team generates the most revenue for the school?

Let's step back to the basic definition of extracurricular: (of an activity at a school or college) pursued in addition to the normal course of study. Chess club. Student government. Football- all unpaid positions that should remain so. Let us not forget in our crazed football and basketball season fervor that college sports exist because college exists- as a place for higher education and a jumping off point for all students to start their careers. Just as any engineering student must do his time before making a cozy salary, so should any college athlete.

Sources:

The Institute for College Access and Success

Court Strikes Down Payments to College Athletes

Capital Punishment: A Burden to All Texans

Societies change over time and government must change its policies also, in order to reflect the will of the people. Texas, obstinately rooted in archaic tradition, ranks number one in the United States in terms of death sentence convictions.

David R. Dow, a Texas law professor at the University of Houston Law Center and a representative of death row inmates, states, "Texas executes so many people because it executes so many people... Killing people is like most anything else; the more you do it, the better you get. If killing people were like playing the violin, Texas would have been selling out Carnegie Hall years ago."

Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, after a period of suspension due to a lack of national standards (1972-1976), Texas has executed 503 inmates out of the national total of 1,234. Despite a 65% national majority in favor of capital punishment, 19 states plus the District of Columbia have abolished it. Capital punishment seems to be losing favor with Texas juries too, with new death sentence convictions down by nearly 80% since 1999.

While the morality of capital punishment remains arguable, the egregious amount of money spent on executions versus life imprisonment is undeniable. According to a 1992 study by the Dallas Morning News, the cost of the average death penalty case in Texas is three times the cost of imprisonment in a single cell at the highest security level for forty years. Even more egregious, the burden of payment for these costs falls on Texas taxpayers. With the alternative of life without parole, arguably a worse and cheaper punishment, the continuation of capital punishment seems to have no benefit to society.

All of this money spent on executing inmates could potentially be placed into beneficial programs, such as the public school system or funding for mental health care (which would likely help prevent crime before it occurs). This would also eliminate the potential for wrongfully convicted inmates being put to death before exoneration- an error too grave to make when dealing with the preciousness of life.

Texas is stubbornly proud of its traditions, and while capital punishment may seem just, ranking as the number one state in a country with the highest execution rates among China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq leaves one in doubt of our current methods. When a function of government becomes a burden to society, it must be changed or done away with. It is time to send capital punishment to the gallows.

Check out my sources and decide for yourself:

Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

Texas Department of Criminal Justice

Death Penalty Information Center

Why Texas Is So Good at the Death Penalty