The state legislature of California had passed the Hayden Bill, which was intended to turn all California animal shelters into no-kill shelters. It stated “that no adoptable animal should be euthanized if it can be adopted into a suitable home”. The problem, of course, was that there was no way that it could create enough suitable homes for all of the adoptable animals.
“The principal measure of this bill required that all cats and dogs must be kept at the shelters six days, instead of the usual three days, before being euthanized. Senator Hayden believes that keeping the animals alive longer enhances their chances of finding a suitable placement. Unfortunately, since no more animals can be placed than there are homes for, keeping them longer does not help in the least.
“As I understand it, this bill has done nothing but a great deal of harm. Keeping the animals longer required that there be much more space to house the far greater number of animals, for they had to keep moving the new ones in over an additional three-day period even though they had not yet been able to move the old ones out. I believe it was Santa Clara County that had to spend $8,000,000 to enlarge its shelter in order to come into compliance with this new law. Every animal shelter in the state had to make commensurate expensive adjustments to be able to conform to these new requirements, and, for all the hoopla and all the cost, the Hayden Bill, for obvious reasons, has not produced any appreciable decrease in the number of animals being killed. “ (P.184)
“Then I got to thinking that if the California State Legislature could pass an ill-conceived bill that was of great cost to the people and of no benefit to the animals, as the Hayden Bill had turned out to be, why couldn’t it pass a well-conceived bill that could really succeed in producing the desired objective of having no-kill-shelters statewide. So I wrote to Senator John Burton who was the state senator for my district. He said that he and his office staff could see great possibilities in my proposal. He suggested that I contact Virginia Handley who had been the chief lobbyist for animal issues with the legislature since 1973. Virginia Handley was also the director of “The Fund for Animals, Inc.” which had originally been founded by Cleveland Amory. I had written to Amory a long time before, but, as you might expect, had received no response.“So, though I knew it would be futile, I placed a call to Virginia Handley. She had absolutely no enthusiasm for my idea, stating that the animal shelters were so financially overburdened trying to conform to the requirements of the Hayden Bill, that they would certainly not have any money left to spend on spaying. It was out of the question. Not seeing any way that I could hope to communicate further with anyone having such a defeatist attitude and suspecting that she really didn’t want to do anything that would be in the animals’ interest anyway, there was nothing I could do but write her off, along with all of the other animal welfare people I had ever had anything to do with.
“She had taken down my name and address, however, and put me on her mailing list. So I began receiving notices from her, listing all of the various animal welfare bills that had been introduced in the legislature that session with indications as to whether she supported or opposed each and whether they had passed or failed or were still pending, etc.
“The one that interested me was a bill introduced by Assemblywoman Virginia Strom-Martin, which dealt with pet overpopulation. The number of that bill was AB 1139 and was described by Virginia Handley as follows: “States the intent of the Legislature to establish an animal population control fund to pay for low-cost spaying and neutering for low-income people. This would be paid for through ‘the use of an additional dollar ($1) per pet license fee, the state income tax checkoff program, and private donations to add to the fund’”. I read elsewhere that this fund would be administered by the California Veterinary Medical Foundation and would be used to supplement other funding sources for animal population control measures. This bill was being held over so that it could be amended to be more specific before being voted on. So early in January of 2000, right at the start of the new session, I talked to someone in the office of Strom-Martin, but she said that Strom-Martin would only be interested in my proposal if it had Virginia Handley’s endorsement.” (P.185)
So I wrote a three-page long letter to Assemblywoman Kerry Mazzoni, who was the assemblyperson from my district, in which I set forth a proposal for a pilot spay project to be conducted by the state. (This letter can be found on P.185-189).“Soon after that, I received a letter from Kerry Mazzoni stating that she respected the idea of having fewer animals put to their death and thought my proposal was very good, but that she would be unable to author the bill herself due to bill limit restrictions and to the fact that she was presently serving her last term of office. Then she went on to say, “However, I did submit your proposal to our Legislative counsel office to prepare it for introduction. I encourage you to locate another author. I have enclosed the drafted language for you.” My heart gave a great leap of joy at reading this, for in all the time since I first started out trying to do something to help the animals, this was the only really encouraging thing that had ever happened. I have extracted just the essential part of the law she proposed which read as follows:
Section 1. Section 320004 is added to the Food and Agriculture Code, to read:
320004. The Department of Food and Agriculture shall enter into an agreement with a county animal control agency to establish a pilot program under which female cats and dogs would be spayed during the winter months at no cost to their owners”
“This was wonderful! All I had to do now was find someone to author the bill. I wrote again to Senator John Burton, but he was the President Pro Tempore of the State Senate, which meant that he received a larger than average number of requests to author legislation and was therefore unable to accommodate my request. He suggested another Senator I might contact who was authoring some other animal legislation, but that one couldn’t do it either. Furthermore I learned that my bill was too late for the present session and would have to wait until the next year’s session. (P.189)
“Then I thought that I should try to talk to Strom-Martin, since I had been told that her bill to reduce the pet population was meeting with opposition and not doing very well. It was still early in the spring when I drove to Sacramento and went to her office and spoke to one of her assistants whose name was Howard Posner. He acknowledged that my proposal was a very good one. He made copies of all my information and said he would discuss the matter with Virginia and then would invite me to come back to talk to her sometime after the beginning of September, when the session was winding down. From his positive attitude, I felt quite confident that he believed Strom-Martin would want to author my bill during the next session and so I did not try to line up anyone else.
“After a few months had passed, I was becoming anxious. I wrote to Mr. Posner, and he wrote back, assuring me that he had not forgotten me, and promised that he would contact me in the fall. In October I called Strom-Martin’s local office in Santa Rosa and told the woman I spoke to that I had expected to hear from Posner by September. She looked at Strom-Martin’s agenda and my name was on the list, so she assured me that I would be called and that only if I did not hear from them by Nov. 1, should I call Mr. Posner. So early in November I called Mr. Posner just to be told by him that Virginia Strom-Martin would not be able to author my bill. He didn’t even apologize for having led me on during all that time or for breaking his promise to call me. The joy I had felt at Kerry Mazzoni’s letter had largely dissipated by then. I still had some hope left that the bill might eventually be enacted, but was discouraged to think that another whole year would have to be wasted, during which hundreds of thousands of more cats and dogs would be needlessly destroyed in California.
“It was anticipated that the person who would be elected to replace Kerry Mazzoni was Joe Nation, so I decided to contact him right at the beginning of the next session so that he would not be able to claim that he already had his quota of bills lined up. I wrote to him in the middle of December, but did not receive a response. So in the latter part of January, I went to Sacramento and spoke to his assistant who told me that they were still in the process of settling in and hadn’t gotten around to answering all of the correspondence. She did remember having read my letter, but said that it was probably already too late to have my bill considered during that session. When I pointed out to her that the drafted language had already been prepared, she said that in that case there was still time. She wanted to know if I had consulted with Virginia Handley about my proposal. When I said that I had spoken with her a couple of years earlier and that her response had been very negative, that seemed to end the discussion as far as she was concerned.
“Then while I was there at the capitol, I decided to stop in at Virginia Strom-Martin’s office to inquire as to the status of her spay-neuter bill and to suggest that, by authoring my bill instead, she could do a much better job of meeting her objective. Howard Posner was no longer there, but I learned from another of her administrative assistants that Strom-Martin’s bill had failed because there was opposition to the idea of raising funds by having contributors make a checkmark on their income tax returns, but that she was preparing another very similar bill to be introduced that session which would use other means to create a fund which was still to be managed by the veterinarians. This assistant, like the one in Joe Nation’s office, implied that unless Virginia Handley would support my bill, it would not have a chance of passing anyway.
“So I called up Virginia Handley again and asked her if she would advise the offices of both Joe Nation and Virginia Strom-Martin that she would support my bill. She said she first wanted to see what the details of the proposal were and to read the drafted language. So I mailed her what she had requested. Since she was the head of a large group of animal welfare organizations and hosted a legislative meeting at the state capitol periodically which was attended by interested animal welfare groups and animal supporters, I knew that my position regarding animal welfare people would antagonize her, but at the same time I thought that it might not do any harm for her to know that there was at least one person who was on to them. If any legislator were to take any interest in my proposal, I suspected that it would fall into her hands sooner or later, anyway. At any rate, I have never heard from her again and don’t expect that either Joe Nation or Virginia Strom-Martin did either. In addition to that, Virginia Handley took me off her mailing list.
“I eventually received a letter from Joe Nation stating that he was already committed to authoring a bill on behalf of the Humane Society of the United States related to the humane treatment of animals in high school agriculture classes and could not author my bill. But he suggested that Assemblyman Paul Koretz was possibly planning to author a spay-neuter bill and that he had forwarded my proposal to him. He also gave me Koretz’s phone number to call. His other suggestion was that I might want to discuss my idea at one of Virginia Handley’s animal welfare meetings. Copies of his letter to me were also sent to Assemblyman Paul Koretz and Virginia Handley, Fund for Animals. Since then I have not heard from any of these people.
“So now I think I have even a little more insight into how the anti-animal forces wield their power and how all encompassing their influence has become. It is understandable that the people in the legislature do not consider the animals that reside in their districts as constituents, for they know very well that no cat or dog will ever cast a vote for them. The only way they will, therefore, do anything that is in the interest of the animals is if there is a large enough group of humans who will sponsor it and support it. Strom-Martin’s pet-overpopulation bill, as I pointed out to persons in her office, is not in the interest of the animals; but she is intent on pursuing it anyway. I suspect it is the veterinarians of her constituency whose interests she is promoting, for it seems to me entirely possible that most of the money raised by this bill would go directly into the veterinarians’ pockets and that very little, if any, should ever be expected to trickle down to the animals. Quite a bit of it, however, might be expected to trickle down to Strom-Martin.
“Any animal legislation that passes must necessarily have the animal welfare lobbyists behind it, and even then it can fail if there are stronger or more numerous or wealthier lobbying groups in opposition to it. The animal welfare people are never suspected of being anti-animal because they are perfectly willing to support most animal causes that come along, such as humane treatment for the turtles and frogs killed in Chinese restaurants, exempting government animal shelters and nonprofit animal welfare organizations from paying sales tax on adoption fees, or postponing for a year the effective date of longer holding periods for owner-surrendered animals and strays mandated by the Hayden Bill, in order that the shelter operators may have time to prepare to accommodate the far greater number of animals. The latter two bills mentioned above are much more in the interest of the animal welfare people than of the animals, but people assume that whatever benefits the animal welfare people benefits the animals as well, which, we know, is, for all practical purposes, never the case.
“The reason Virginia Handley would probably support Virginia Strom-Martin’s pet population control bill and would not support mine is because she knows Strom-Martin’s bill will not scale down the shelter operations in any appreciable way, while mine could very well put the shelters virtually out of business altogether.” (P.190-191)
“So I wanted to talk once more to Joe Nation who, I was informed, did not wish to talk to me, to try to find out why he had made me three promises that he had evidently never intended to keep and whether I would be justified in placing the state legislators in the anti-animal category and, if so, why they would choose that status for themselves. On both of the two occasions that I had had an opportunity to speak to him he had been absolutely non communicative. On the first occasion he listened attentively and then all he had said was, “I promise I will do those three things for you.” One thing he promised was that when he got up to Santa Rosa later that day, he would try to promote my plan with the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, as I had already brought the matter to the attention of one of their aides at that time. The other two things he promised were that, during the next year’s session, (1) he would author the bill Kerry Mazzoni had prepared for introduction and (2) he would attempt to have the bill amended, that Gladys Sargent had been responsible for back in 1970, to exempt the male animals from having to be sold for a price that would include the cost of neutering. I knew that politicians are notorious for making promises that they have no intention of keeping, but I thought that was done just in campaign speeches. Certainly they would not trifle with the trust of their constituents in such a way on an individual basis. Believing him, I had, of course, not tried to line up anyone else to do these things. He therefore caused the loss of another year of time, just as Howard Posner had the previous year, which is a serious matter, since every year that is lost involves the sacrifice of the lives of millions of more innocent animals.
“On the second occasion that I had spoken to Joe Nation he had listened but said nothing in response except that he would have to talk to some people. I think he should have straightened me out right then and there as to what was really going on, but that would be telling, and how can one admit to a constituent that he is a willing participant in a corrupt conspiracy, if that was, indeed, the case. After that, the person who sets up his appointments refused to give me another appointment, saying that I should instead talk to the aide in his San Rafael office. Presumably, she was the one who had been instructed to give me the brush off.
“So one day I drove over to Sacramento to see if I could find anyone there who would help me understand why the state government would pass one bill after another that one’s common sense would tell him could be of no benefit whatsoever to the cats and dogs and yet would avoid, like the plague, the one and only proposal that very clearly could easily have put an end to this tragedy.
“I went into the offices of the six legislators who had the best voting records on animal issues. In one case I was asked to come back at one o’clock to see the appropriate person and, after waiting in the hall for half an hour, was told that that person had been called away to a meeting that would probably last all afternoon. In another case, the aide I spoke to said she thought my proposal was something the senator was very likely to be interested in and that I should call the next day and talk to the other aide who made the appointments. When I called him the next day, the aide who made the appointments said that the first aide I had spoken to was probably just trying to be polite, for he was sure that the senator would not be interested in such legislation. In most of the offices I was told that I should take the matter up with Joe Nation, since he was the person who represented my district. I told them that Joe Nation didn’t care about animals and had led me on for over a year with false promises, knowing all the time that he had no intention of doing anything that would not sit well with the animal welfare lobbyists.
“The demeanors of the couple of aides who took a little time to listen to me resembled, to quite a degree, those of the animal welfare people I had tried to reason with. They wanted to fault whatever I said, but every time I succeeded in explaining to them why they were mistaken, instead of acknowledging that I was, indeed, correct, they just gave me a blank stare. They each said they could understand my frustration, but neither offered me any reason at all to hope that the state legislature would ever do anything that might serve to resolve the problem of pet overpopulation.” (P.211-212)
By the end of 2004, I recognized that the animals’ situation had, if anything, worsened. In Chapter 19, I cite at great length “the sad saga of the Sacramento County Animal Shelter, to show how, right there, in the shade of California’s capitol building where California’s state legislators let themselves be influenced by the anti-animal lobbyists to refuse any relief of any kind to California’s unwanted, homeless cats and dogs, the most wanton inhumaneness is not just tolerated but deliberately maintained by the animal control people and their supporters.” (P.221) I had learned this from a series of newspaper articles in the San Francisco Chronicle that were written by Julian Guthrie.“You may also recall that there was mention made of the fact that no elected official had ever set foot in the Sacramento Animal Shelter. Well, that was soon to be remedied according to an article Guthrie wrote two days after the first article appeared, which bore the title: “Article sends Leno on crusade to spay animals”. The subtitle was “S.F. assemblyman says he will also visit Sacramento shelter”. Excerpts from that article are as follows:
“State Assemblyman Mark Leno introduced a resolution Monday to curb the overpopulation of dogs and cats in California and vowed that it is only his first step on behalf of animals.
“Leno, a former San Francisco supervisor, said his next step will be to visit a Sacramento County animal shelter which was the subject of a story in the Chronicle on Sunday.
“ ‘The story in yesterday’s paper was the first I learned of what’s going on there,’ Leno said of the Sacramento County Animal Shelter on Bradshaw Road. ‘I’m going to visit the shelter and talk with Assembly colleagues to see what can be done.’
“Leno’s proposal seeks to establish Feb. 25 as ‘Spay Day USA.’ Under the measure, Californians would be asked to observe the day by having their dogs or cats sterilized or by contributing to organizations that provide spay and neutering services.”
“So I drove to Sacramento and went to the office of Assemblyman Leno where I very soon had his staff convinced that I was a wonderful person with a wonderful plan for curbing the overpopulation of dogs and cats. Leno wasn’t there, but his aides were so taken with me that they invited me into his private office just to look around. This was an honor, for I had never been in any of the state legislator’s private offices before. They also called his office in San Rafael to make an appointment for me to talk to the person there who would present my plan to Assemblyman Leno.
“I arrived at the appointed time and the office staff there, who had been apprised of how wonderful a person I was, greeted me with all due enthusiasm and really rolled out the red carpet. The woman I was to speak to took me into a large pleasant room where we discussed my spay project plan thoroughly. She agreed that my plan was vastly superior to Leno’s “Spay Day USA” plan and was delighted to have such an excellent proposal to present to the assemblyman. She said that I would probably receive a call in about three days.
“That I never received a call did not surprise me. The problem, of course, was that Leno, who was in the first month of his first term in the legislature, was still very naïve regarding what the animals were up against in that body. I am sure that when he talked with his Assembly colleagues to see what could be done, he was advised by all that there was absolutely nothing that had ever been done or would ever be done by the California legislature that would substantially benefit the cats and dogs.” (P.225-226)
“Then I remembered that the name of Assemblyman Paul Koretz had appeared in some of Guthrie’s articles and I knew that he was reputed to be one of the more animal-friendly members of the legislature. So, having failed with Leno a few months earlier, I wrote to him and received a very nice though very discouraging letter in return. Here are a couple of paragraphs from that letter:“I do indeed care very much about animal welfare issues and have for decades. As an Assemblyman, it has been always a priority for me to carry legislation that will improve the lives of animals in this state. This year I actually carried three animal bills. AB 395 would prohibit veterinarians from declawing cats, AB 342 would prohibit using dogs to hunt bears, and AB 588 would ban the practice of pound seizure in California.
“As you may know, it is very difficult to pass animals bills in the Legislature. Typically, bills intended to help animals face an uphill battle to gain votes. Indeed, any bill that relates to the “kill” policy at animal shelters are very controversial and spark debate even among animal rights organizations. While I believe your proposal has merit in light of the dog/cat overpopulation crisis, I’m afraid the timing would be very poor for such a bill, particularly given the state budget deficit and the fact that local governments face a fiscal crisis as well.
“Once again, thank you for your correspondence and your thorough analysis. Good luck in your continued efforts on behalf of animals.” (P.229-230)
Many of the people from whom I have requested help for the animals have wished me “good luck” in my efforts, but I am sure all of them know that it will take a great deal more than luck to bring about the salvation of the non pets. Good luck never has been and never will be in the cards for these exploited animals, unless and until we, who are sincere in our desire to cause the dawn to break for our non pets, can find a way to defeat the animal exploiters and deliver the unwanted cats and dogs out of the ages-old darkness that otherwise will envelop them forever.