Crunch Time for Oreo's Law
Oreo’s Law faces its first major hurdle, as it will likely be taken up by the New York State Assembly's Agriculture Committee this month. Despite the efforts of Ed Sayres of the ASPCA, Jane Hoffman of the Mayor’s Alliance, and their puppet Laura Allen of the Animal Law Coalition to kill the bill and condemn thousands of savable animals to death despite a rescue alternative, Oreo’s Law continues to garner support in the NYS Legislature.
Oreo’s Law now has 25 legislative sponsors, representing both political parties, in every region of the State. Despite this support, the opponents are committed to ensuring that their power is not upended, even if it means the needless killing of animals, making the passage of Oreo’s Law an open question. As such, supporters are asking animal lovers and rescue groups throughout New York State to call, e-mail, or write Agriculture Committee members and urge a “Yes” vote.
Oreo’s Law was introduced following the decision by the ASPCA, a non-profit organization in the State, to kill an abused dog for whom another non-profit organization was willing to offer lifetime care. The bill would make it illegal for shelters to kill animals when a qualified non-profit organization is willing to save that animal’s life.
ASPCA President Ed Sayres killed Oreo and is now intent on derailing the law which would prevent it from happening again, even if his effort results in the needless killing of animals throughout New York State and even though he supported similar legislation in California.
The bill makes exceptions for animals who are dangerous, irremediably suffering, or have rabies, and it prevents groups with volunteers, staff, or leadership charged with animal neglect or cruelty related offenses from participating. It is based on a successful California law, passed in 1998, which is credited with saving thousands of animals every year, a fact that even Ed Sayres, current head of the ASPCA and an opponent of Oreo’s Law cannot deny. As then head of the San Francisco SPCA, his own analysis of the California Law showed that the law was not only responsible for a reduction in shelter killing rates, but also saved $486,480 in taxpayer funds in San Francisco alone.
To maintain control over smaller non-profits, however, the larger New York State non-profit organizations, such as the ASPCA and Mayor’s Alliance, are trying to derail Oreo’s Law. In order to do so, they are employing various misleading claims; including fear mongering that Oreo’s Law would put the public at risk by forcing the release of dangerous dogs and animals in harm’s way by placing them with animal abusers disguised as non-profit animal protection organizations. But an analysis of California law, where similar claims were made, shows these to be false. In fact, Sayres defended the law in California against similar allegations. But in California, the law was not named after a dog he needlessly killed, a fact which he does not want memorialized in law, even if he condemns thousands of animals to death in the process.
Animals Needlessly Killed Despite a Rescue Alternative
Moreover, a statewide study of New York State rescue groups shows that Oreo’s Law is badly needed. Seventy-two percent of non-profit organizations—nearly 3 out of 4—are denied the ability to rescue by at least one NYS shelter they are willing to save animals from, and these shelters are in many cases killing these animals instead. In fact, 71% of respondents have had shelters kill animals their group had indicated they were willing to save.
According to Empty Cages Collective, a rescue group in New York City,
While justifications for killing abound, the truth is that shelters all over New York State kill animals who reputable and responsible animal rescue organizations are or would be willing to take, rehabilitate and place in loving homes. Animals are being killed in New York City, Rochester, Buffalo and cities and towns throughout the state because animal control establishments are not working with rescuers at all or will not work with them to the extent they could. Even in New York City, where NYC shelters do a better job working with rescue organizations than almost anywhere else in the state, animals are still killed while hardworking and knowledgeable individuals who run 501(c)3 non-profit animal rescues are denied taking animals destined to die.
Oreo’s Law Would Also Reduce Cruelty
The statewide survey also found that 43% of respondents who have expressed concerns about inhumane conditions which they have witnessed in New York State shelters said that their non-profit rescue organizations became the subject of retaliation, while over half (52%) who have witnessed it but did not express concerns said they were afraid to complain about inhumane conditions—and simply looked the other way—because they were afraid if they did complain, they would no longer be allowed to rescue, thus allowing those inhumane conditions to continue.
Julio's finder was afraid to call animal control for help because they kill healthy animals.
But not only would Oreo’s Law help stop animal cruelty within a shelter, it has the potential to reduce it outside of it as well. Empty Cages Collective found that New Yorkers are placed in the untenable position of having to allow animals to languish in substandard and even cruel conditions because they fear those animals will be killed, both by the ASPCA and shelters in New York City. Describing one such case, they write that,
[S]omeone had abandoned a small brown tabby kitten on [a] porch the night before, leaving nothing more than a box of food. The kitten was confused, terrified, and freezing! There was already several inches of snow on the ground, and more snow was coming. When ECC realized that the kitten had been left outside overnight and was found shaking uncontrollably at daybreak, we knew we had to help. ECC immediately agreed to accept the kitten (now known as Julio) into our adoption program. When asked why [the neighbor] didn’t rescue the cat sooner, her] reply was similar to [others]. [She] didn’t want to take Julio to Brooklyn’s Animal Care & Control, where he could be unnecessarily killed instead of being merely frightened and cold. “What would be the point of rescuing him just to turn him over to a place that would kill him?” [she] asked.
Much like [other cases], Julio the kitten awaited rescue, suffering simply because the institutions in place to care for companion animals in crisis utilize killing as a method of problem-solving—a method that many members of the general public will not accept. The point is simple and yet profound: the public leaves animals in egregiously cruel, neglectful or unacceptable situations rather than bring those animals to shelters who kill healthy or treatable animals and show no active intention to stop. Animals stay in abusive situations because the institutions that are designed to help and protect them kill them instead. This ethical inconsistency has forced the public to remain hands off, refraining from reporting cruelty and neglect situations lest they aid and abet the killing of adoptable animals.
By ensuring that these animals are saved when there is a rescue alternative, Oreo’s Law will help stop the continuation of neglect and abuse both in and out of the shelter. Rescuers will no longer fear that if they report inhumane conditions in a shelter, they will be retaliated against because they will have a legal right to the animals. And everyday animal lovers will not be forced to allow neglect to continue because they will have increased faith that a “rescue” doesn’t mean killing—“a schizophrenic paradigm where killing poses as love, the animal control establishment force the public to compromise the welfare of animals by asking them to do something they won’t do: participate in a system that pulls animals from abusers only to unjustly end their lives—lives these animals value and struggle to keep intact.”
A Double Standard
Despite this, Hoffman and Allen continue to advance a dishonest critique of the pending law using the NYS Bar Association (Animal Issues Committee) of which Hoffman is a longstanding member. In fact, the Bar Association “analysis” is a repetition of Laura Allen’s inept and inaccurate reading of California Law.
Allen runs a New York-based group she calls the “Animal Law Coalition.” A coalition, however, is “an alliance of distinct organizations or parties.” But the Animal Law Coalition is a coalition in name only. It is one person: Laura Allen. And Laura Allen has come out in opposition to Oreo’s Law by arguing that shelters should be trusted when making behavioral determinations, by misrepresenting the law relating to California’s Hayden Law upon which Oreo’s Law is based, and by arguing that animals are better off dead than in the arms of the rescue groups which she says are most likely animal abusers anyway.
One of Allen’s disingenuous complaints, betraying her interest in protecting her friend Hoffman, is that Oreo’s Law does not “consider” Hoffman’s organization, the Mayor’s Alliance of New York City. It is not the job of public legislation to protect the power structure of a special interest group when that power structure sacrifices the public good (in this case, the lives of animals throughout New York State). Second, New York State does not end at the borders of New York City. Animals outside of the City deserve protection. Third, despite tens of millions given to Hoffman’s group to save and care for New York City’s animals, despite a relatively low per capita intake rate, the presence of the ASPCA which is the wealthiest humane society in the country and one of the 200 richest charities overall down the street, NYC shelters continue to kill healthy animals and threaten to kill them every single day. More disturbingly, NYC shelters are running out of food and have put out frantic appeals saying they do not have enough food to feed the animals in their care, despite Hoffman’s millions. According to one such appeal:
Dramatic budget cuts have forced Animal Care & Control of NYC to look to the public for food donations. AC&C’s primary source of funding is the City of New York. Due to the current fiscal environment, that support has been drastically cut. Your food donations are now desperately needed for the hundreds of animals in their three care centers. And they could be needed for months.
As such, Hoffman has proven she cannot be trusted to put the interests, indeed the very lives, of the animals ahead of her own naked self-interest to retain power. Oreo’s Law would help remedy that by eliminating her stranglehold on power and put it where it belongs: with the people who do the actual day-to-day lifesaving of animals throughout the State; with the people who do not hide in their penthouses paid for by the blood, sweat and tears of the rescuers they falsely and maliciously claim are abusers in disguise and paid for, in part, with the donations of animal lovers, while animals are killed for being hungry right down the street.
Allen goes on to say we need to “respect” the decisions made by shelters to kill animals, even at shelters that give dogs only the minimum time according to law before they are killed—a paltry five days for strays and zero days for owner relinquished animals. But while Allen argues that such determinations are adequate for the dogs of NYS—even when it means those dogs are killed while rescue groups willing to save them are turned away—it is not good enough for her own dog. When it comes to the life of her own animal, Allen has an altogether different standard. In opposing Oreo’s Law, she is opposing legislation mandating action which saved her own dog from death.
Allen has never worked in an animal control shelter, and perhaps has never even been to one—except in Seattle, where her and her husband’s dog was impounded after biting someone, was determined to be dangerous, and was sentenced to death. Instead of “respecting” the decision of the shelter as she admonishes others to do, Allen and husband Russ Mead enlisted a rescue group, Best Friends, to save their own dog’s life from a shelter determined to kill him. And Best Friends did, on condition that the dog never be allowed to leave a lifetime care facility. It sounds remarkably similar to Oreo, where Pets Alive offered lifetime care. The difference of course is that Oreo was not adjudicated to be dangerous by a court and never attacked anyone. The other difference of course is that, in the case of Allen’s dog, the rescue group was given the ability to save a life by being rescued from the shelter, while Oreo, and the thousands of anonymous dogs and cats unknown to her at shelters throughout NYS, Allen’s viewpoint seeks to condemn to death.
The praise and confidence she places in shelter directors throughout NYS does not extend to those who judged her own dog dangerous because when Best Friends invited Seattle Animal Control director Don Jordan to speak at their conference, Allen’s husband Russ Mead called Best Friends and let fly a string of epithets against them for inviting that “*&^%#$” who was going to kill their dog.
Yet in spite of this experience, Allen published an opposition piece when Oreo’s Law was first introduced arguing, of all things, that it should be opposed because it goes “too far” and saves “too many” animals. Allen actually opposed Oreo’s Law because the law was not limited to “adoptable” and “treatable” animals the way she claimed the California law on which it is based is. In other words, she was essentially arguing that the law had the potential to save too many animals. As unethical as that position is, it was also a misreading of California law.
According to UCLA Law Professor Taimie L. Bryant, the Hayden Law’s primary author,
The California version of Oreo’s law did not limit rescue groups’ right of access to shelter animals to only “adoptable” and “treatable” animals as defined in the public policy statutes of the Hayden Law. The specific statutes of the law that give rescue groups rights of access (Food and Agricultural Code sections 31108 and 31752) explicitly exclude from rescue groups only those animals who are irremediably suffering from a serious illness or severe injury such that immediate euthanasia is the only humane alternative.
Language about “adoptability” and “treatability” do appear in public policy statutes that are part of the Hayden Law. However, the purpose of those statutes is to assert the preference of the people of California for adoption and rehabilitation instead of killing shelter animals. There are no specific duties in those statutes, and they do not constrain the application of the specific statutes that provide for release to rescue groups.
Of course, one would expect an “Animal Law Coalition”—even a coalition in name only as her group is—to celebrate, rather than condemn, expanding the scope of the bill to save animals such as feral cats, as well as neonatal kittens and puppies. But equally disturbing is that even after being informed of her misreading of the law, Allen refused to correct the error on her website. To this day, she continues to intentionally promote the misinformation in order to derail Oreo’s Law from passage. And that intentional misrepresentation is now wearing the imprimatur of the NYS Bar Association because that Committee republished the false reading of the California Law which was the impetus for Oreo’s Law.
The Status Quo
For over a hundred years, animal shelters in this country and their allies working at large, national animal protection organizations have argued that the killing of animals in shelters is unavoidable, and that the irresponsible American public is to blame. Without an alternative model to challenge the assumptions upon which these calculations were based—animal shelters were, by default, granted almost unequivocal discretion to kill millions of animals a year, while blaming others for the need to do so. Not only did this stymie any innovation seeking to reduce the numbers of animals killed, but, having been unchallenged in this course of action for so long, it had the unfortunate side effect of creating the expectation among shelter directors that they should be able to operate without public scrutiny, comment or accountability for their actions and decisions.
In the late 1990’s, when the burgeoning No Kill movement proved that many of the assumptions upon which traditional sheltering were based were, in fact, untrue, and that nearly all animals entering shelters can be saved, traditional sheltering models had by that time become so firmly entrenched—and those championing them so large and influential—that any challenge to their hegemony was met with recrimination and hostility. And since that time, animal advocates throughout the country, working to reform their local shelters by demanding innovation, modernization and greater lifesaving, have almost universally found themselves at cross purposes with not only their local shelters which refuse to reform, but, just as often, the large, national groups, such as the ASPCA, which come to the defense of their local shelter and its archaic, regressive policies which favor killing, and, therefore, a continuation of the paradigm upon which their power is predicated.
As a result, it is not uncommon for shelters to refuse the assistance of grassroots rescue organizations willing to save the animals they are determined to kill. Time and again, these organizations hold the animals hostage, ignoring the requests of local sanctuaries and rescue groups willing to assume responsibility and liability for their care, even as they then turn around and kill them, just as the ASPCA did to Oreo.
But these rescue groups are not going away quietly, as the furor over Oreo’s killing has proven. Despite the entrenchment of groups like the ASPCA, the widespread success of the No Kill movement has invigorated animal lovers nationwide, and one of the results of that success has been an exponential increase in the number of rescue organizations. Their efficacy, their dedication, and their willingness to do the lifesaving that shelters and the large national organizations have for so long argued is impossible threaten to expose the lies upon which the historical inaction of shelters and the large national groups is based. It is why Ed Sayres chose to kill Oreo rather than give her to an organization that was willing to go the extra mile for her, when the ASPCA was not, despite raising over $100 million dollars last year from an animal loving American public after promising to do just that in such circumstances, and for such animals.
And it is why Jane Hoffman, who now keeps the rescue groups of New York City under her regressive thumb, is also opposed to Oreo’s Law. Her opposition is, at its core, about fear—a fear of losing power. A fear that Oreo’s Law—by eliminating her role as the unnecessary “middle man” between shelters and rescue groups—will render her obsolete, as it should.
