Category: Animal Shelter Operations

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Controlled Substance War Story

That last blog reminded me of an incident involving controlled substances security.  Sorry! A couple of employees came to me to advise me that our veterinarian had left our controlled substances unsecured.  The veterinarian was on vacation and was the only person with the keys to the drug box.

While in the military, I spent a lot of my time studying.  I usually studied criminal investigation techniques, but I would often break from that training to pick up other useful knowledge.   As such, I learned locksmithing; to be more exact, I studied lock picking.

I simply picked the drug box lock and resecured the drugs.  When the veterinarian returned from vacation; I explained to the veterinarian what I had done.  It seems that the veterinarian only heard “lock pick” and “drug box.”

A few days later, I was visited by a trio of criminal investigators who were investigating me for breaking into the veterinarian’s drug box.  Fortunately, they got a good laugh out of it.  They went on to report my veterinarian to the State Pharmacy Board.  I don’t know what the best lesson to learn here was: to pay more attention to locking your drugs, paying more attention when your Executive Director is talking to you,  or just not being stupid (trying to get your boss fired without thinking it through).

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Hiring a veterinarian

Hiring a veterinarian can be the most challenging task that you might ever encounter. Your veterinarian will likely be your most expensive employee and the veterinarian position will be the hardest position that you will ever have to fill. During your interview with potential hires, you will keep asking yourself if there is any hope that you will get your money’s worth from that individual. Here is what you will encounter:

You need someone who can organize their time and be able to perform high-volume surgeries. But here is the kicker: they can’t be too fast or too slow. A veterinarian that needs two or three hours to complete a spay/neuter will be too ineffective on your staff; but, a veterinarian who completes surgeries within minutes will be taking shortcuts. I have witnessed veterinarians taking shortcuts in closing and substituting glue for sutures. I’ve seen organizations dealing with the bad press from people taking their pets home, only to complain about open wounds. And then the shelter has to pay for that person to take their pet to the emergency clinic to close the wound again. You can’t afford to be paying for many of those incidents. It is much cheaper to do the surgeries right, even if it takes a few minutes more.

Hiring a veterinarian is all about balance. That balance is very hard to find. As such, you need to think about “plan B.” If your local humane society operates a high-volume clinic, you might consider contracting with them for your surgeries. Some will even provide pickup and delivery services. “Plan C” is contracting with a local veterinarian who is willing to reduce their rates for a constant income source. Surgeries make up a small portion of a veterinarian’s business and you might find one who wants your business just to stay proficient.

A word of caution. Avoid “luxury veterinarians”; who might have worked at a luxury, government, or university clinic where that had unlimited resources.  There are hidden costs associated with “luxury veterinarians,” because they are used to providing deluxe services.  I discovered just how many dogs you can find with lime disease if you test for it. You are going to run up your veterinary costs if you treat every dog that comes into your shelter with lime disease. If you have the time and the money, go for it. If you are working with the same budget that I’ve had throughout my career, you have to stop short of providing luxury services.

Another word of caution is the handling of controlled substances. Although the shelter purchases the drugs, your veterinarian is the only one allowed to handle them. If you decide to fire your veterinarian, have another veterinarian in the wings to accept responsibility for the drugs. Come to think about it, you might want to schedule route drug tests for your veterinarian. I never did that and thinking back, I wish that I had.

I am going to get slightly off-topic. When I worked in Utah, employees who were in accidents when driving a government vehicle were immediately sent in for a drug test. At first thought, you’ll think that is a stupid idea, until you start to realize that the accident could have been caused by someone on drugs. Does meth make you drive a little more aggressive? I think that it might. Of course, back in those days, Utah had the third-highest meth use in the Country.

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Surveys

Just like tipping, survey requests have gotten out of hand.  I am constantly being asked via email for my opinion.  I’d like to think that someone wants to know what I think on a particular matter.  But, before I get a big head, I realize that they really are not interested in my thoughts, but my money.

At the end of the survey is a request for money.  In most cases, you can’t even submit your survey until after you’ve donated.  I’ve given up on taking surveys.  I am not interested enough in my opinion to pay for it.

The curse with giving to “good causes” is that they spring forth with more “good causes.”  The next thing, you start thinking about changing your email address.  Surveys are the same way.  One survey breeds another.

The trick is to create an email address just for this purpose; then you can focus your spam emails into one location and leave your other email addresses for more important purposes.  I’ve thought about creating an email that is SPAM@davidflagler.com, but that might be too obvious.

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There are no bad dogs.

Recently, I was contacted by a blogger who wanted facetime on my website.  I am always curious about people who approach me and want to write on my website when they have a website of their own.  In checking out his website, he had a tagline that claimed, “There are no bad dogs.”

This is the greatest lie that we can tell people.  In the same vein is when we tell people that all dogs are alike.  People usually make that claim when talking about pitbulls.  That too, is another lie.

Anyone who has worked in an animal shelter knows that pets have phenotypical and behavioral differences.  We chalk that up to genetics.  It is foolish to think that genetics does not impact behavior.  Let us face it, poodles and chihuahuas are the meanest dogs.  We chalk that up to their genetically small brains.  They don’t make the newspapers because they are too small to cause any real damage to a person.  Pitbulls are the breed most likely to cause a fatality due to their size, aggression, and numbers.  There is something about a pitbull owner that seems to think that they need to breed more pitbull mixes.  I think they are having a contest to see just how many other breeds will breed with a pitbull.

For many years, dog fighters would breed their line of pitbulls to be mean.   They would come upon a specific genetic marker for aggression and milk it. Many of the offspring of those animals find their way into animal shelters.  One of the biggest problems that we face is that most pet owners do not know how to respond to the aggression they see in their pets.  Like having a misbehaving child, they blame themselves and attempt to adapt to these new behaviours.

It is tragic the number of pitbull owners who give up their pet after witnessing numerous incidents of aggression and wait for the “the big one.”  The one action that is so severe that they are forced to surrender their dog.  That action is usually a bite so severe that it cannot be overlooked.  The victim is usually a child.

Pitbulls are not alone in being potentially dangerous.  It is the responsibility of shelter staff to see aggressive behaviour before you place the dog on the adoption row.  Too often, animal shelters are trying so hard to reach a 90% save rate that they will intentionally overlook a dog’s behaviour in hope of being able to announce they’ve become no-kill.  For that reason, maybe people should avoid a no-kill shelter fearing that their no-kill rating is more important than an adopter’s safety.

Animal shelters that adopt potentially dangerous dogs and pet owners who choose to keep a potentially dangerous dog should be charged with reckless endangerment if someone is ever injured due to their complacency.  An animal shelter is negligent when keeping a dog that has shown aggression towards their own staff.  If more shelters were held responsible for their animals that they adopt, they might reconsider the importance of being called no-kill.

Don’t get me wrong, no-kill is a good thing, if it is done in a responsible way.

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Analytics

Every once in a while, a blogger finds their way to this site. I don’t know how they find me, but they do, wanting to author an article for you. I’ve agreed a couple of times, only to regret it. I’ve decided that if someone is going to write something stupid on my website, it was going to be me, which I do quite frequently.

I infrequently ponder who might be my readers and in what numbers they visit me. The site analytics tell me that this site is visited, on average, fifty times a day. The next question is why?

I would like to think that I can impart some wisdom to keep animal welfare workers out of trouble, or people are visiting to see my paintings in the gallery. To see if I have gotten any better. The problem is that you have to look at a lot of bad paintings to find the one or two that I could be really proud of. Some might disagree and claim that their 12-year-old can do better. That is hurtful thinking, but probably true.

Maybe it is an ex-employee looking me up to see if I have died yet. Maybe it is one of those humane societies that I worked with to see if I have written anything bad about them. It could be an ex-wife who is checking to see if I am still saying stupid things; which I am.

I am hoping that someone new to animal welfare accidentally finds this site and can learn from my experiences. Our field is a challenging one and the challenges have even gotten harder. COVID drove people to adopt pets when they were working from home, and then gave them up when it was time to go back in to work. Inflation grew so much that people could not afford to feed themselves and chose to give up their pets. Cities and counties had to adjust budgets to deal with the invasion of illegal immigrants coming into our Country. In many ways, times have gotten harder for animal shelters who are forced to do more with less funding. That is why I speak out against organizations who are trying to bully animal shelters to adopt out more animals when the adoption market is dry.

I’ve always encouraged being good stewards and showing integrity. Keep up the good fight and do what you can to give homeless animals a new future. Feel free to check in every once in a while to enjoy a friendly chat from time to time; although it is one-sided. Don’t forget to bring your coffee.

Don’t get angry with me when I change topics away from animal welfare issues. As I have gotten older, I have been nurturing my soul. I found Christ a long time ago while serving in Thailand. I have made the mistake of not mentioning Him before. I will not make that mistake any longer. He is my life and He directs my way. Throughout my entire career, I always knew that God had my back.

I never turned on the comment feature on the website because the world is full of mean people and I pay enough money for the site that I don’t want to listen to them. I figured that if you really needed to find me, it doesn’t take much work to drop me an email. If you are experiencing difficult times, my email address is in the menu. If I can’t offer solid advice, I can always pray for you.

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Doctrine

Doctrine is those things that you hold firmly.  It is the thing that you build your principles upon.  Sadly, it is also the thing that divides us.  False doctrine is something that erodes us.  It goes beyond faith, it becomes who we are.

Every animal shelter would have a principle for how we treat the animals in our care.  That doctrine should insure that each animal is receiving adequate care.  That principle should also extend to how we treat the animal when an animal is suffering and we are unable to provide it with the care that it needs.

Animal shelters need to document these principles so that everyone in the organization will understand our doctrines.  Many times, our doctrines are what paves our path to humane treatment of the animals in our care.  It is upon these doctrines that we submit our annual budget request.

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Being on the Right Side of Animal Rights

As much as I lambast animal rights organizations for bullying animal shelters for not adopting aggressive dogs so as to meet a 90% statistical number; I find myself on the same side wth them when it comes to wild animals.  I think all roadside zoos should be shut down.

Although my college background is in wildlife resources, I am against State laws that require that trappers only have to check their traplines once every three days.  I can’t imagine an animal being stuck in a leg hold trap for three days.  I can’t imagine an animal having to be in a leg hold trap for even three hours.  Whenever I am given the opportunity to update a city or county animal ordinance, I always work in a prohibition on leg hold traps. There is no use for them in populated or unpopulated areas.  They are a danger to domestic pets and they are intended to harm another living thing.

While I am bandstanding, wild species should never be a backyard pet.  For a while idiots were allowed to purchase ligers, half lion and half tiger.  There are probably still people keeping these animals in their backyards.  The real dumb ones probably have them running around in their houses.  The problem with natural selection is that instead of wiping out the person with deleterious genes (for stupidity) is when a child becomes injured due to someone else’s gene pool.

I worked with someone conducting college research on taking coyote puppies and attempting to domesticate them.  They hand-raised them from birth; only to find that the animals were coded from birth to be wild.  The human species is not smart enough to figure out that wild animals are coded with DNA to be wild.  It is inhumane to make them any different than what they are coded for.

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Protests

In the mid-1990s, a woman called our local media and announced that there was going to be a major protest at the County Animal Shelter. The media showed up, and a single protester walked outside our doors with a sign that said, “Save Pookie, Neuter David Flagler.”

In all of my years in animal control, I have to say that was my favorite sign—not that I had many to choose from. Pookie was a Rottweiler who attempted to eat the neighbor’s child. The child was climbing the chain-link fence that separated the two yards, and Pookie grabbed the tip of the child’s shoe and attempted to pull the child through the fence.

Given the circumstances, I deemed Pookie dangerous. My decision was overturned in court when the audience showed up wearing t-shirts supporting Pookie. Then and now, we live in a climate that supports the underdog.

We go, almost daily, reading about protests in our communities. The latest one in my community had 200 protesters, but the media could not discern what they were protesting. It doesn’t matter, people protest everything…. Immigration, transgenders in women’s sports, Trump cleaning out the waste in government spending. We have such a large pallet of causes that it no longer matters, we’re just going from one complaint to another.

All of these protests later, I regret not getting my hands on that first protest sign because Pookie was saved and eventually Flagler got neutered. As I think back, I was probably already neutered at that time. But anyway, it was a comforting thought.

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Respecting the Dead

I’ve always said that how you treat a dead animal indicates how you treat a live one.  I bring up this issue today when several of our local police officers were discovered cutting up a dead homeless person.  Pretty outrageous.  They didn’t even cut off their body cameras; pretty stupid as well.  I have a lot of respect for police officers, but these guys do not measure up to the level I expect of their position.

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Acronyms

Acronyms are undermining society. This should not be a surprise because social media is at the root of the new language that sprung forth from our cell phones. At least once a week, I’ve been stumped (ALOAWIBS) (LOL) when I come across an unknown acronym.

As professionals, you would think that we would avoid the overuse of acronyms, but we are just as bad as the rest of the social media world. For example, anyone outside the animal welfare world would not know what HBC (Hit By Car) means. We would say the animal was dead, but no, we have to say “dead on arrival” (DOA). It gets confusing when dispatch wants to know if our DOA was HBC. You get the point.

It is a confusing world. On a lark, I Googled to see if there is an app that can help us out. Much to my surprise, there is. The app that I found can only be used on iPhones. Who decided that people who have Apple phones need the acronyms finder more than Android users? Then it hit me, iPhone users are more likely to overuse acronyms. As an Android user, when I come across an acronym that I don’t recognize, I just move on. If the person has to use an acronym to make their point, then the point isn’t all that important.

Soon, I am sure, that there will be an app that help people invent new acronyms. I am hoping that the Android version comes out first. I could shorten my emails with acronyms of my choosing.

Of course, it might be a mistake to ignore acronyms in all places; especially hospitals. I can see why hospital staff might shorten their language in an emergency. However, after the emergency, it would be nice if they moved back to a “normal” language.

We have been using acronyms for so long that some of them are becoming quite annoying. I could live without LOL or RLOL, which really should be ROTFLOL. If you don’t know what any of those mean, you are not missing much. Actually, you aren’t missing anything.

Some in the world would say that I’m wrong. I get that quite often. What would the world be like without a few LOLs in our life?