Dangerous Reporting

The headline would frighten anyone with small children. “Complaint: Dangerous Dogs Being Released by City,” the Albuquerque Journal declared on its front page on March 31. In case anyone missed the implications, the accompanying illustration showed the menacing silhouette of a pit bull.

The story grew only more horrifying from there. A complaint was filed with the city’s Office of the Inspector General by two employees of Albuquerque’s Animal Welfare Department (AWD) alleging that in 100 cases last year, the shelters allowed dogs to be adopted or returned to owners that had “flunked nationally recognized standardized tests that showed the animals had dangerous tendencies.” Case histories described dogs that had lunged at handlers, bitten children, and killed pets, but been adopted or given to rescues anyway. The story was repeated on the newspaper’s television partner, KOAT-7.

A collective shudder ran through the dog rescue community in the days that followed this report, not because of what it revealed, but because it ran so counter to what many in the community knew. Since Barbara Bruin became director of AWD in 2009, the city shelters had seen a remarkable turn-around, instituting enrichment and training programs for shelter dogs that were allowing many more to find new homes.

Moreover, as many in the community hastened to point out, the “nationally recognized standardized test” for aggression known as SAFER was never designed to be a pass/fail test on which adoption decisions are made. A “fail” result does not mean a dog is dangerous. Created in 1999 as a simple test that could be administered in minutes by nonprofessionals, the SAFER assessment was developed by the ASPCA as “a helpful tool,” according to spokeswoman Alison Jimenez, because many dogs’ history is unknown.

“SAFER is an aggression assessment—not a pass/fail test—and simply presents a snapshot of one moment in time to help determine the likelihood of aggression,” she wrote in an email, adding that other factors need to be used to decide whether a dog should be placed.

Beyond questions about the validity of its “dangerous dog” label, moreover, the Journal report—along with a follow-up story on April 27—suffered from serious flaws in its sourcing. Investigative reporter Colleen Heild relied entirely on the accounts of the two disgruntled employees making the accusations; she did no independent investigation of the truth or significance of their claims. The newspaper, in effect, let itself be used as ammunition in a workplace dispute.

What apparently proved irresistibly explosive in this story is that this was no ordinary workplace, no ordinary claim of mismanaged taxpayer funds. The label “dangerous dog” plays into longstanding stereotypes about shelter dogs and pit bulls in particular, encouraging readers to abandon scrutiny and succumb to the pleasures of hair-raising alarm.

Convenient label

What exactly is a “dangerous dog”? The question is more than a semantic quibble. Shelter dogs have long been perceived as emotionally damaged by their history and more prone to dangerous, erratic behavior. Although such perceptions have been changing in recent years, public understanding of dog behavior has not kept pace with science. The field of veterinary behavior is still relatively young (unlike dog training, which is age-old), and New Mexico has only one residency-trained specialist in veterinary behavior medicine: Jeff Nichol, who specializes in dog aggression.

Nichol said he was surprised not to have been contacted about the OIG complaint, but he made his position clear. “The SAFER test is as good as any out there, but there is more to dog behavior than a test. Attempts to oversimplify these things are a big mistake.”

The bottom line, he told us, is that any dog will bite under the right circumstances, which almost always involve fear. “If they want to assure that no (shelter) dog is going to bite, they have to euthanize every dog on the planet,” he said. “If you own a dog, you have to know that it can bite.”

In the stressful environment of a city shelter, Nichol added, “dogs are being euthanized that shouldn’t be, for showing aggression. And unfortunately, there are other situations that may cause a dog to bite that wouldn’t in a shelter.”

That doesn’t mean dogs should not be tested, he added. But “there’s far more factors that need to be considered before a dog is slated for euthanasia— Barbara Bruin is right about that. Some things are practical, and others are not. But every adopter needs to sign off on the fact that the dog could bite. Because there’s always a risk.

“If they fail the test, they need a second look—that’s all I would say.”

Details matter

In interviews with more than a half dozen dog trainers and rescuers, all echoed Nichol’s warning that the situation, not the dog, determines the likelihood of attack—situations that many people create themselves.

“There are very few dogs that you can trust immediately with babies and children,” said Dani Weinberg, a Corrales-based dog trainer who works with many local shelters and rescues. “And not all dogs who bite are dangerous. It depends on the specifics of the situation.”

Gerry Glauser also emphasized the importance of knowing the precise circumstances in which dogs have attacked. A retired software developer, Glauser spent six years learning about dog behavior at the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Utah, and estimates that he has worked with more than 2,000 dogs.

In Albuquerque, he focuses his efforts on what he calls “the 2 percent,” shelter dogs that prove so unmanageable, they need intensive rehabilitation to place. He volunteers primarily with NMDog, which rescues dogs from extreme abuse and neglect. Dogs that no one else will train, Glauser takes under wing and spends up to four weeks retraining. Those that do not improve, he has euthanized for public safety.

The vast majority of dogs, he says, can be rehabilitated with enough time and training. Few shelters have the resources to devote to that, however, which is where temperament tests like SAFER come in. The tests are supposed to help identify which dogs will benefit from added attention, but they are far from foolproof.

In fact, a 2012 study by veterinary researcher Sara Bennett found high rates of error in SAFER and another popular temperament test, Assess-a-Pet. Bennett tested the tests on a group of dogs with known behavior problems, and compared the results with a highly accurate owner assessment called C-BARQ.

She reported in Applied Animal Behaviour Science in 2012 that both SAFER and Assess-a-Pet performed poorly in predicting aggression, passing dogs that were aggressive and flagging nonaggressive dogs. SAFER proved so unreliable that the results were little better than chance.

Bennett noted that her own study failed to replicate the conditions dogs face in a shelter environment, and that “aggression” was not always defined the same way by pet owners. Food aggression, for example—growling or snapping when a food bowl is touched—was often not reported by owners outside the testing situation, or else they did not see it as a problem.

“When we think ‘dangerous,’ that’s a huge spectrum,” says Rena Distasio, a pit bull advocate who serves on the state Animal Sheltering Board. “To some people, no aggression against other dogs should be tolerated. Other people consider that to be perfectly manageable. A lot of dogs will kill small dogs because of high prey drive.”

From the standpoint of rescuers, high prey drive might be manageable by the right adopter, under the right circumstances.

“We call those our ‘only’ dogs, but they’re not dangerous,” says NMDog founder Angela Stell, who rescues many dogs that have lived on chains. “They’re not dogs we would place in a home with another dog, or in a play group. But our dog will not drag you across the street to get another dog.”

Stell says NMDog will not place any dog that has killed an animal or severely injured a human. But she would not consider a dog dangerous for biting an unsupervised child, or killing a cat.

“A lot of that has to do with dogs being dogs. A lot of what creates ‘dangerous dogs’ is the irresponsible actions of their guardians. Any dog that is let loose and encounters another dog in the street, many of them have the potential to get in a fight.”

And if the attack involves a pit bull, “it ends up in court and on the news,” said Distasio, who once had a dog euthanized for just that reason. She and her husband adopted Otis, a bully breed, from the city shelter in 2012. Adorable and quiet, he passed all shelter assessments with flying colors, but proved so protective when he got home that he attacked strangers.

“Our decision to euthanize was not only about how we live our life, but also for the breed as a whole. We couldn’t risk him doing anything.”

Data-driven complaint

A “dangerous dog,” under an Albuquerque ordinance known as Angel’s Law, is one that has caused serious injury (broken bones or lacerations requiring sutures or cosmetic surgery) or a dog that had been flagged as potentially dangerous that goes on to cause injury. Under state law, a judge can label a dog “dangerous” for similar reasons.

Such officially dangerous dogs are supposed to be tracked by AWD, and it was an apparent lapse in this requirement, according to his complaint, that first led Animal Program Analyst Jim Ludwick to fear that dogs were slipping through the cracks in a zeal to reduce the shelter’s euthanasia rate—although there is no logical connection between the two. Dogs labeled dangerous have nothing to do with dogs that “fail” the SAFER test. News reports also failed to distinguish the term “dangerous dogs” from Ludwick’s opinion of the threat they posed.

In his March 27 letter to the OIG, Ludwick says he counted 215 dogs that “failed” the SAFER test in 2014, of which 100 were adopted out, and another 32 turned over to rescue groups. To put those figures in context, the Albuquerque shelters took in 10,156 dogs in 2014, and adopted or gave to rescue groups 5,831, so the adopted “fails” represent two one-hundredths of all adoptions. The 16 cases that Ludwick describes of dogs attacking others and being adopted out represent 0.0027 percent of adoptions.

Ludwick concludes from this that “It is not a success, and it is not responsible, if we show sympathy for the dogs we see in person at our animal shelters, but have no concern for … the pets and children … who might pay the price if we unleash the dogs we should euthanize for public safety reasons.”

His eloquent plea belies the important fact that Jim Ludwick has almost no contact with animals at the shelter. What he knows of their histories comes from their files—though he must know that the city euthanized 830 dogs last year for aggression. As Animal Program Analyst for the last eight years, Ludwick is charged with developing department policy and monitoring performance, including budget. Animals are nowhere mentioned in his job description.

“Some mistakes will always happen in a city shelter,” says Glauser, echoing the reaction of many rescuers to the Journal account. “Dogs naturally slip through the cracks,” Distasio said of her experience with Otis, adding that the city cannot be faulted for doing its best within budget constraints, amid public demands to reduce euthanasia. “What are they going to do if they can’t euthanize for space? They have to adopt, adopt, adopt.”

Office fight

Jim Ludwick is not the only critic of AWD to pounce on “no-kill” as motivating what he perceives as unnecessarily dangerous risks. As recently as a couple of decades ago, the Albuquerque shelters routinely euthanized half to three-quarters of animals they took in, a figure that persists in many New Mexico communities.

What has made it possible for an open-admission municipal shelter like AWD to reduce its euthanasia rate to 14 percent last year is the emergence of tools and techniques that help increase the “live release” rate, primarily through adoptions. National organizations such as the ASPCA have been instrumental in disseminating these programs, providing shelters with grants, research, and tools like the SAFER test. Last year AWD was among the organizations targeted to receive multi-year funding and assistance from the ASPCA to help improve New Mexico’s live-release rate.

Among the progressive programs implemented at AWD since Bruin took office are “playgroups,” developed by nationally known dog behaviorist Aimee Sadler. Dogs are put together in pens to interact, allowing enrichment, training, and further assessment by trained volunteers in a setting more natural than a checklist temperament test.

Playgroups are entirely volunteer-run at AWD, as are most other enrichment activities, such as daily dog walking, socialization of kittens, one-on-one training, and taking animals to adoption events. Shelter staff do not have the time to devote to these activities, which are hard to justify using taxpayer dollars. Bruin has been known for making good use of volunteers and embracing these strategies. Officially, AWD counts 430 volunteers, though only about 40 of them work regularly with dogs.

“Barbara is really good at giving dogs a chance,” said Carol Latham, a volunteer who has run playgroups for about three years. “She’s given everyone the opportunity to save animals that are savable.” Volunteers are able to place “holds” on particular animals, removing them from the euthanasia list to allow additional time for training or placement with a rescue group.

These “holds,” and the prominent role given to volunteers at AWD, are among the problems listed in Ludwick and Carolyn Hidalgo’s complaint. Hidalgo, who resigned as AWD behavior specialist, told the Journal that Bruin “irrationally sides with volunteers, against career professionals, on issues where volunteers are relatively unconcerned about public safety.”

The shelter volunteers dispute this claim. “Barbara counts on us because we do know the dogs,” said Carol Latham, adding that volunteers are loathe to see any dogs released into the public that could fuel preconceptions about “dangerous pit bulls.”

The volunteers note that Hidalgo opposed playgroups from the start, refused to observe or participate in them, and tried to eliminate the program, saying volunteers were not qualified to run it.

Gerry Glauser is more blunt. “She latched on to SAFER and flunked a lot of dogs,” he said. “She was argumentative and abusive to anyone who disagreed with her.”

After just 15 months at AWD, Hidalgo left a legacy that sets back years of efforts to change public perceptions, Cassell and Latham said. “Now we’re just doing damage control,” said Latham.

Bruin, for her part, said she is cooperating with the Inspector General’s investigation and that new protocol and procedures are being put in place “that have been in the works for a while.” She said the shelters would be applying more criteria to improve the SAFER test, but these are also part of ongoing plans.

Some observers have noted with alarm on Facebook that euthanasia rates have shot up at the city shelters, but Bruin says this is unrelated to the OIG’s investigation. “We’re entering into our busy season, where we get 500 animals a week, so we need to make tougher decisions sooner, so we don’t get overcrowded again this summer.”

Blaming dogs

As passionate as many animal-lovers are about achieving no-kill status at animal shelters, it is a distant dream in a state like New Mexico, with its serious overpopulation of unsterilized dogs. Municipal shelters are designed to accept any animal surrendered to them, and fully 70 percent of canine intakes are picked up as strays, basically let loose by their owners and abandoned.

Under these circumstances, critics who present the problem as a difficult tradeoff between public safety and no-kill are missing the point. Many states, including neighboring Colorado, have such a shortage of abandoned dogs that they actually import them from places like New Mexico, which is overrun and yet unwilling to follow other states’ lead and mandate sterilization.

“These (problem) dogs are sure to slip through the cracks when you’re a municipal shelter in a city where indiscriminate backyard breeding is done,” says Distasio. Declaring certain dogs inherently dangerous serves to excuse pet owners who cause or fail to address behavior problems, and abandon dogs instead. It declares that pet owners—not dogs—are the victims. And this is the real damage done by news reports that fixate on scandal absent any social context, or their role in shaping it: While it may be shocking or disheartening to Albuquerque residents to hear about problems at their city shelter, the underlying message—that we are blameless and don’t need to change—is hardly difficult for the public to hear.