Butte Council of Commissioners Lose the Cat Vote

By Justin Ringsak, New West Unfiltered 1-11-08

A few years ago, while living in Chicago, I volunteered once a week at a no-kill animal shelter on the city's north side. The work, if you could call it that, was easy. I sat for an hour or two in a sunny room where shelter cats were free to roam and simply gave them some attention so that they would be "socialized" and therefore more likely to be adopted. The shelter was one of the most relaxing places in all of Chicago, a unique combination of relative quiet and escape from the city's cacophony and rare a chance to interact with the animal world. The names of some of the shelter's long-term resident cats, many of whom had lived at the facility for years, still stick in my head: Wilkie, a talkative old black-and-white cat who dragged a bum leg behind him; Jalapeno, an obese but charming fellow who often had a peculiar way of sticking his tongue out. That room full of cats was one of my favorite city haunts, and so I was excited to hear that Butte's own Chelsea Bailey Animal Shelter was slated to get a new free-roaming cat room.

"I can't duct-tape them to the ceiling." So said Erin Wall, director of the Chelsea Bailey, prior to a Butte-Silver Bow Council of Commissioners meeting earlier this week where her request to use $10,000 in private donations to build the new room at the shelter facility was addressed. Wall was referring to the number of animals at the shelter, which cannot turn away strays brought in by animal control officers. The shelter currently cares for about 90 cats, a slight drop from about 100 in recent months.

The Council rejected the proposal for the new cat room and questioned shelter operations in general, particularly the $2,000 the shelter spends annually to contract out crematory services with a facility in Manhattan, Montana, a pretty darn insignificant number in terms of Butte-Silver Bow budgetary boondoggles. The Council meeting was a sad return to the shelter's contentious status in past years. In early 2005, after becoming entangled in legal battles with former members over operating practices and the use of shelter funds, the local humane society chapter stopped managing the Chelsea Bailey and the shelter closed. Strays were sent to shelters in Anaconda or Dillon. Butte was left shelterless until 2006, when the Chelsea Bailey reopened, now under the auspices of county government control and with an enthusiastic and progressive new director, Erin Wall, at the reins.

Things seemed to be looking up for the Butte animal community. Wall planned to revamp the shelter, which had been known around the state for a relatively high amount of euthanizations, into a positive community asset, a place for people to come and interact with animals, even if they didn't adopt one. And, by most accounts, she has been succeeding. In 2007, the shelter euthanized a scant 25 animals, and only because they were sick or vicious, a substantial drop from the shelter's pre-Wall days. The shelter was making strides in spaying and neutering animals as well. Wall's work was praised in the local media, and things seemed to be on the right track.

Then came this week's Council meeting. Commissioners voted 8-4 to deny the request to build the new free-roaming cat-room at the shelter, but said they could reconsider the request after a new director is hired, presumably sometime next month. The micromanaging denial goes in the face of Wall's excellent record as shelter director, particularly considering that the $10,000 cost would be paid entirely from a shelter donation fund. In other words, no city-county money was ever involved in the request.

The Commissioners' rationalizations for voting against this addition to the shelter reach back to the bad old days of the Chelsea Bailey. Commissioners questioned the number of animals being housed at the shelter and why an existing ordinance stipulating that animals be euthanized after 30 days isn't being followed. The shelter has not been following the 30 day ordinance since reopening in 2006, so it is curious that the ordinance is only becoming an issue now, after two years of established practice Wall has justified by noting that most animals find a home after three to five months- a 30 day death sentence just doesn't leave much time for the clemency of adoption.

County Attorney Bob McCarthy confirmed that the shelter is in violation of the ordinance because it is not killing enough animals. And here I foolishly thought that it was the job of an animal shelter to save animals. But this is America, the land where boneheaded, outdated laws regularly trump any semblance of moral choice, because we all know that bureaucracy is more important than reality. And so the Commission voted against Wall's request, despite her clarification that the improvement was an effort to make room for patrons to visit with cats, not to expand the number of animals housed at the shelter.

Wall succinctly reacted to the Commissioners' behavior in an interview with The Montana Standard after the Council meeting: "I think they are very uneducated in the way shelters should be run in the 21st century. Their thinking is just very illogical. They made a very uneducated decision."

When the new director is hired, before the Council reconsiders this issue, they may want to educate themselves by paying a visit to the Chelsea Bailey, where they can ask themselves what is more important: an obsolete, illogical city ordinance, or another living creature. And if, after such a visit, they still want the strays of Butte killed within 30 days, then I have a proposal that will save the county $2,000: let the Commissioners do the killing themselves. [End of article]