Web Posted: 11/14/2004 12:00 AM CST

Lisa Sandberg
Express-News Staff Writer

©2004 San Antonio Express-News

Pawing at the rusty crate it shared with three mutts, the big husky howled.

It must know, Rasiel Galvan mused.

Galvan is a supervisor at the San Antonio Animal Care and Control shelter, commonly known as the pound. On this humid morning, when the gas chamber was ready for another load, the husky would join a grim processional that this year will send nearly 50,000 cats and dogs to their deaths — more per capita than any other major American city.

Masked by euphemism and hidden from the public, the ritual of animal euthanasia proceeds unabated every day but Sunday.

In some ways, what happens in San Antonio is no different from what happens nationwide; dealing with strays and unwanted pets is a pound's sad mission.

But nowhere does death cast a longer shadow than at San Antonio's pound. Simply entering virtually assures an animal's doom.

Despite what some visitors are told when leaving unwanted pets, animals stand almost no chance of being adopted, thanks to old-school policies, bureaucratic inertia and a shoestring budget. So even as the national euthanasia rate plummets and many other cities save most of the animals they take in, San Antonio's kill rate has doubled in the past 18 years.

Almost nine of every 10 cats and dogs that enter the pound are put to death, many within an hour of arriving.

The San Antonio Express-News recently spent more than 50 hours at the city pound. The newspaper found a facility that's woefully behind the times, one overseen by officials with no plan for promoting adoptions or reducing the number of unwanted animals coming through its doors and few designs for bringing in volunteers or partnering with animal-rescue groups.

The pound has failed to adopt more humane practices of handling animals in the three years since a national consulting agency criticized the agency.

Now, as the city designs a new $12 million shelter scheduled to open in 2007 on an 8-acre Southwest Side site, the pound stands at a crossroads.

Will it follow the lead of more progressive cities and try to save more pets? Or will San Antonio continue to underfund the pound and close its eyes to the assembly line of death behind its doors?

Mayor Ed Garza said enacting sweeping reforms at the pound might be difficult given the "big issues with our budget." Things "don't change overnight," the mayor said.

But he added, "It's certainly troublesome, and as an animal lover it certainly doesn't make me feel good, but the option is to raise property taxes."

Former Mayor Howard Peak called many of Animal Control's practices shameful and added that it would be inexcusable for the city not to institute far-reaching reforms.

"The city needs to take advantage of the fact that we're going to be, in essence, starting from scratch," Peak said. "San Antonio ought to aspire to be part of that top echelon. How people act toward animals is very much how they act toward people."

The death chamber

The building where animals go to die is a square, windowless structure the size of a two-car garage. Located on 2 acres across from the Brackenridge Park Zoo, it sits amid low-slung cinderblock and cement buildings in a complex that includes four kennels, a clinic and an administrative building.

Founded in the 1940s as a division within the city health department, the pound is supposed to control rabies, investigate dog bites, enforce leash laws, run the city's largest lost-and-found for animals and send out dogcatchers to clear the streets of strays.

Unlike private shelters, the pound must take in every animal left at its door, providing a valuable public service on a tight budget.

Last year, officials added the word "care" to the pound's name to show the public there's a softer side to the business of tending unloved beasts. But spin can't alter the harsh realities of the pound or its nondescript house of doom.

The pound has three gas chambers. It takes five minutes to kill a dog in one. That's time enough to run a mile. Or listen to the long version of a rock song.

In a properly functioning chamber, animals don't suffocate or choke. There is no difference in air pressure and no foul odor as a chamber is saturated with 6 percent lethal gas. Hypoxia sets in quickly as oxygen in red blood cells is replaced by carbon monoxide. It's the lack of oxygen that renders animals unconscious in 40 to 60 seconds, and dead in five minutes.

William Lammers, the pound's veterinary services manager, has been an ardent backer of the chambers during his 18 years at the pound.

Lammers calls gassing the most humane method of euthanasia. Lethal injections easily can be botched, he said, because it's often difficult to locate the veins of scared or aggressive animals.

But few if any other major cities still use the gas chamber, which has fallen out of favor in the same way electric chairs have for human executions.

New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Miami switched to injections years ago. Chicago transitioned more recently. St. Louis is doing it now.

Franklin County, Ohio, where the city of Columbus is, switched when its county administrator showed up one day and ordered the pound's director to unplug the chamber.

Douglas Fakkema, a leading expert on animal euthanasia who until recently worked for the American Humane Society, abhors the gas chamber and devotes part of his time training animal-control employees around the country to switch to lethal injections.

Fakkema disagrees with Lammers' belief that employees are emotionally less impacted stuffing animals into a chamber, flicking a switch and fleeing a room.

"It's in fact worse," he said. "If somebody cares about animals, having to run from the box so you don't have to hear the howling and scratching at the door, there's no question that's hard on the worker."

David Lee Nichols can attest to that.

The animals Nichols puts to death as a senior kennel supervisor at the pound haunt him after hours, the memory of their faces visiting him when he's fishing at Calaveras Lake or settling into bed for the night.

Nichols, one of several workers whose duties include operating the gas chambers, is the reluctant executioner. He wheels and runs after loading the gas chamber and throwing the switch so he won't have to hear the cries of dying cats and dogs.

"Believe you me, you cannot harden yourself to this," Nichols said, tears flowing as he talked about identifying dogs he must select to euthanize.

Lammers has no plans to end the practice of gassing animals. He intends to either transfer the three chambers to the new facility when it opens in 2007, or buy new ones, at a cost of about $20,000 each.

Catch and kill

The pound's adherence to old-style procedures has done little for its image.

While many other pounds embrace volunteers to foster young animals — whose immune systems cannot withstand the diseases that run rampant in a shelter — San Antonio gasses all puppies and kittens younger than 4 months so no sick or diseased animal will be adopted.

The Humane Society of the United States has not taken a position on the use of carbon monoxide gas, though it has called the practice of gassing puppies and kittens unacceptable.

While many other pounds aggressively promote adoption, the vast majority of animals here go to their deaths without ever being viewed by prospective owners. Adoption kennels often sit empty for days — with few pets offered for adoption.

Only about 4 percent of the 53,000 animals that were impounded in San Antonio last year were adopted. Meanwhile, Miami placed animals in new homes at a rate five times that of San Antonio; Dallas at twice the rate.

Caught in a catch-and-kill cycle, city leaders have been slow to accept innovative approaches that have sent euthanasia rates nationwide plummeting 80 percent in the past two decades, according to figures from the Washington-based Humane Society of the United States.

Cities such as San Francisco and Austin promote free spaying and neutering and embrace volunteers and rescue groups. Many cities showcase adoptable animals in parks and malls.

In New York City, adoptions are up 101 percent in the past 12 months, said Ed Boks, a leader of the "no-kill" movement and director of that city's Animal Care and Control. Last year, New York killed 27,000 fewer animals than did San Antonio, according to Boks' figures.

Compared to cities such as San Diego, whose progressive animal control policies and state-of-the-art pound are held out as models; and Denver, which saves 76 percent of its animals, San Antonio's kill numbers are embarrassing, city leaders acknowledge.

San Antonio has taken some positive steps.

In 1997, the pound entered into a partnership with three private organizations to create the Animal Resource Center, a South Side spay and neuter clinic.

More than 25,000 surgeries have been performed at the clinic since its founding, most on animals that come from poor households.

The agency now permits the city's two private shelters to remove pound animals free of charge. The Humane Society of Bexar County takes out as many as 30 animals a week.

But the measures haven't changed the pound's basic mission, nor have they reduced the number of animals picked up each year and killed.

Lammers said there's no systematic plan to bring down the numbers, and noted the new facility will have plenty of room around it to expand.

Two architectural firms are drawing up designs for the new shelter, which they vow will be an inviting place for families looking for a new pet or searching for a lost one.

It will be bright and airy, with fenced-in areas for people to interact with prospective pets and isolation units to house sick animals. There will be enough space so cats aren't crammed four and five to a cage.

And the city hopes the new facility will be able to hold animals a few days longer so more lives are spared, Lammers said.

But will a new building be enough to reverse the culture of killing?

While San Diego spent an average of $431 per animal at the shelter last year, San Antonio spent $60. Compounding the situation is the fact that San Antonio has reduced staffing at the pound by 8.5 percent in the past five years.

"We've never had enough," Lammers said. "We know that, and I'm sure the mayor and the City Council know that. But when you have drive-by shootings and problems of that sort, where are you going to put your resources?"

The lack of resources is apparent in the pound's lobby. There are no adoption counselors or volunteers; there's no money to pay for someone to coordinate them.

A visitor's first contact with the agency is one of two clerks behind glass.

But neither of them told Tabatha Ross, a West Side mother of two, that the two kittens she was dropping off with confidence they would be adopted would be dead before the afternoon was over.

Lies to owners

Whether by neglect or design, deception is built into the process.

Workers making $9 an hour bear the brunt of public contempt — Animal killer! anonymous callers scream into the phone at them — and often they avoid telling people the grim truth: Owner-surrendered animals don't have to be held for two days as do strays, so typically they go from the truck directly into a cage and then into a gas chamber.

Consider Roland Gonzales.

Each morning at 7, Gonzales, 32, climbs in a flatbed truck carrying 18 metal cages from the 1940s and drives to his South Side district, a 20-square-mile area from downtown south to Loop 410 and from Interstate 37 to Pleasanton Road.

This is among the poorest of the 13 animal-control districts in San Antonio. Because there's a correlation between poverty and the concentration of stray and vicious dogs, it's also among the busiest.

Gonzales, a laid-back, 10-year agency veteran who goes about his job stoically, sometimes drives 85 miles in a single morning, hunting for strays and issuing warnings or citations to people who let their animals roam.

He also collects unwanted pets.

At Gloria Hernandez's modest Ashley Road home, Gonzales listened patiently. Hernandez, a retired restaurant manager, was having a hard time, she told him. Her rheumatoid arthritis made caring for three dogs a pain.

The dogs would fare better if put up for adoption, she said.

Gonzales handed her a form stating that only a small percentage of the animals entering the pound are placed in new homes.

Hernandez signed it.

What were the chances her dogs would be adopted? she asked.

Fifty-fifty, Gonzales told her.

"Do people actually go down there to adopt?" Hernandez asked.

"Yes," Gonzales said. "And if they're put up for adoption, they'll stay in the adoption kennel until they're adopted."

Back in the truck, Gonzales explained himself: He tells people their pets stand a good chance of being adopted because he doesn't want to be negative, he said.

What does Lammers think of that?

"We don't have a lot of college graduates going out there who have been to Dale Carnegie who can communicate," he said.

Hernandez wept when told later that her dogs were sent to the chamber.

"I wouldn't have let them go if I knew they would go down so quickly," she said.

Few spared

Which animals will live and which will die?

It's a question left to veterinarian Roque Gonzales and two of his technicians.

The men walk the kennels, clipboards in hand, eyeballing animals through the cages and deciding their fates in a split second.

With only 24 cages in the adoption room, the odds aren't good for the more than 300 cats and dogs Gonzales and his men appraise at any one time.

They look for the adorable and the eager, the tail-waggers that "jump up and say, 'Take Me! Take Me! Take Me!'" Gonzales said.

Labrador mixes are a dime a dozen. So are black dogs. The so-called "aggressive dog breeds," the pit bulls, Shar-Peis and Rottweilers? They go down, all of them.

Sixty percent of all animals killed at the pound display no health problems or signs of problematic behavior, Gonzales said.

They die because they are too young or too old, too mangy or too beaten down. They die because they are the wrong color, size or breed. They die simply because they are unremarkable.

Out of some 200 dogs he appraised one day recently, Gonzales spared three. The rest received a death sentence: a handwritten "NFA" — Not For Adoption — on the back of a half-page sheet of paper.

Pitiless process

The grim processional to the chamber starts each morning at 7:30 with a procedure called "the pull" — a rounding up of the animals whose luck has run out.

Moving quickly from cage to cage, kennel to kennel, the workers inspect each animal's paperwork.

Doomed dogs are walked or dragged from their cages and loaded into cages in the center of each kennel.

Cats are loaded into crates, often with nooses slipped around their necks, and carried to the dogs' kennels, where they are crammed into cages with other cats.

Pandemonium reigns during the 90 minutes it takes to sort the animals.

Dogs bark incessantly. Terrified cats huddle in piles or cling to the ceiling of the metal grating.

Young dogs go down with old ones. Fancy pedigrees go down with mongrels. Whatever advantages a dog or cat may have enjoyed before entering the pound vanish inside the tractor cage.

That's how it happens most mornings, and that's how it happened on the muggy morning that the husky took its final breath.

After the carcasses of nine cats tumbled into a truck, each one's nine lives spent, the gas chamber opened for another load.

A kennel worker, grasping the sides of the husky's crate, wheeled it across the room and pushed it into the yawning gas chamber.

Then the worker, a big man in tall rubber boots, slammed the clear acrylic door of the gas chamber and flicked a switch on top.

There was silence, then a hissing noise. Carbon monoxide gas filled the chamber.

At first the reddish-brown husky scratched at the door and raised its head, swinging it from side to side.

Then its howls became muffled cries.

After 20 or 30 seconds, the mutt next to the husky fell. Then the husky collapsed, unconscious but not yet dead.

There was time for the kennel attendant to pull from another chamber the carcasses of four dogs then dump them through a chute into the parked truck below.

By 10:07 a.m., 31 cats and 66 dogs — including the husky and his mixed-breed companions in the rusty crate in which they were delivered to their doom — had died this way.

Three hours after the first gassing, the cacophony of panicked barking dogs and screeching cats drew to a close.

Men hosed down cages in the shade, awaiting the trucks that would soon return with their morning loads.

The new arrivals would be counted, sorted, tagged — and led away.

lsandberg@express-news.net