Job Demands Reaching Out to Pets, People

The question Dan Knapp’s friends keep asking about his new job as chief of L.A.’s Animal Services Department is, why does he want it?

After all, this isn’t just a city department. It’s a cross between animal law and animal welfare.

In the strange world of city animal services, bureaucrats have learned to take death threats and lawsuits in stride. Animal rights advocates see each line in the budget as a matter of life and death.

Incompetence is viewed as murderous, and reformers seek not mere change but a new human consciousness reflected in city policies from New York to San Francisco.

“Think of the city’s animal shelters as Planned Parenthood,” said Gini Barrett, one of five commissioners overseeing the department. “Think of the animal rights groups as Operation Rescue.”

Into this caldron steps Knapp, executive director of the Sonoma County Humane Society and an ordained Assembly of God minister, the first general manager to be appointed from outside the department in at least a quarter century.

Gentle and amiable, a minister who declines to be addressed as reverend and uses phrases like “goodness gracious,” Knapp is seen as the salve and the savior for whom the department has yearned.

Named to the spot by Mayor Richard Riordan, Knapp starts later this month. He’s a reformer eager to bring progressive and expensive changes to a department that struggles to perform basic functions.

Chief among these is “100% adoption of adoptable animals,” a goal that could require reducing the number of animals killed in L.A.’s shelters by about 24,000 per year. “I’ve been called crazy. . . . But everyone who has had a dream is seen as crazy,” Knapp said. “Look at Noah and the ark.”

Knapp, 42, takes control of one of the largest animal services departments in the country at a time when an animal control model handed down from the 19th century is being shaken to its roots by an increasingly influential animal welfare lobby.

Historically, animal laws were rooted in public health policies aimed at preventing people from dying from rabies. The policies were carried out with an efficiency and determination that tended to eclipse animal welfare concerns. That model established one stereotype that still rankles animal workers today: “the Li’l Rascals dogcatcher,” as one advocate put it.

Today, professionals are realizing they “should not just be about picking up and killing stray dogs,” said Barrett.

Central to the new ethic are new “no kill” and “low kill” policies, holding that it is not ethical to euthanize thousands of animals yearly simply to make way for the next batch.

From a more practical standpoint, private humane societies, which in many areas provide municipal animal control, increasingly object to draining money from other programs to fund the killing of animals.

So in recent years, mainstream humane societies have risen in revolt against euthanizing healthy animals, saying “we won’t do your killing anymore,” said Joyce Briggs, spokeswoman for the American Humane Assn.

In New York, San Francisco and elsewhere, humane societies have ended public contracts and forced cities to create separate shelter systems. San Francisco’s humane society has been known to spend thousands of dollars on training and medical treatment for individual animals to make them suitable pets.

“What you have here is a humane community growing and ever-increasing in enlightenment,” said San Francisco SPCA President Richard Avanzino.

The changes in New York and San Francisco have galvanized animal advocates to press for stronger measures against animal overpopulation. Mere public education won’t do anymore, in many advocates’ view.

Known for his business acumen and public relations skills, Knapp has been at the forefront of reform, first as executive director of the Humane Society of Humboldt County, and then in Sonoma County, considered “one of the better systems in the country,” said Ed Sayres, director of the Phoenix-based Pet Smart Charities.

A former seminarian at Simpson College, Knapp studied organizational development at the University of San Francisco. As a clergyman, he served as pastor of Assembly of God churches in San Jose, Santa Monica and Huntington Park.

In churches, his expertise was as a turnaround specialist, he said. He was called in to straighten out financial and other problems, and made a jump from religion to the corporate world when he was called in to straighten out financial problems in a Silicon Valley high-tech firm.

From there he went to the financially troubled Humboldt County Humane Society, and to Sonoma County. Knapp and his wife, Suzanne, have a teenage son and daughter and a dog named Pugsly.

The combination of management specialist and minister has served him well, said Nanci Burton, president of the Sonoma County Humane Society. Burton said Knapp excelled at such diverse tasks as raising money and comforting pet owners who came to shelters to have ailing dogs euthanized.

When Knapp talks about animals, it is the only time when he sounds faintly like a minister.

“A great disease, if not the greatest, is loneliness,” he said. “Animals heal that.”

In Sonoma County, he is credited with helping to push through ambitious new regulations to promote responsible pet ownership, including restricting dog leashes to six feet, requiring all outside cats to be spayed or neutered, and a so-called “two strikes” rule, which mandates that dogs be sterilized if they are impounded more than once--whether the owner consents or not.

He also helped develop guidelines for an unusual “cat colony” management strategy in the region, using both public and private funds to trap and sterilize feral cats--then return them to the wild.

Marc Richardson, assistant city manager in Santa Rosa, where Knapp also served as animal services director, said Knapp’s knack was to get different interest groups to agree and support the plans. His “biggest strength is his communication skills,” said Richardson.

Nowhere are such skills needed more than in Los Angeles, where welfare groups, the SPCA, and the city Animal Services Department are locked in a standoff acknowledged as harmful by all sides, but seemingly intractable.

“It’s almost like this silent Cold War,” said Joyce Pieper, an advocate for the group Fund for Animals. “What’s missing is this spirit of we are in this together.”

Lacking funds and popularity, the Animal Services Department, recently renamed from Animal Regulation, has made stabs at instituting more progressive animal welfare policies.

The Animal Services Commission has been working on a “vision” plan to reduce pet populations, and on Monday will consider competing proposals to revamp spay and neuter policies.

But at the same time, the department has come under fire for failing to fulfill more traditional functions.

Despite mounting pressure, the department killed 57,868 animals last year, more than 70% of the total that entered its shelters, and 58% of those deemed “adoptable.”

Los Angeles shelters are 50% over capacity, and lack of kennel space is the main factor in animal deaths. Budget cuts have diminished the ranks of officers on the street. The department today has 180 employees, a $7-million budget, and until recently had just one veterinarian to handle 81,000 animals per year.

The city, meanwhile, offers a particularly nettlesome combination of dense population, poverty, cultural differences and politics. And a dedicated group of activists, increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress, have harried the department in recent years with letters, protests to the commission, lawsuits and threats of lawsuits. One insider said the acrimony has occasionally brimmed over into anonymous threats.

The general manager’s post is, in short, “the toughest job in the world,” said Madeleine Bernstein, president of LA-SPCA.

Knapp says his goals will be to meet with advocates and listen to their concerns, and to foster ties with private sector groups and donors, as city dollars alone cannot fund more humane treatment of animals, he said.

Despite the divisions over the department, Knapp’s appointment is being welcomed by everyone from animal rights activists to the employees union as the beginning of a new era.

Animal rights advocates, especially, have anointed him. “Oh my God. Bless him,” exclaimed activist Joyce Forest, when his name came up.

“They will expect him to work miracles,” warned Pieper. “And if this poor guy makes a mistake, they will crucify him.”