Saturday, October 20, 2007
News

Shelter fallout

Georgia Department of Agriculture in contempt over animal euthanasia

By Josh Clark

Georgia’s animal rights activists scored a victory recently against the illegal gassing of Georgia’s unwanted animals. On Oct. 10, Fulton Superior Court Judge Tom Campbell upheld a contempt of court motion filed by attorneys at Atlanta firm Schiff Hardin LLP against the Georgia Department of Agriculture and its commissioner, Tommy Irvin. Under the court’s instructions, the Department of Agriculture is ordered to—well, do its job.

In addition to the regulation and licensing of everything from gas stations to bakeries, the department is charged with ensuring that county animal shelters comply with the state laws that govern their practices. Chief among those practices is the euthanizing of unwanted animals, and it appears that not all animal shelters in the state are following the letter of the law.

In 1990, the Georgia legislature passed the state’s Humane Euthanasia Act, which outlaws the use of gas as a means for killing pets that find themselves behind bars in county animal shelters. One provision of the act: The gas chambers already in use by shelters in the state remained approved under a grandfather clause.

“But they couldn’t replace them,” Walter Bush, one of the attorneys who filed the contempt of court motion against the agriculture department, tells The Sunday Paper. It was the vision of the act that eventually the old gas chambers would fall into disrepair and the practice would eventually be phased out of Georgia’s shelters.

But vision doesn’t always translate into actuality, especially when the agency charged with enforcing the law isn’t following it. In 1995, the Cobb County animal shelter replaced its old gas chamber with a new one, and employees there have been operating it ever since. Agriculture Department inspectors gave the shelter passing grades despite its use of an illegal chamber—and their reports provided the basis for the legal action brought by Bush and other activists.

HUMANE FOR WHOM?

The gassing of animals has been proven as a humane method of euthanasia mainly for the humans who must administer it. Dogs and cats are locked in an airtight chamber, and then the euthanizer turns on the poisonous gas, usually carbon monoxide.

But for the animal, it’s not so easy. Reports of pets that suffered tremendously during the procedure abound in literature from the ASPCA and PETA. Some dogs and cats must be gassed more than once and die a slow death, sick from the gas that has been introduced into their system. Puppies, kittens and sick and pregnant dogs and cats routinely require more than one gassing before they die.

The Georgia legislature didn’t think it this was a good way to end animals’ lives, and lawmakers devised the Humane Euthanasia Act, which endorses sodium barbital—a strong sedative that is considered painless—as the means by which Georgia’s unwanted pets should be killed. While it’s decidedly easier on the animal, this method requires the shelter employees to euthanize the animals in a more hands-on manner.

Despite the act passed by Georgia’s legislature, Cobb County’s animal shelter continued gassing animals. But Bush says he wasn’t gunning for the county when he introduced the contempt filing. “We could have sued Cobb County,” Bush says, “but we’d rather the state enforce the law.”

While the Department of Agriculture cannot directly close down a county animal shelter, the state agency is invested with regulatory powers. Since its inspectors license animal shelters, they can revoke or deny renewal of the shelter’s license based on the use of illegal gas. Previously, agriculture inspectors had been found to be inspecting illegal gas chambers as part of their visits to county shelters. But Bush says the department’s tactic for dealing with shelters that use gas has changed and now amounts to turning a blind eye.

“The evidence [the Agriculture Department introduced] in the hearing was that they had stopped inspecting the chambers altogether,” he says.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Whether this latest ruling will force the department’s hand remains to be seen.

“We don’t know what the department’s going to do as a result of being held in contempt,” says Bush.

Essentially, the ruling doesn’t levy any sanctions against the department—there are no fines or penalties it will have to pay for being found in contempt. What’s more, the contempt ruling comes after the department ignored a previous ruling by a Fulton court for the agency to stop licensing shelters that use gas chambers. This ruling came out of a suit filed last March by Bush and others on behalf of former state representative Chelsey Morton (who introduced the Humane Euthanasia Act) and a private Douglas County resident.

Bush says he’s ready to keep up the fight. “I expect to continue to take the Department of Agriculture to court if they continue to fail to enforce the law,” he says. SP