Opinion

Lack of urgency on dog bites

Desiree Zertuche suffered severe lacerations and cuts to her hand and leg after a pitbull mix attacked on the street in November 2014. Is ACS doing enough to track dangerous dogs? Desiree Zertuche suffered severe lacerations and cuts to her hand and leg after a pitbull mix attacked on the street in November 2014. Is ACS doing enough to track dangerous dogs? Photo: / Photo: / Image 1 of / 35 Caption Close Lack of urgency on dog bites 1 / 35 Back to Gallery

At some point, responsible pet ownership morphed into a cop out for Animal Care Services.

The agency does important work, but responsible pet ownership has become a sort of generic rhetorical magical wand for ACS officials to wave in response to any and every animal welfare problem that hits the press, most recently dog bites.

“The solution is responsible pet ownership,” ACS director Heber Lefgren said of that issue.

Are dog bites a product of irresponsible pet ownership? Sure, probably in many or most instances. But it also doesn’t absolve ACS of any shortcomings, be it poor customer service or a failure to do its best job to keep the public safe.

EDITORIAL: Dog bites reflect irresponsible pet ownership among San Antonians

Case in point: a 2015 audit that found the agency was grossly unresponsive in its monitoring of dangerous dogs. Those dogs might very well have had irresponsible pet owners. But regardless, it was ACS’ job to keep track of them.

That wasn’t happening. That audit, based on fiscal 2014 numbers, found annual inspections were not current for 73 percent of aggressive or dangerous dog cases — and that officers at that time were not presenting unfounded cases to management for review.

The same audit found a lack of supervisory review for officer decisions, and that bite citations were not being issued consistently.

Lefgren described the audit as a turning point, leading to much more rigorous controls and standards at the agency. For example, ACS has conducted routine inspections in the 40 to 45 active dangerous dog cases, he said. And, of course, the agency has been aggressively citing owners for irresponsible pet ownership in recent years and has adopted a strong education campaign.

But the audit remains relevant because its findings undercut, in some ways, the rhetoric from ACS officials at the time. Then, as now, officials preached responsible pet ownership. But ACS officers ignored these aggressive and dangerous dog cases, which is pretty irresponsible.

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It’s not like dangerous dog bites were a new issue in 2014. That was the year Petra Aguirre was mauled by a neighbor’s pit bull as she was feeding cats in the back yard of her West Side home. Aguirre, who was 83, eventually died from her wounds.

The dog, which had previously bitten a boy, broke free from a neighbor’s yard.

Many of these bites, minor and major, occur when a dog escapes from a yard. To its credit, the agency does have a program — paid through fees — for minor fencing repairs. Unfortunately, its effectiveness is less than clear.

Lefgren couldn’t say how many fences were repaired last year, only that there were fewer than 100 repairs.

He spoke at length about needing to be judicious about selecting fences to be repaired. Animal Care Services officers have to build a case to justify any repair, and a judge has to sign off on it. He also again cited the need to create a culture of responsibility.

Rigor is important — nobody wants public dollars misspent. So is responsibility. But what good is a fencing program that doesn’t fix very many fences in a town where dogs roam and bite?

It would be refreshing if the conversation recognized obstacles to creating responsible pet ownership. It’s hard to imagine poverty is not part of that discussion.

I want to be very clear on this point: Being poor does not equate to being irresponsible. But being poor just might make it harder to be a responsible pet owner. Fence repairs, for example, can be expensive. Building a fence is even more expensive.

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Back in 2013, I mapped four years of dog bites by zip code. The 78207 zip code had the greatest number of bites. It also had a poverty rate of 36.8 percent.

Six of the 10 zip codes with the greatest number of dog bites had poverty rates above 20 percent. Three other zip codes had poverty rates close to 20 percent.

The point here is that responsible pet ownership is a lofty goal, but it’s also a blurry one. It doesn’t tell us anything about the invisible forces that reinforce irresponsible pet ownership, and it doesn’t apply any scrutiny or accountability to ACS. It’s an ideal that rests perpetually on the horizon, but just out of reach. And the dogs keep roaming and biting.