The Denver Municipal Animal Shelter has been improperly feeding animals, needs better protocols for cleaning kennels and should retrain workers, a preliminary evaluation released today found.
Details of the evaluation by the Humane Society of the United States were made public during a meeting with members of the Denver City Council.
Nancy Severson, the city’s manager of environmental health, and Sherry Purdy, deputy manager of that agency, said changes already are underway and that the city is not waiting for the opening of a new animal shelter in 2011. City voters authorized the construction of the shelter when they approved a bond improvement package last year.
The agency has established a new animal care and control advisory committee to guide improvements, they said.
The evaluation is costing the city $20,000, $10,000 of which was paid by donations.
Purdy said the agency asked Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s administration to add two additional animal-care attendants in 2009. Instead, the administration asked the agency to reassess the need for staffing, fix redundancies and reallocate staff accordingly.
The shelter will make do by finding efficiencies elsewhere and may explore contracting out euthanasia work, she said. The city also filled a vacant supervisor position.
The city currently has been redeploying animal-control officers — whose main charge was to work out in the city streets finding stray dogs — to do some of the shelter work, Purdy said.
The final evaluation won’t be ready for release until later this year. The preliminary review found the current shelter benefited from a good heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system and a committed volunteer group. Yet the report still found problems. It said staff overfed animals and had other feeding issues. For instance, kittens were fed adult cat food, which they are incapable of digesting, Purdy said.
The staff also hasn’t been using a software system designed to track animals when they come to the shelter, Purdy said.
Councilman Doug Linkhart said he was glad to see the agency was addressing problems.
“A lot of these changes are very overdue,” he said.
Councilman Charlie Brown said many of the recommended changes won’t be costly and should be easy to put in place.
Christopher N. Osher: 303-954-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com
