Hey, guess what? The County of Los Angeles awarded their own shelter system an award for 2013… Amazing. Go to any facility right now and you can see banners hanging from every shelter that say “Top Ten Winner” for “reducing canine euthanasia through partnerships.”

With the accepting of this award the department is actually out claiming that the national euthanasia, scratch that, kill-rate for dogs is about 60%, while the L.A. County DACC came in for 2013 at an “all-time low of 37%.” Um, I call the loudest bullshit humanly possible. Show folks the real numbers, and not the fabricated ones where you can cowardly deem thousands of dogs “unadoptable,” kill them, and then hide them from your paraded around digits.

And through partnerships? What partnerships? With actual human beings? This county fires volunteers that socialize and network their impounded dogs. This county has a massive backlog of new volunteer applications and still not even a word to them about any scheduled “training” so that they can get themselves started. The Carson shelter does like 1 training a year for example. This county also has an in-house breed-discriminatory policy that sentences over 90% of their Pit Bulls to death, most never getting a chance to leave their kennels until the day that they are killed. This county runs a racketeering program, extorting money from families after they’ve illegally seized their dogs and then held them indefinitely for money, or killed them without due process or hearings. This county has managers, like at Carson for example (Gil Moreno), that cancel rescue transports because he claims to “not have” any staff that are willing to come late to load trucks, and then refuses to let the willing volunteers help who would be there immediately if they were simply asked to be. This same guy allows a bigot, authoritarian, micromanaging Nazi to be his head volunteer (Joyce), and runs an onsite snitch operation meant to harass amazing volunteers into “compliance,” apathy, or exhaustive frustration. This county has workers who routinely check people’s Facebook pages, and mine leads that list, and then use screenshots to attempt to bully volunteers and rescuers in private based around something they may have said on the internet. This is done by threatening to yank their access to the animals, and most will roll over to any demand because that’s the ultimate power you can have over someone who is at some level dependent on the system and still actually there for the animals. This county is run by one of the worst shelter directors (Marcia Mayeda) in the nation, quite literally. I could go on forever about this apathetic and murderous operation. But they’ve won an award, just like Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize once.