"Torment and Kill: Karen Bass's Plan for Animal Pound Overcrowding" by Daniel Guss
ITYS - Intransigence over innovation is doomed to fail
@TheGuss Report on Twitter - Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appears to be in over her head with problems worsening as her responsibilities grow exponentially.
Inside Safe, her slogan-heavy homelessness plan is not only failing, but regressing according to their own stats. She is also the new chair of Metro Los Angeles, one of the nation’s worst transit systems. Much of the rest of the city of Los Angeles is failing, rotting and getting worse by the week, aided by corruption and other City Hall scandals at the top of its political food chain.
Deep into her first year as the city’s chief executive, Bass is stumbling badly.
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Among the problems is the perennially corrupt, rigged and deadly LA Animal Services, LAAS, where conditions are so bad, even the LA Times could no longer deny the cruel, if not illegal, conditions where its animals don’t get exercised or socialized for weeks or months on-end. (Soon, this column will exclusively show you what else the LA Times was told about LAAS, but didn’t report.)
And as I reported weeks ago, overcrowding at LAAS included keeping animals in crates rather than kennels, and given sedatives like Trazadone while stockpiled in backrooms which, too, might be illegal. What if their families are looking for them but they are drugged and hidden in a back room??? And retaliation for exposing these deadly problems is so commonplace, Bass has only issued lip-service about the importance of volunteers.
This is a powder keg when combined with other forms of mistreatment of the animals there, as evidenced by a slew of recent lawsuit settlements.
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Bass’s office is also slow-walking my public records request surrounding her hiring of Staycee Dains, her similarly overwhelmed new general manager of LAAS, whose bizarre responses to people volunteering to help is well-documented.
There’s a can-do attitude for ya!
But it’s so much worse than that.
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That brings us to Bass and Dains’ widely feared plan to do a mass killing of LAAS animals, particularly dogs. Not because they are irremediably ill or injured, but due to lack of space because Bass, Dains and LAAS are unwilling to admit that its problems are the result of the city’s refusal to control the pet population with innovation, mass spay/neuter, funding and enforcement.
While Dains has said publicly that using water hoses to move or intimidate animals is “unacceptable,” she has refused to address specifics or why it happens so often, where the dog goes from fear of being blasted with water to aggression, long a practice at LAAS, including with water hoses that, left in the sizzling summer sun, contain piping hot water.
The practice continues to this day.
The frightened animals are then listed as aggressive, placed on the pre-kill red list and then put to death as a result of “cause,” and not counted as a kill for lack of space; a sleazy and long-running City Hall practice.
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Upon multiple inquiries about this and related practices, there was nothing but silence from Bass, Dains, LA City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, whose committee oversees LAAS, and LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who often boasts of volunteering at LAAS.
Or to quote Hernandez’s media flack, “our office does not have a comment at this time.”
To be clear, Dains, as GM, can kill the animals at her whim. She doesn’t need lies on kennel cards to do so. Nor do they need LAAS Commission President Larry Gross (whose termination I predicted a few weeks back and still see in my crystal ball) to manipulate the LAAS board’s agenda to make unjustifiably killing the animals seem like a collectively agreed-upon thing.
But it is being done so that Bass and Dains, who appears increasingly fractious herself these days, can sleep better at night.
City Hall also refuses to address whether those lawsuit settlements for LAAS dog-biting incidents are costing us more money each year as a result of this mistreatment of animals, or regardless of it.
That said, if exposing this wretched, cruel and deadly ruse results in even a hint of retaliation or political pressure from Bass, Dains, Hernandez or Mejia, you’ll read a whole lot about it on this page.
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(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a multi-award-winning journalist. In June ‘23, he won the LA Press Club’s “Online Journalist of the Year” and “Best Activism Journalism” awards. He is City Editor for the Mayor Sam network, and has been a featured contributor for CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW 89.9 FM, KRLA 870 AM, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)