Pasadena Humane Claims 94.38% Placement For Cats Even Though it killed 59%

Pasadena Humane is a typical "lying" shelter.

PH claims a “Placement rate for cats” of 94.38% on page 5 of their 2008 report. http://www.pasadenahumane.org/site/DocServer/PHS_Annual_2008.pdf?docID=361

This is an astounding claim since they took in 3,741 cats and killed 2,194 of them! Only 1,547 cats left the shelter alive! They killed 58.6% of all cats that came in yet astoundingly claim a placement rate for cats of over 94%.

Their kill figures are a little worse than LA City but not quite as bad as County where about 80% are killed.

So how do they get their 94.38% placement rate figure? They claim that of the 3,741 cats impounded, only 1,639 were “placeable," and of these 1,639, only 92 were killed for lack of space.

“In 2008, PHS cared for 1,639 placeable cats. Of these, 1,326 cats were adopted, 205 went to rescue organizations, and 16 were transferred to other shelters. 92 cats were euthanized for space reasons, 7 more than in 2007. Our placement rate for cats is 94.38%, down 0.22 % from 2007.”

They get their “fantastic” placement rate by defining the population of cats they adopted, transferred or had rescued as the placeable ones. It is purely a name game with them. Marcia Mayeda used to do the same, claiming an almost 89% adoption rate even though County killed 82% of the cats impounded.

They just defined the group of placeable or adoptable cats as being slightly greater than the total number of cats they actually adopted. Actually, if you are a really good liar, you can generate numbers where you saved or placed more animals than were placeable. You could even create a 110% placement figure while still killing more than half the cats brought in.

Compare Pasadena’s stats with Reno for example, where the live save rate for cats is over 80%, not 41% as in Pasadena.

The case with dogs is only a tiny bit better. Of 4,288 impounded dogs, 1974 made it out alive in 2008 according to their report. That is a live save rate of 46%. Yet, they claimed a 97.6% placement rate for dogs, because they only considered 2,024 of the nearly 4,300 dogs placeable.

This is far, far worse than Los Angeles Animal Services with a live save rate of 74% compared to Pasadena's 46%. I think even LA County has a better than 46% live save rate. Reno has a live save rate for dogs of over 90% and they handle more than twice as many cats and dogs as Pasadena.

There is one very unusual statistic. Pasadena claims 3,741 "live animal" impounds for cats out of a total cat impound figure of 4,760. They list 1,019 deceased cats also impounded. This is extrememly high compared to Los Angeles. Los angeles, for the same period had only 556 DOA cats, and yet LA impounded almost five times as many cats. That is, dead cats impounded was only 2% of LA's impounds, but was 21% of Pasadena's. It could be that Pasadena counts every dead cat impounded while LA doesn't, which is troubling if true, because in LA, once again we are missing an important piece of information regarding animals in the city.

Given the photos of the thrown away items, the lack of official response to the claims of not having over 300 evacuated animals, along with this blatant slanting of statistics beyond recognition, and you have an organization I certainly would not trust regarding anything.