From the moment MCAS picked up Mozart for quarantine on November 29, 2013, the MCAS senior staff had no intention of releasing him back to his owner of 6 years or to any rescue that applied. MCAS views others’ investments and humanitarian concerns as obstacles to their will, not worthy of respect or consideration. Each rescue plan offered is to there to be gamed, subjected to long silences and failures to respond. Ironically, the final rescue question about whether or not Mozart could wear a collar, considered an obstacle to placement by one party, is now answered. Released public records show that Mozart was leashed and wearing a collar at the time of impound.
The MCAS plan was a carefully orchestrated killing. It is a familiar MCAS pattern of manipulating outcomes. MCAS does not solve problems. It forces preferred outcomes to achieve singular control. Singular control eliminates all obstacles.
The 10 day interim “owner” surrendered Mozart in the field, an animal control practice previous directors forbade to avoid hasty emotionally charged decisions. Field surrenders do not permit time for reflection; they create a crisis and give MCAS immediate control. That is the first step in gaining the power needed for disposal. When the short term owner asked if he should sign the request for euthanasia, as well as the impound release to MCAS, he noted unless the rescue group came for the dog, he did not want the dog back. So he signed the form. The officer carefully did not report that his surrender removed all rescue authority. It appears that he believed the surrender form left the rescue an option to take him back. But after he signed the surrender form and euthanasia consent, the rescue had no legal standing or say. MCAS had squeezed the rescue out of the picture. Plans they might come up with would be subject to their approval. It was the appearance of inclusion for this and all other rescue offers when none was intended.
The investment of the long term owner who had had Mozart for 6 years, since he was a puppy was never included, honored, or respected. MCAS studiously ignored him. The lawsuit filed on January 06, and served personally to MCAS director Michael Oswald on Tuesday, January 07, charged the agency and Mr. Oswald with unlawfully holding the property of another.
Long before then MCAS had started its cat and mouse game with interested rescues and the public. At the outset MCAS had begun the manipulative process of discouraging others, simply not responding to offers or pretending to reflect upon sound offers but never getting back to the parties involved. They also began to orchestrate a campaign to discourage rescues from taking Mozart, including the rescue that had brokered the failed adoption.
The agency’s “assessment” process is the second stage in outcome manipulation. It is intended to persuade others to agree with their objective: killing. Animal care staff made judgments about a “bite” for which no supporting photographic evidence or hospital report was provided, making any description based upon trust and faith. There is not one picture of the alleged bite according to MCAS management despite a MCAS policy that strictly requires pictures for objective documentation. There was no follow up despite the fact that the report of a bite was emphasized in the portfolio designed to justify a death sentence.
At MCAS, this “assessment” is made by someone designated as the agency’s official behaviorist. The term is used repeatedly, often, and generously. It deliberately and intentionally implies advanced degrees and the knowledge that truly qualify a person to make life and death judgments. However, the individual employed is an animal care technician, not a certified behaviorist. The singular qualification this individual has is a certificate qualifying her for private dog training. Her shelter observations are necessarily based upon the behaviors of animals that have been traumatized, impounded, control sticked, and left in solitary confinement, all factors creating poor prediction of temperament and prognosis. Others who came to see Mozart were not permitted to take him out of the kennel where he was confined. No observations were permitted outside the confinement of the kennel space. All observations were and are predicated upon an animal experiencing shelter stress. That policy sets up the desired bias.
In this case (and some others), MCAS sought “expert” support for its views in order to create the appearance of legitimacy. It sent the kennel care technician’s notes and summaries to a veterinary behaviorist for review, a practice that builds in an echo because the data is not first hand and already contaminated. The veterinary behaviorist never saw Mozart. His report and any concurrence or shared conclusions were based entirely upon what the animal care technician saw and reported. He conducted no first hand interviews depending entirely upon the summaries from the animal care technician who had already determined that Mozart should be killed.
Reviews based upon second hand information provided by an animal care technician whose agenda is already known, declining to see the animal in question, and “interpreting” a bite for which no objective evidence is available seriously calls the independence of such a report into question. I don’t care who wrote it. By relying upon second-hand reports and not taking the time to make his own observations, the author offered his reputation for sale for a small but deadly price. MCAS’s purchase of that opinion demonstrates its zealous pursuit of a death sentence for Mozart. Even more damning is the fact that the report was used by shelter manager John Rowton to discourage offers of rescue. When a professional party does not do his/her own data collection and an agency has a skewed mission to persuade, the report will suffer from validity and reliability challenges. This one did. It was cherry-picked and used to justify another needless killing.
The overwhelming confound affecting second hand reviews and reports is that any direct animal observations by another person, in this case the animal care technician, are absolutely affected by her goal, her own behavior cues and emotional state. How the animal care technician interacts and engages with any animal is affected by her own emotional cues and her behavior. Very often what one is judging in that case is what one is eliciting. Whose temperament is it that is being recorded?
Too often behavior and emotional cues from staff in shelters are founded in fear and suspicion of their subjects because of the agency’s extreme public safety emphasis. The response from the animal is automatically set up by the often unwitting or unacknowledged behavior of the evaluator. That is commonplace over and over again when one finds the puzzling phenomenon that the only “rehabilitation” an animal needs is leaving prison. Summaries provided by others, especially those who are untrained and unqualified cannot be accepted as accurate. Interviewing is a highly trained skill.
MCAS has historically operated for decades as a rogue agency without oversight, standards of performance, or outside supervision, not as a shelter but as a closed aggressive government agency committed to forcing its agenda on the public and homeless animals. They alone make decisions about who lives and who dies. The inclusion of “independent” views to appear participatory is just an illusion.
In cases like Mozart’s where MCAS has decided it will only be satisfied with a death sentence despite the views of other professionals, it begins a campaign to deliberately bias data and betray and exploit public trust. MCAS jollies each rescue along, stringing them out, implying they are being seriously considered, and holding off questions with reassuring statements such as "it is just a matter of time” until without notice and despite a pending lawsuit, MCAS kills the dog and all opportunity for protest or alternative options. MCAS is also expert at fomenting disagreement and polarization among rescues, using that to deft advantage and then sitting back and watching as rescues engage in accusations and counter accusations toward each other over turmoil MCAS has deliberately created.
To achieve authoritarian control MCAS management will go to any lengths. Ethics are a toss away. But there is a critical distinction between staff and management. Not all staff is complicit, a fact made clear in a private communication last year from an employee over another incident, one when MCAS forgot to check cat traps in a new ballyhooed program, a failure ending with the slow drawn out deaths of two trapped cats left without food and water, exposed to the weather over weeks: The staff member’s communication cried out for help:
“Please help us, upper management only believes their manager(s). Please go to the news media and or whoever will help us…It’s not the employees [it] is the managers.”
All staff is under the same unilateral authoritarian regime; some complicit but some must go along trying to do their best in the shadows of this regime.
Mozart’s death resulted from a corrupt, deceptive, and calculated process. He was destroyed after being kept in solitary confinement with no visitors and no socialization for 55 days despite numerous humane options including two rescue/sanctuaries. It is a form of government sanctioned cruelty. His owner’s pleas and a legal challenge in process were ignored.
On Tuesday, January 21, Mozart’s owner’s attorney finally got long requested discovery, documents provided by the opposing senior Multnomah County counsel, David Blankfeld, with the following note:
“As requested, here is the trainer summary and behaviorist review, I was under the impression you had access to these documents, but just in case, here they are.”
On the next day, January 22, without notice, Mozart was summarily killed. We learned indirectly on Friday, January 24. “It’s just a dog. What will it cost us? $700 or so” is how I imagine the county’s reasoning goes.The collateral cost for destroying a life seen by the county as without value is just a cost of doing a deadly business...
Without public outcry MCAS’s vindictive cruel animal policies and practices will not change. No one else cares.
Mozart’s suffering ended tragically. The suffering of those of us who cared about him and his plight, who knew him, our suffering, has just begun.
“…Now I am free of the collar
…and that is all you need to know about this place,
Except what you already supposed...
That everyone here can read and write,
The dogs in poetry, the cats and all the others in prose.”
(The Revenant, “The Trouble with Poetry”, Billy Collins copyright 2005, Random House)
Remember him.
Gail O’Connell-Babcock, PhD
Citizens for Humane Animal Legislation/Watchdog
Sherwood, Oregon