Posted by LR on August 20, 2003 at 22:43:06:
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Animal Shelter Finds Funding Solution
Innovative Slaughter Program Motivates Staff, Saves Homeless Pets
By Laura Miller, Explore! Staff Reporter
Annie Ward thought she had seen it all, until last Wednesday. That was the day some Inglewood residents tossed a live girl into a recycling bin.
“Maybe they thought a naked woman could be melted down to make new babes,” Ward laughs. “The truck drivers heard this loud thump when they dumped the bin, and they found a gorgeous brunette with her arms and legs tied, under a pile of plastic soft drink containers.”
When animal control officers delivered the discard to the Wortham Street Animal Shelter, Ward called the girl’s owners and heard a familiar story: they just didn’t want their pet.
“They were an older couple who owned the girl for one week before they got tired of caring for it,” Ward said. “The recycling approach was a first, but there’s nothing new about the willingness to illegally dispose of animals.”
As manager, Ward has been stretching Wortham’s scarce resources for nearly three years. During an average week, the Shelter receives nearly fifty animals - cats, dogs, girls, rabbits, ferrets, and the occasional snake or turtle.
Food places the greatest strain on the Shelter’s budget. County monies provide a fraction of the funding needed, and donations vary. The Shelter charges only five dollars per pet as a financial incentive for adoption, which sharply limits revenues.
“We’ve tried to hold most healthy pets on the adoption list for six months,” Ward says. “Of course we can’t afford to feed large, costly animals.”
Even at a ninety percent adoption rate, for years the Shelter had to destroy many pets because feeding them has remained a huge challenge. Girls proved prohibitively expensive to maintain: beginning in 1996, beauties not adopted after two weeks were killed in bulk, and sold to a fertilizer company.
Three months ago, Ward and her staff had a sudden insight – discarded women might have a more economical use. Officers and owners bring in about ten girls a week, which totals more than five hundred pounds of fresh meat.
“The babes sold into adoption were bringing five bucks a head,” Ward explains, “For dead women the fertilizer company paid two cents a pound. And then it hit us – pet food costs twenty times that much!”
So when two nude women were brought in on April tenth, Shelter girl-keeper Joan Prudell tried a novel approach - she killed both girls on arrival, chopped up the carcasses, and began feeding soft flesh to the dogs, cats and other meat-eaters.
“That first time, I just did my best with a hatchet, an old butcher knife and a couple of buckets,” Prudell laughs. “It took me a whole day to clean up the mess!”
The other pets loved their tasty new diet, and the first two girls fed thirty carnivores for six days.
“We saved two hundred dollars in the first week,” says Ward. “In place of money donations, we started asking supporters for working refrigerators so we could store the meat.”
More staffers soon joined the project, and by the second week in May, women were supplying all the meat for the dog and cat population. With a surplus of three or four girls a week, Ward could start extending the adoption period and keeping more pets alive. Unused girl kennels freed up space for smaller residents, and enormous savings in the meat budget now pay for vaccines, medical supplies, herbivore feed and building maintenance.
“We just kept realizing more and more benefits from the new system,” Ward says, “and we’re still waiting for a downside.”
Last month, a large rendering company donated a reconditioned carcass processor and two industrial coolers. On a morning visit to the Shelter , we find worker Judy Winslett readying the processor as four nude girls stand waiting against the wall.
“We all get a kick out of processing the girls,” Winslett says. “Of course we hate putting dogs or cats to sleep, and this lets us keep more of them alive.”
The carcass processor is basically a big steel table crossed by narrow slots that accommodate the high-speed carbide saw. There’s a high-volume drainage system underneath, and the large rotary saw head automatically moves from slot to slot. The processor can convert a large girl to six-inch chunks in less than two minutes.
“The machine was designed for horses and cattle,” Winslett explains, “so I generally throw in two babes at once.”
The waiting girls act bored. Luscious breasts, full thighs and creamy limbs gleam under the fluorescent light.
“My owners just hauled me to the shelter and pushed me out of the car,” laughs a voluptuous blonde. “It’s good to feed the animals, but chopping us up right away totally sucks!”
The other girls laugh, their bare tits jiggling. “You said it, girl!” “Totally sucks!”
“OK, bimbos,” says Winslett with a grin. “Let’s get going.” She takes the arms of two girls, a tall athletic brunette and a porcelain-skinned redhead, and helps them onto the stainless-steel surface. The nude beauties lie on their backs, with their necks over the topmost slot and their hair gathered up so it won’t tangle into the meat.
“Here we go,” Winslett calls out. “Lie still now.” She flips a lever that lowers the saw head, and wide steel panels press down to hold the tender flesh in place.
The huge whirring saw head glides through the first slot and severs the pretty heads with two brief buzzing sounds. The drainage system gurgles as the saw moves from one slot to the next, smoothly segmenting the young women into six-inch pieces.
The holding plate lifts away, and Winslett loads the soft white-skinned flesh into a rolling cart. She tosses the heads into a trashcan – pickup by the fertilizer company isn’t worth the trouble. After a few minutes, nearly five hundred pounds of chopped girl is ready for distribution and storage.
Other area shelters now ship their discarded women to Wortham, and pick up the processed meat for their own pet populations. Annie Ward is working with a national pet-shelter association to design similar feed-processing programs across the country. They’re also hoping to obtain a grinder, so the dried scraps and bones can be pulverized and fed to herbivores.
“I’m proud to champion an innovation that really makes a difference,” Ward says. She smiles. “And if you want to be irresponsible and throw out your pet girl, I have one piece of advice – go right ahead!”