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MARY-ROSE ABRAHAM: The life of a dog or a cat at the city's animal shelters can only go two ways. It's adopted and it lives. Or it eventually must make space for another, and it's killed.
AMB-1: bring up sound of dogs barking
ABRAHAM: The shelter in Brooklyn is always full. The back rooms house dogs - lost pets and strays. In the front room, only a few cats are awake in the dozens of individual cages. Many of the animals are brought here by Eli Velasquez.
AMB-2: Eli talking to cat
ABRAHAM: Velasquez works for Animal Care and Control, the private organization that run the city's three animal shelters. He picks up animals throughout the boroughs. Velasquez responds when people are found hoarding hundreds of cats or dogs. He takes the pets when someone can't pay the rent and is evicted.
ELI VELASQUEZ: The most dangerous ones sometimes are when people move out of their apartment and they have two to three pitbulls in there. That's very dangerous.
ABRAHAM: When a dog comes in, it's moved to a cage in the back rooms for a few weeks. That gives owners time to claim lost pets. Then the animals are moved to the front for adoption. Each one has a time limit. Shelter workers do what they can to extend that time. Velasquez says some even take animals home and bring them back after a few days.
ELI VELASQUEZ: They try to hold them. Oh man, sometimes forever really. But if the place gets crowded and the time is past and he's been here too long, we don't have no choice.
ABRAHAM: The only choice for a past time cat or a dangerous dog is to kill the animal.
AMB-1: Eli talking about dog that's going to be euthanized (fade out)
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ABRAHAM: The city's Animal Care and Control took in 42-thousand animals last year. The agency killed 22-thousand of them. A lot more would have been killed. Adoptions saved 18-thousand dogs and cats. All shelters and rescue groups are organized into the Mayor's Alliance for New York City's Animals. The goal is to get New York to be a San Francisco, a no-kill city.
JANE HOFFMAN: Probably a more precise term would be low kill.
ABRAHAM: Jane Hoffman is president of the Mayor's Alliance.
JANE HOFFMAN: What no kill means is we don't use killing, a.k.a. euthanasia, as a means to control pet overpopulation.
ABRAHAM: Instead, the Alliance considers adoptions and spaying and neutering as the long-term solution. The coalition's 10-year plan takes into account the lives of all New York City's animals, pets and strays alike. That is especially important for those most likely to be forgotten: sick or old animals, vicious dogs and feral cats.
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ABRAHAM: A kitten with tuxedo markings lounges on the sunny back porch of a home in Queens. The cat turns its head as Fran Burzynski peers over a fence to get its attention.
AMB-1: Fran calling kitten over her neighbor's fence
ABRAHAM: This kitten, its three siblings and eight adults form a feral colony. They roam the tidy yards of this quiet neighborhood and show up promptly two times a day for meals in Burzynski's backyard. She spends six-dollars a week on their food. They won't let her get close to them. They spray the walls of her house, leaving a nasty odor. Sometimes they even hiss at her. But she still wants to help them.
FRAN BURZYNSKI: I don't have any kids. My dog and my cat are my kids and I can't see me having them in my house and seeing the ones out there and have nothing for them. Just because they don't have a home, doesn't mean they don't deserve the food and the shelter that everyone deserves.
ABRAHAM: Burzynski has been feeding the cats for five months. The kittens are the second litter she's noticed. She knows she has to do something and finds out about T-N-R: trap, neuter and return. On this Saturday morning - a day she took off from work -- she's hoping sardines fresh from the can will entice them into the traps.
FRAN BURZYNSKI: (can tab pops off). // I'm going to leave some of the juices because once they smell that. // Here ya go, juices, juices, yah. Oh they're going to come running.
AMB-2: sound of maneuvering cages around (keep under)
ABRAHAM: Burzynski moves the paper plates of sardines to the back of the cages. Then she goes back inside and sits on the couch by the window, her own dog and cat lying beside her.
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ABRAHAM: After more than an hour, two cats walk into the traps. Early the next morning, Burzynski takes them to Elmhurst where an ASPCA vet will spay them. The mobile clinic is full of cats trapped by Linda Bryant and volunteers with Linda's Feral Cat Assistance. The group traps about a hundred feral cats a year.
LINDA BRYANT: If a feral cat is fixed, you don't have the problem. You don't have spraying, you don't have fighting. They literally, you know, they go on their way and just live. I mean I have a colony of 10, 12 and I've not had a single kitten there in six years.
ABRAHAM: Bryant and two other volunteers, Paul and Iris Rosario, load the fixed cats into the Rosarios' SUV in the afternoon. They are driving them back to their neighborhoods. The Rosarios - both are NYPD officers -- did T-N-R on their own colony of five feral cats. They feed them twice a day. And they do get something in return.
PAUL ROSARIO: We've been there three years and we've yet to see a mouse or a rat and we live in Queens. And living in the five boroughs, you're bound to get mice and rats (IRIS ROSARIO: definitely). Not one, not even a squirrel.
ABRAHAM: The SUV pulls up to an apartment building and Bryant and Paul Rosario get out. They are returning several kittens to a woman named Lucia.
AMB-1: Linda talking about Lucia's cat. Paul helping her to take cats out.
ABRAHAM: Lucia helps bring the kittens into a room so they can rest and recover from the anesthesia. Bryant then demands to see another cat - semi-feral - which has not been spayed. Lucia is reluctant to turn over the cat because it is pregnant.
AMB-2: Linda demanding mother cat from Lucia
ABRAHAM: Bryant takes the pregnant cat in a cage back to the SUV. Unless she has her kittens before the spaying, they will probably be aborted during the surgery. It's a harsh choice -- the kittens' lives versus the difficulty of getting them adopted. They would probably end up on the street or in the shelter.
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ABRAHAM: The majority of the animals at the shelter is not unwanted cats, but dogs. Many of the dogs that end up at the pound have a reputation for viciousness, none more than pitbulls. And one woman says she knows why the shelters fill up.
REGINA MASSARO: I consider junkyard dogs, bodega cats and pitbulls in the inner city the root cause of overpopulation.
ABRAHAM: Regina Massaro founded SNIP, short for Spay Neuter Intervention Project. She works alone. No volunteers to help out. Massaro drives around in a large van to Brownsville, East New York and Jamaica. She goes directly to owners to persuade them to spay and neuter their dogs in these high-crime police precincts.
AMB-1: regina visiting house and greeting owner/dog
ABRAHAM: Uno has one blue eye and one brown. She looks like a friendly dog, But her owner holds her tightly on a leash attached to a collar ringed with metal spikes.
AMB-2: regina asking if dog has been fed that morning
ABRAHAM: Uno can't have surgery if she's already eaten. Massaro leaves disappointed, but finds another owner standing just outside the apartment building. Massaro offers to pay for the sick dog's treatment.
AMB-3: regina and dog owner making deal to get dog spayed
ABRAHAM: Convincing an owner is not always so easy. Sometimes Massaro will offer a couple of hundred dollars to sweeten the deal. The money comes from foundation grants. Massaro's work with animals and owners in these rough neighborhoods is controversial.
REGINA MASSARO: Some community leaders will say this is not a quality of life issue and we have more important issues. We have high crime, we have children. Absolutely. There's no denying that humans come before animals, there's no comparison. However, the crisis in the inner city with overpopulation, particularly pitbulls, junkyard dogs and bodega cats, has a direct impact on the quality of life in the community. There's no doubt about it.
ABRAHAM: Some dog owners get angry with her when she files a complaint with the city. Massaro says her next purchase will be a bulletproof vest. She wants to protect herself from the gunfire of summer evenings as she travels around these neighborhoods looking for dogs and their owners.
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ABRAHAM: With the work of its rescue groups, the Mayor's Alliance for New York City's Animals plans to get to no-kill, or low-kill by the year 2015. Alliance president Jane Hoffman says the current system - killing more than 20-thousand animals a year -- must change.
JANE HOFFMAN: Just a moral point of view and a physical point of view, getting them out alive is a lot better and healthier and humane way to go about animal control.
ABRAHAM: The Mayor's Alliance has 127 organizations doing just that -- working to help the strays, feral cats and vicious dogs in the city's shelters or trying to keep them out altogether. Mary-Rose Abraham, Columbia Radio News.