01-30-06 Special Called City Council Retreat Meeting of La Porte City Council

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• Proper Use of the Guillotine Door Ae Problem: any dog runs are designed with a guillotine door; usually this door divides the run in half. All too often the inappropriate use of this door creates many problems for the agency. The guillotine doors are to facilitate cleaning and were never designed to be permanently shut. The policy of housing a dog on either side of the guillotine door (effectively turning 10 runs into 20) is not how most agencies were designed and when the agency houses dogs on either side in this manner it is impossible to properly clean the facility resulting in disease outbreaks, too many animals for the staff to adequately care for and an environment that is not conducive to encouraging the public to adopt. In fact this practice is the beginning of the majority of problems we see in shelters around the country. The Cleaning Process with the Door Down: One at a time, each dog was taken out of his kennel and tethered to the fencing while his kennel was being cleaned; however, tethering each dog to the same area facilitates the spread of disease. Each run, one -by -one is hosed down, disinfectant applied, scrubbed, let sit 10 minutes (all disinfectants need a minimum of 10 minutes contact time to be effective, any less is a false sense of economy), and then rinsed. To conclude the process, the kennel was squeegeed dry and the dog was returned. This is a one by one process — or possibly 4-5 dogs at a time if you have a strong volunteer program (ref Manual) with volunteers walking 5 dogs at time. Cleaning Process Using the Guillotine Door Properly First, the agency must decide to only house one dog or at the maximum two compatible dogs per run. If matching two dogs that did not come in together follow these guidelines (same sex, same size, not aggressive to animals or people, compatible). So, if you have 10 runs and you (by closing the guillotine door created 20 runs each holding 1 dog) by making this change you still have the ability to house the same number of dogs — yod loust have to take a bit more time in matching up the animals. Proper animal management will allow any agency to discontinue housing dogs on both sides of a kennel. One or two compatible dogs should be housed in each kennel and the guillotine door should be kept open, except for cleaning. This will speed up the cleaning process tremendously. It is important to note that the dog kennels should not be cleaned one by one, but rather all the dogs in a section should be moved to one side of their kennels so the empty side can be cleaned as a whole in order to expedite cleaning of that section. The time you save in cleaning and the result of healthier and happier dogs will be worth it. By making this change you achieve the following: • Quieter kennels • Easier to clean • Dogs stay cleaner • Healthier animals • Public less intimidated by `too many' dogs • Instead of waiting for the 10 minutes for the disinfectant to work for each run, the staff by cleaning one whole side of the kennels at once — now you can wait one period of time with the disinfectant working on all kennels which will result in better use of staff time for clean-up. SPOW to Make the Switch? Many agencies understand the rational of using the guillotine doors properly, but are concerned about the perception that by not housing animals on both side of the door that the agency will hold fewer animals and be 4