Barstow Volunteers’ Noble Effort At Establishing No-Kill Animal Shelter Ending

Barstow is the latest community in San Bernardino County to face the eradication of its humane facilities aimed at preventing the slaughter of wild and feral animals or lost and displaced pets.
As has been the case in the cities of San Bernardino, Hesperia and Upland, the concerted efforts of volunteers and underfunded municipal divisions devoted to animal control have proven inadequate to the task of dealing with the volumes of uncared-for animals on their streets, neighborhoods and both wide-open and confined areas. As a consequence, volunteers have in large measure stepped in to take on the function that in most other communities has traditionally relegated to municipal or county animal control divisions.
The Route 66 Animal Shelter, located at 2340 Main Street in Barstow, was opened last year as a no-kill facility. The founders had philosophical differences with municipal officials, whose approach toward animal control, was largely deferred to the county. While perhaps not meeting the definition of inhumane or sadistic, the region’s animal control operations were more practically oriented. Governmental workers, intent on maintaining a safe and clean environment, are more goal-oriented when it comes to handling stray pets. If, after what those animal control workers consider to be a decent interim, pets in their custody are not adopted or spoken for by their original owners, they will ruthlessly “put down” those animals, to use a euphemism.
By euthanizing the animals that remain unplaced with new owners, city animal shelters free up the space monopolized by those unadopted dogs or cats, allowing the next batch of new arrivals a place to survive for a time deemed long enough for someone to see and adopt them. If that doesn’t occur, the process repeats itself.
The founders of the Route 66 Animal Shelter in Barstow could not and still cannot bring themselves to kill the animals that have landed with them. Following successive cycles of arrivals during which only a fraction of the incoming animals are placed into homes, the animals are stacking up, literally, in quarters that are incapable of accommodating them.
Because the volunteers are unwilling to coordinate with the City of Barstow and its animal control division to have those animals put down, a decision has been made to close out the Route 66 Animal Shelter altogether after one last Herculean effort is made to place the shelter’s current population of pets into domestic situations.
Thereafter, the facility will be turned over to the city, which in short order thereafter, will undertake the mass exterminations the shelter’s current management feels so squeamish about.
As is very often the case with humanitarians dealing with the proliferating animal crisis, a paradox has emerged. The desire and effort to help the animals has turned into a circumstance in which the creatures are housed – the more plain word is caged – in an environment/situation in which they are not free to run, but are confined in ever more cramped space, in a condition or conditions which are downright inhumane and which, if discovered, examined, investigated and acted upon by the authorities, could result in the conviction of the do-gooders involved on violations of laws intended to prevent cruelty to animals.
When it comes to violations of the prohibition against cruelty to animals, there are animal rights activists who have for some time maintained that Barstow civic officials have been guilty of such cruelty by means of the neglect they have shown toward the animals in their midst. In 41.34-square mile, 25,415-population Barstow, there has historically not been an animal control division. The city’s website states: “The City of Barstow’s Code Compliance staff receives a plethora of calls on issues in which they simply do not have the authority or resources to help the resident or business. Although many of the requests for help are valid, city staff must redirect them to the relevant agency so they can get the help they need.” With regard the subject of “Dangerous animal[s] threatening public safety,” the city website states, “Bobcats and mountain lions are presumed dangerous. Call 9-1-1.” For “animal issues within the city limits only  – please call 760 255 5195 – Animal Issues in the County, please contact County of San Bernardino Animal Control 800-472-5609.”
Ultimately, those seeking help with animals will be handed off to the Barstow Humane Society, which is unaffiliated with the city government.
Some of the handful of those involved with the Route 66 Animal Shelter consider its pending closure to be an indication that their effort was an abysmal and abject failure. From a wider view, however, it was good for something. It has given rise to Barstow’s nascent municipal animal control division. When the Route 66 Animal Shelter ceases to exist under that name, the small, metal warehouse-style building that is its current quarters, together with its canine and feline denizens, will fall into the possession of the city. At that point, the Barstow Animal Control Department will come into existence. The city has agreed, as per the intercession of acting-City Manager Andrew Espinoza and action taken by the city council on June 17, to house the animals contained therein for at least 30 days, during which efforts to place them into homes will be made. Only then will the animals be given the fatal needle. Thereafter, the quarters will serve as temporary housing for the animals collected by the city’s code enforcement officers-turned-dogcatchers.
The facility at 2340 Main Street can hold up to 150 animals without being out of compliance with California law. Espinoza has given indication the city will find other spaces for dogs and cats. He will come back by mid-September with a fleshed-out plan for sustaining the city shelter into the future, with kennel operators and animal control officers.
Over the last 15 years, there has been on-again, off-again dissatisfaction in the City of Upland with regard to the city’s willingness to subsidize the operations of the local animal shelter in keeping with the level of care animal lovers in the community felt the 79,040-population City of Gracious Living should be extending to man’s best friend and felines. It was not that the city employees at the facility were inhumane or uncaring, but that the city’s decision-makers, i.e., the city council and the city manager, had given the shelter and its operations too low of a priority, elements within the community felt.
Activists in 15.62-square mile Upland formed Friends of the Upland Animal Shelter, a 501 (c)3 organization, which now operates the Upland Animal Shelter in partnership with the city’s animal control officers and is dedicated to saving every shelter pet.
In 2018, when then-San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia had just come into office, he moved to deal with the most populous city in the county’s longstanding animal control problem by moving in the opposite direction of what the city’s animal kindness advocates wanted. Members of the San Bernardino Animal Care Foundation, which had been founded by Alice Chow, wanted the city to remove animal control out from underneath the management and control of the police department, which they felt was too distracted with its other duties to devote the time and care to animal-related issues. Moreover, they wanted the city to replace its dilapidated and inadequate animal shelter with a new and large enough facility to handle the dozens, scores and hundreds of displaced or wild pets that were found roaming the 59.6-square mile city daily, weekly and monthly.
Valdivia, however, was unwilling to dedicate the money such fixes would require, and he favored eliminating the city’s animal control division altogether and contracting with the County of Riverside or the City of Colton to have those entities provide the service. Members of the San Bernardino Animal Care Foundation, however, were skeptical about how the city’s animals would be treated by outside agencies, and they were particularly worried that Riverside County and Colton would euthanize people’s pets left and right without making an adequate effort to find those owners.
When Councilwoman Sandra Ibarra, who had been politically aligned with Valdivia, proved sympathetic to the animal advocates, it forced a break in her relationship with the mayor, who, quite literally, never recovered from what proved to be the initial stage of the dissolution of his ruling coalition and the growing enmity with the not insignificant number of animal rights activists in his city. While the animal shelter issue was hardly the only political problem Valdivia experienced, it contributed to his demise, and he was defeated in his 2022 bid for reelection.
Sadly, San Bernardino has not yet resolved its dilemma with what many residents and others consider to be the city’s inadequate animal control situation.
In Hesperia, City Manager Rachel Molina’s transition last year from being assistant city manager to acting city manager to full-fledged city manager was marred by the appalling conditions that were revealed to exist at the Hesperia Animal Shelter when a person or persons took unauthorized photos of the facility and then went public with them.
That circumstance had been preceded by Dr. Jaime Velasco, a veterinarian who had provided competent care for the animals for some time, inexplicably discontinuing his treatment of animals at the shelter, which necessitated that the city’s animal services coordinator perform spays and neuterings on animals and diagnosing animals and administering pharmaceuticals to them, despite not being trained or licensed as a veterinarian.
Despite higher-ups in the city, reportedly extending all the way up to Molina ordering that the conditions at the shelter be kept under wraps and that city employees, under the threat of being fired if they did so, were not to go into the facility with cameras, including cell phones, somehow photos showing animals living in wretched conditions within the facility and its kennels, where the temperature typically reached or exceeded 100 degrees during the summer, surfaced.
A photo taken inside the facility showing a dog lying in its own filth was widely distributed.
Another photo circulated, showing caged dogs in an area of the shelter which the individual displaying the photo said had no ventilation and where the temperature reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit on a daily basis for more than three weeks.
At one point, according to one volunteer at the shelter, a goat that was hit by car and brought to the shelter needed to see a veterinarian to have a decent shot at survival. Instead, it was put in a dog kennel where it languished and died.
Last summer, with a crescendo of criticism being vectored at the city and charges being hurled at Molina that what was going on at the shelter demonstrated her inadequacy as city manager, the city abruptly put out a statement that the shelter had reached full capacity and was accepting stray animals by appointment only. Then, in a development that baffled virtually everyone, the shelter began turning away those seeking to look over the dogs available for adoption.
This provoked widescale skepticism among Hesperia residents, who insisted the shelter was nowhere near capacity and that a third to half of the cages are empty because animal control officers were no longer actively patrolling the city to pick up strays. Residents claim the animal control division still is not responding to citizen calls vectoring the animal control officers to where stray animals have been spotted, and wild dogs continue to run free throughout the 73.1-square mile city.

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