Daniel Steps Into the Lion's Den of Animal Services

The question Dan Knapp's friends keep asking about his new job as chief of Los Angeles' Animal Services Department is: Why does he want it?

After all, this isn't just a city department. It's a cross between animal law and animal welfare.

In the strange world of city animal services, bureaucrats have learned to take death threats and lawsuits in stride. Animal rights advocates see each line in the budget as a matter of life and death.

Incompetence is viewed as murderous, and reformers seek not mere change but a new human consciousness reflected in city policies from New York to San Francisco.

"Think of the city's animal shelters as Planned Parenthood," said Gini Barrett, one of five commissioners overseeing the department. "Think of the animal rights groups as Operation Rescue," the antiabortion organization.

Into this caldron steps Knapp, executive director of the Sonoma County Humane Society and an ordained Assembly of God minister, the first general manager to be appointed from outside the department in at least a quarter of a century.

Gentle and amiable, a minister who declines to be addressed as "Reverend" and uses phrases like "goodness gracious," Knapp is seen as the salve and the savior for whom the department has yearned.

Named to the post by Mayor Richard Riordan, Knapp starts later this month. He is a reformer eager to bring progressive--and expensive--changes to a department that struggles to perform basic functions.

Chief among these is "100% adoption of adoptable animals," a goal that could require reducing the number of animals killed in Los Angeles' shelters by about 24,000 per year. "I've been called crazy. . . . But everyone who has had a dream is seen as crazy," Knapp said. "Look at Noah and the ark."

Knapp takes control of one of the largest animal services departments in the country at a time when an animal control model handed down from the 19th century is being shaken to its roots by an increasingly influential animal welfare lobby.

Historically, animal laws were rooted in public health policies aimed at preventing people from dying of rabies. The policies were carried out with an efficiency and determination that tended to eclipse animal welfare concerns. That model established one stereotype that still rankles animal workers today: "the 'Li'l Rascals' dogcatcher," as one advocate put it.

Today, professionals are realizing they "should not just be about picking up and killing stray dogs," Barrett said.