Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: I'm not your baby. Alright.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Good morning, everyone. We are about twenty minutes of 11AM, Friday, January 30, house government operations military affairs, and we are joined by the secretary of state division of animal welfare, Lisa. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: It's in the, department of public safety.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Okay. That's a interesting header that confused me. Anyway, we'll forego that one and just run with Lisa Mylot, the director of animal welfare. Yes. No. You've re we re homed

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: you. As

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member, Burlington)]: long as I'm not gonna talk

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: at my house, I'm good. That's all good.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: That's all good. Just going for the rehoming joke and it's low hanging fruit.

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: Hi. How are you? Good. How are you doing?

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Good. Good to see you again.

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: Alright. Lisa Mailet. Yeah. Doing a venom warfare. So tell me what

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: We want you to read the whole report to us beginning. Okay, and I can talk really fast. Just kidding.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Yeah, no, no, we just wanted to formally go through that, get your perspective on it and just for the committee to have a more detailed understanding of it. People did review it. But having your perspective spoken to us would be very valuable. And then we'll just do a little Q and A.

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: Yep. Okay, that's perfect. So as you know, spent the last eight months sort of investigating what the situation of animal welfare was in Vermont currently. How cruelty cases are identified, investigated and prosecuted. And what the laws look like in terms of modernization of laws and what could be helpful to improve animal welfare here, as well as the quality of life for the people who have animals. And I've summarized what I see as the current status of cases. And there's a little bit to talk about there. But before I go into that, then I have My approach to animal welfare, it's the prevailing best practices approach, is to look at how many of the cases that are currently getting to the point where there are complaints about animal cruelty. How many of those cases could we really divert before they get to that point? Because prevention is really key here. Like some other crimes, not typically crimes against property, but like some other crimes, once the harm has happened, you can't really undo it. And trying to repair the harm because unlike a computer that somebody steals and breaks, you can just buy another computer. You can throw that one away and buy another one. But when it's an animal that's been broken, you spend a lot of energy and money rehabbing that animal unless you're willing to just say, well, somebody abused this animal, we're going to euthanize it. And I am very interested in interventions that can happen before we get to the point of cruelty and opportunities for residents to come into compliance by learning about what they need to do or by having the resources, giving them the opportunity to do that, and seeing who's left. Who do we then really want to prosecute? And in my experience, animal cruelty offenders, there's five general categories. There are people who are offending simply because they don't have resources. They might not have the money to get the necessary vet care. They might not have the money for the food. And those people, if you offer them resources, won't commit cruelty. You can divert those ones relatively easily if you've got the resources in advance. The second category is the people who commit cruelty because they don't understand proper standards of care, or they might have learned standards of care that are no longer deemed appropriate. The example I like to use is that there's folk medicine would be putting motor oil on a dog who has fleas. So your dog has fleas, you put motor oil on them, it'll kill the fleas. It might kill the dog, though. So that is a question of education. They need to understand that, hey, there's these other things that isn't actually appropriate, and here's these other things. And there's some number of people who otherwise would have been offending that you can divert that way. There's the folks who are offending out of inertia. If it is easier not to take care of their animal than take care of it, they will not take care of it. A lot of times, the only thing you need to do to get those people in line is to have a visit from a law enforcement officer, or for them to get a ticket, and suddenly it's more of a bother to offend than not offend. So they it just it's that inertia where it just shifts it a little bit so they stop offending. There's mental health offenses, and those ones are hard. That's probably the hardest category to deter. And that's plugged into the whole range of human vulnerabilities. It might be substance abuse. It might be poverty. It might be anger management issues. There's a whole bunch of mental illness issues around animal cruelty. And the only way to effectively intervene in that is to look at the whole system and say, what can we do to support the people and make the changes in their lives so that they don't have these vulnerabilities anymore? Then you've got malice. And with malice, I say, go and prosecute. If we're in that category. But a lot of these you can carve off using resources. So what I've talked about at the beginning of this report, where the first real suggestion section is what sort of preventive resources do I see as lacking here potentially that we could try to build so that people can consensually come into compliance with their obligations? And it doesn't have to be a law enforcement matter. And then once we have the prevention pieces in place, what's left over? How can we have a more effective cruelty response, a law enforcement response? And I see law enforcement as things get escalated to them. Right now, when there is a cruelty complaint, the call should come into the local police dispatch, whoever that is. It could be a municipal police dispatch. It could be Vermont State Police. Whoever does law It could be a sheriff's office. Whoever does law enforcement, their call comes in and then it's supposed to get routed to the right party. Even if it comes in the wrong station, it can get routed to the right place. With respect to VSP, they rely on Fish and Wildlife, the game wardens, the most part to be the primary investigators. Think that change was forget if it was 2022 or 2023. But that was a relatively recent change. I don't believe that was meant to be long term. That said, until there's capacity to handle investigation of these cases elsewhere, that's the status we're at now. Informally, come in a lot of different They come in through the complaint portal on the Agency of Agriculture website, actually. And they forward those on to Fish and Wildlife. And at this point, they're also forwarding them to me. They might also come in directly to game wardens. They might come in to animal control officers. There's a variety of ways these calls come in, and they're tracked differently depending on how they're made. And so one thing that I've suggested here that I can offer is try and come up with a unified system for those complaints. And that unified system would involve me being copied on complaints, receiving notice of the complaint, so I could make sure it was routed appropriately. And I could provide subject matter expertise to the extent that was helpful. The other thing is once I have a website up and running right now, is not a division of animal welfare website, having a complaint portal there so that when there are animal complaints, they're not coming in and people want to do it online, they're not coming into agency of agriculture, for example. They can come directly to me and then I can forward them the correct one. So that's the first step of triaging all of these issues. Saying, let's just get the complaint system standardized in a way that is low cost, and make sure that there's some oversight of these cases and they're getting directed appropriately. The next step is the investigation step. And as I noted in the report, and I mentioned last time I was here, there were about 400 animal incident calls made to between Vermont State Police and Fish and Wildlife in 2024. About half of those could be characterized as potentially animal cruelty. Doesn't mean they all are. Could be that the person didn't have information they needed. Could be that there really wasn't an issue. There's lots of reasons this might not be animal cruelty. And ultimately, nine of the calls resulted in arrests. I do want to flag, though, that those are just the calls that came into Vermont State Police and Fish and Wildlife. There were about 54, I think, municipalities that retain law enforcement jurisdiction. And there were an additional 44 cruelty arrests in 2024 from the municipality. So there were a total of 53 cruelty arrests. That's not in here in part because I was only asked about state agencies and the legislation, and in part because I didn't have the local data until after I submitted the report. So but there were a total of 53 cruelty arrests in 2024. There are some right now, it is completely a complaint based system where if there is a concern and somebody calls in a complaint, somebody will call them back. Either the police or sheriff's department or Fish and Wildlife will call them back, have a conversation, see whether or not this is actually something that needs to be investigated. Or they'll send somebody to the property to be seen. But generally, there are not rechecks to confirm compliance. So even where they show up the first time and there's some deficiency, maybe there's not appropriate shelter. And it's October, so it's not quite critical yet. They're working with the person. They tell the person you need to get some sort of shelter that's going to protect your animal from the weather, especially with winter coming up. There generally is not a recheck to ensure that anything changed. They wait until they see if there's another call. And that's a manpower issue. The police and gay wardens don't have the manpower to go back out and work with people on compliance over time. It's really the only way to know that anything changed, because in a lot of instances, the places these animals are are not easily visible. You can't. If it's on someone's rural farm, or in a barn, or even in someone's house, waiting for a new complaint means you really have no idea what's going on and you don't even know that that animal is still alive. And so when somebody has a complaint against them for animal cruelty, one natural reaction if they're not coming into compliance is just to make sure that nobody can see the problem again. To put up barriers, for example, so that their property is no longer visible from the road, so there can be no new complaints. This is somewhere else that I think that my division could step in if I have manpower. And that I'm not envisioning a division that's going to be staffed like Delaware's that I described, where there are about 45 employees staffed in the division of in their office of animal welfare. And everything gets routed to them from lost dogs to cruelty complaints. I don't think that Vermont is looking for that sort of system. Financially, I don't see how we get there. But what I do imagine is having one in my division directly and then having them out in the field, having humane officers. And humane officers are non swore could be law enforcement, but that's not what I'm referring to. Statutorily in Vermont, humane officers are one of two things. One would be law enforcement officer. That's not what I mean by having a humane officer. The other arm is a staff member in the division of animal welfare or an animal control officer who works for a law enforcement agency. So it's an ACO who works for a police department. Those two categories of people can be humane officers, if they go through training to learn investigations. That's what I'm envisioning, having someone in my office, if there's a way we can come up with funding. That that person could oversee a lot of these compliance checks. And that way it would take the burden off of law enforcement for that. And it would allow somebody who is a subject matter specialist in animal welfare issues to to do a lot of these and see, are these things changing? One thing I realized in Georgia, when I first started working with my animal control officers down there, was that they would only do scheduled rechecks. So they'd go to someone's property and say, have to your dog in Athens, you cannot tether a dog unattended. So they would tell the person, your dog cannot be out here tethered unless you're out here with them. So you have to have some other way of confining them. And I'll be back next Tuesday, probably in the afternoon to check. And next Tuesday when they came back, the dog was never tethered. But if they went back next Wednesday, the dog was tethered almost all the time. I mean, tell me not to drink coffee one morning because I'm gonna have a blood test. I'm not gonna have my coffee that morning. Guarantee I have it the next morning. And it's the same thing here with the compliance is that having scheduled rechecks is great. That's the first step. And then you wanna have an unscheduled unscheduled recheck. And just make sure, did this really stick? And then you can go back to a complaint based system. But there has to be people who can do these compliance checks. And so I'm envisioning having one in my division, if possible. And I'm envisioning a task force approach to enforcement more generally. Like with the special crimes investigation units, animal cruelty issues are ones that both they you need a cluster of professionals to address the problems. You need social welfare folks in the mix. You need rescues and shelters in the mix. You need humane officers in the mix. You need sworn law enforcement in the mix, and you need veterinarians in the mix. And, ideally, these would be, once again, the task force approach where there would be several task force task forces in the state responsible for responding to cruelty complaints in their area. First response could be the humane officer in that bunch. If they need law enforcement help, they'd bring them out. Otherwise, they work on compliance. If they need a vet assessment, they bring the vet out. That's medium term. I don't think we're getting to a task force approach this year. I think we can figure out how to get to a task force approach, though, this year. I think the figuring out stage can happen now. And that's what I'm proposing in the proposal is that this year we do the figuring out stage. We have a working group with relevant representatives and we figure out how do we make the finances work within the constraints of people who are already employed. What expertise do we have? Where do we need to do a little bit of extra training? How do we figure out how we pay those people back and forth? But we have models for this already in Vermont that work well. So the division of animal welfare itself would be a relative not even relative. It would be a very small division. And I've suggested that initial staffing could be a veterinarian or some ability to contract with a veterinarian. A lot of what needs to be done is veterinary, both on the preventive end and on the cruelty end. A humane officer. And then the ability to pay some small number of law enforcement officers who are interested in this area on an overtime basis. Or split a position. So that when necessary, when a locality says, we need outside help for this case, or when it's clear that for whatever reason there is real harm that's occurring and it's not being investigated otherwise, I can rely on these people to step in and say, let me figure out what's going on. It's a little bit amorphous because once again, I don't know exactly how we get from where we are today to that task force approach. But I know that we can figure that out. So that's what I'm envisioning on that on the investigation end. Another end that we really need to work on is where do the animals go? Vermont does not have a municipal shelter system like Georgia and a lot of other places where that is that is obligated to take seized animals. Where I was in Athens, if animals were seized, they went to the shelter. Here you've got private organizations. Animal shelters and rescue groups are private entities. They are not obligated to take animals that are seized. And right now, animals that are seized often have to be held for six or eight months before they could be adopted out. Before they could be spayed or neutered and realistically go into most foster homes. Before they, in some instances, can be euthanized because there's no other good outcome for them. And so figuring out how to speed up that system is one of the important things. Because humane societies in the last ten years or so have been Maybe not ten years, but five or so years have been loath to help with these cases because of the amount of time the animals have to sit there. It's bad from a resource management perspective. While they are filled with seized animals, they cannot help Vermonters who need help rehoming their animals. While they're filled with these seized animals, for dogs and cats and other animals that are seized and have to be held in kennels or cages, those animals degrade really badly. There's a lot of research saying that two weeks of high stress kenneling, which is what this is for dogs and cats, they start to have neurochemical changes that are irreversible. And that doesn't mean that they can't be adopted out afterwards. One of my dogs was at a shelter for four months and he's awesome. But it does mean that he has lasting effects from having been kenneled in a high stress situation. And so figuring out how to speed up these decisions. Does the animal go back to the owner? Or does title get forfeited and the animal can be rehomed? And getting that on as fast of a timeline as possible is critical to having the space in the first place to put these animals. Because the other thing that happens is that the people who work for humane societies and volunteer for rescue groups love animals. And watching animals degrade in the kennel is one of the most emotionally difficult things that volunteers and shelter staff can go through. And so figuring out how to speed all of that is important. All of that up is important, both in having better outcomes, but then also having help when we need it to house animals. And figuring out other short term holding places so that we can triage animals. Right now there are animals that are left in In situations that would qualify as cruelty simply because there is nowhere for them to go. And so we leave them where they are. And that's not a good outcome. And so another option, and I talk about this in the preventive section more, but it also applies to the cruelty section, is coming up with short term holding places where we can take animals when we seize them for triage. Who needs to go to a vet? Who can go immediately to a foster home? Who needs to be held in quarantine to see whether or not they have any infectious disease? You don't want to put new cattle in with an existing herd. You want to make sure you quarantine. So where can we come up with those short term holding facilities that are not replicating the municipal shelter system of the South? That might be for livestock. We might talk about, fairgrounds with temporary, setting with volunteers trained to deal with them. It would be nice to have a professional vet who could oversee that. For cats and dogs, it might be pop up kennels and mobile kennels in municipal spaces, intended only to be for three or four days, just to get them in, figure out how we disperse them out. So there's the seizing, impounding animals portion of the cruelty investigations. And then there's the prosecution end. And on the prosecution end that that ties into some of some of the moving the animals through more quickly, or just having more satisfactory outcomes is doing training for prosecutors and the judiciary. There's a lot of research showing that simply providing training about the elements of these crimes, because they're different than they deal with a lot of time, the collateral crimes that animal cruelty is associated with. So with child abuse, with domestic violence, with elder abuse, with gang activity and with drug trafficking. All of those things are associated with animal abuse. And so training the judiciary and prosecutors on this overlap, as well as the investigators, so they know to think about the problem in terms of when we're trying to develop a good response. We want to make sure that we aren't just addressing the very narrow problem in front of us, but that whatever we're coming up with is going to help bigger picture. And there might be more cases where we want counseling and education and some sort of monitoring. We might want anger management when if we only looked at it as an animal problem, we might just say take the animal away and and put the person in and maybe just find the person. Right? But if we look at a little bit broader, no. This person needs anger management training. And they need to have something so that they're not having the spillover effect on people as well as on the animals. And that's a question of training. And that's something that, my my division could could provide. Now it comes down ultimately always to some question of money. And money is a really hard part. And so I have not suggested anything that would raise taxes or raise fees or impose new taxes or fees. I understand the judiciary the the legislature's concerns with doing all of that. And I've yeah. I I and being in the executive branch, I understand the governor's concerns with doing any of that. So what I looked at is how do other divisions of animal welfare get funded other than from general funds? And. Are there special purpose fees currently being paid? And maybe some portion of them could be redirected or maybe they're not being used to benefit the constituency paying them. So maybe we want to think about a change there. And I want to make it really clear. When I talk about special purpose fees and maybe redirecting some of them or whether they're benefiting the constituency that's paying them, I have actually no doubt that the money is currently being spent in the ways that it was intended to be spent, that it is authorized to be spent under the statute, and that is doing really good things. And so I'm not trying to say that anything being done with it is inappropriate or not helpful. But what I'm questioning is, for example, there is a $1 surcharge on every dog license that goes to rabies control programs. It's about $64,000 a year total that gets directed to rabies control programs. That's what the statute said it should do. There's no question that it's doing what it's supposed to do. I question, though, whether owners of rabies vaccinated dogs should in fact be funding rabies control programs. That's my fundamental question. Your answer could be yes. That people with rabies vaccinated dogs should be funding rabies control for all of the unvaccinated animals. That is fine, but I flagged that as here's a special purpose fee being paid by one constituency that is being used not to benefit that constituency. It can be fine. With the cat and dog food registration fees, I do wanna tell you, I got more information about how they're spent after I put this report in, and I'm told that they are spent and I have no reason not to think. Sorry. I tend to get a little bit technical. I have no reason not to think this isn't the case. They are spent on testing to make sure that the products actually match their labels and are safe. Some of the requirements are federal requirements. Some of them are just best practices in concert with other states. And so I do want to flag that even though they're being paid by dog and cat owners indirectly, I don't know if there's any wiggle room in there. But that's something that right now those fees are being utilized on testing. The other categories of possible revenue I saw are I was a tax lawyer by training before I got involved in animal welfare stuff. And so I always think about tax gaps. What amounts are owed, but frequently acknowledged to not be paid? And cash sales, informal sales, is a huge area where it's well known there's low compliance with both income tax laws and sales tax laws. Puppy sales, now that they are not taking place in pet stores, so there's no brick and mortar setting for them, they're taking place in people's houses. They're taking place over the Internet. They still exist. That is a big area where generally there's under reporting for income tax purposes and very little sales tax compliance at all. Not saying these monies are easy to collect, but there are examples like I gave in the report of in The UK where they are ramping up efforts to collect these sort of funds and the sorts of things they're learning about how to get those revenues in. That could be a potential area for funding. And then there are the voluntary programs. There's specialty license plates where people can pay an extra fee in order to support a division. There's income tax check boxes. There's grants. There's just solicitation of donations. Those amounts are generally not enough in dollar value and not sure enough to fund positions. They aren't good for operations for the most part, But they can be really good for paying for the sort of preventive things that I discuss in the report. That's me talking a lot. Are there any questions at this point? What can I tell you?

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Rep Stone.

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: I have a lot.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone (Member)]: My mom is watching from home. She's in Alabama, and she said that she wishes that you were down there working in that

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: state. Don't go.

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: Although it's warm right now. A little bit.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone (Member)]: How will your division ensure adequate resource flow to rural and underserved areas of Vermont that currently already struggle with vet care access and enforcement capacity. I know that the report says that it notes access to spurious advocates for community support expansion. But I was wondering

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: if you could just elaborate on that a little bit more. Sure. So in a lot of the rural areas, simply getting basic vet care is difficult. And that's one of the things that leads to avoidable neglect that becomes cruelty. And I have to tell you, when I moved here, have six dogs. And I live in the Northeast Kingdom and I started calling around trying to find a vet. And I was repeatedly told, we're full. We're not taking new clients. And I finally got a vet because a Svein Nudavat I met got me in with the practice. Good for me. That's not everyone's experience. And so it can be really hard to get even just shots and basic preventive care, depending on where you are. And if you need emergency care, you're driving an hour and a half to two hours. And if you don't have a vet who can see you on short notice, one of my dogs got a laceration on her head. It just needed a couple of stitches. I called this vet and they said, we can't see you at all today. We're about, you need to go to the emergency vet. And I'm thinking, I could almost stitch this myself. I'm not going to. I'm a vet and I have no lidocaine. But it's a very small thing. And now I'm going to take a workday, an entire day, because by the time I drive to the emergency vet, I sit there for four hours because I'm not gonna be a high priority. I pay a thousand dollars. I've missed a day of work and a thousand dollars in services to get a couple of stitches in my dog's head. That it's not going to kill her if she doesn't get them. She got them. Again, another friend who was a spay neuter vet stepped in and helped me with it. But at the same time, that's, once again, not everyone's experience. So this can be really, really difficult. You can spiral into neglect unintentionally just because it is so hard to get the care. So my thinking is, I'm very interested in One of the things I did in Georgia was I set up pop up vet care clinics in communities in my area where there was not good access to vet care or people were systemically disadvantaged and simply couldn't afford it. And we went out with pop up tenants, plastic tables, a vet to vet assistants, and I had vet students. But I have to tell you, students in general slow things down. But it's a good experience for them in learning things. And we'd go out, my law students would talk to the owners about proper pet care. Their animals would get service. And I would talk to people about, I'm trying to make this sustainable. You don't have to pay me anything, but this is what it costs me to give you this service. There's no profit here, and I'm not billing you for the bedtime. This is the product cost. And we got back about 98% of our product cost with that conversation. We had several iterations of how we talked to people. That was the one that was most comfortable to me, and also produced the best returns. But you can expand vet care in those ways by coming to the communities that need it. They don't have travel. I was talking to someone recently who runs It's actually not a rural thing, but they run a program where they help keep pets in senior homes, and homes with folks who have various disabilities. So they can't drive to vet care appointments themselves, They might need help clipping their pets nails, things like that. They help with all of that, but it would help them a lot to have where they've got assisted living communities to be able to bring a vet in. But that's something that if there was a vet in the Division of Animal Welfare, could really help bring those services to those areas. There were also packages of legislation and I'm meeting with the executive director of the VVMA, the Vermont Veterinary Medical Association in two weeks to talk to her about my report, which she's read and brainstorm about. Expanding. Who can provide certain services in ways that are still safe and informed, where it's not going but where maybe like, I'm allowed to give my own dog a distemper vaccine. That's perfectly legal. I can't give my own dog a rabies vaccine. And I'm not saying that owners should be giving their dogs vaccines, but there might be a category of people that is non veterinarian that Vermont decides is appropriate to give rabies vaccinations, which both gets those rabies vaccinations into communities at a lower cost and more easily, but also frees up vet time because now they're not doing this lower level activity. They can spend more of their time on the laceration repair or the things that take more technical information. And Maine, for example, passed a bill last year that is a certified rabies vaccinator bill and expands the range of who can give it. There's also possibilities of making licensure licensure pathways for foreign trained veterinarians easier. So these are people who are veterinarians in another country and might be interested in coming here. So what do those pathways look like? And are there ways to make that a little bit easier that is safe for Vermonters? But at the same time just makes us an attractive place for these people to come. And so I think there are a lot of opportunities like that that can be taken into communities as long as we can make the veterinary pie bigger without undue strain on the people who are in it already. That was a very long answer.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Brad Hooper, Burlington. And after that, I've gotta leave for a meeting that got bumped up. So I'm gonna ask representative Waters Evans to run the table for this conversation.

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member, Burlington)]: So the stuff that you find in

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: store, like farm store. Doctor supply ish? Exactly. Yeah.

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member, Burlington)]: They have a cooler with a bunch of those mostly equine and large animal stuff.

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: They also generally have combo vaccines for cats and dogs, so distemper parvo for dogs and FERCP for cats. So they've got the ones that you don't have to have a vet give that you can give yourself. Vermont actually allows you to vaccinate your own feral cats. I don't know anyone who vaccinates their own feral cat. Would not vaccinate a cat by myself, much less feral. Vermont allows that. What you don't get though is rabies certificates. There's no proof. If there's a bite, can't say, Oh, this cat doesn't have to be quarantined because here's the proof. One downside of those things is there isn't great training for the people buying them. I think farmers are fine, I think they know what they're doing. But there's not great training for the domestic pet owner who buys their supply there, or maybe even the homesteader who buys their supply there, on how to even transport that safely. I've had people walk up to me at my vet clinics with a distemper vial in their pants pocket and say, will you give my dog this vaccine? And I say, no, I will give them the same vaccine from my supply. And then now I'm going to explain to you why I'm throwing this one away. Walking up with it in your pocket means you have destroyed it. It's not being kept at the proper temperature. But this is how people walk out of these stores with them in just a bag or in their pocket. And so they have an ineffective vaccine. I think there's education that can go on together with those that can help.

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member, Burlington)]: Maybe following up on this question, is there any state that has sort of the equivalent of a PDAMP program for?

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: I don't know the human category. Would that be like a there's vet techs and vet assistants, but there's they can't perform veterinary. It's different in every state. Vet techs, for example, I would have to look back at laws. Some states, and maybe it's Vermont, they can give rabies vaccinations under the direct supervision of a vet. So the vet has done the exam, looked at the animal, and is there when the person gives the vaccine. That doesn't free up a whole lot of time. Maine's rabies vaccinator statute says that a vet tech can give rabies vaccine under the direct or indirect supervision of a vet. So as long as they work for a vet, a vet has trained them, they can give this even if the vet's not there during the exam. That greatly expands your in the field ability. Because I have to tell you, one of the things we're seeing is that homesteaders and smaller farms can have a lot of difficulty getting vet care for their animals. They don't necessarily have the ability to take their animals to a vet, and they're not big enough for a vet to spend a whole day there. And Vermont, livestock vets have it rough. They're moving between a lot of different farms. They're spending a lot of time on the road. And if they're going to just spend an hour at this farm and then an hour at that one, they have to charge a lot in order to pay for their day. And so I think that's a really good question, but that's one of the categories of things that I would want to dig into this with the veterinary folks. And make sure that everything was being done in ways they're comfortable with and they think is safe. But which things can be carved off and be done on that professional basis, but below the veterinarian level so that we expand the ability for people to get the care they need. Vet techs do a lot in the clinic. Does the vet come in though and listen to the heart and all of that? So that would be direct supervision if the vet tech is doing. Because the vet is there, they're doing the overall exam, and they're The in the question is whether or not there could be a pop up clinic in the field, for example, where there's one vet and 10 vet techs, and the vet's not seeing absolutely every animal. They're seeing the ones that the vet tech spots and says, hey, this one needs a little bit more care, but all these ones we can just sort of do routinely.

[Rep. Sandra “Sandy” Pinsonault (Member)]: When we currently register our dogs, a portion of what we pay in the state of Vermont does go to fund those people who can't afford to spay or neuter their dogs. Correct. We know how much of that money is being utilized or is it? I think it's about 150%

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: of that. It's all being spent plus more. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me. So $4 There's a $4 surcharge on every dog license fee other than people with 10 or more dogs that they're breeding can get bulk fees and they don't have to pay that surcharge. But most of us are paying that surcharge and that goes to the Vermont Spain Eater Incentive Program, VSNP. And VSNP is administered by DCF. So it's seen as a benefit to low income providers, not so much as a population control measure. And the way it's set up is very much in the realm of benefit for low income Vermonters, not the most efficient for reproductive control. But they're spending about $350,000 a year on spays and neuters, I believe. And so that's It is being fully utilized. And I have to tell you I think I mentioned in the report, it's increasingly a problem with pet owners who receive intact pets from whatever means. They might get them from a rescue, they might get them from their neighbor, they might get them from a breeder. And they want to have them altered and they can't afford it. They don't qualify for VSIP because they're not at that income level, but they can't pay $600 at their vet for the surgery. And so they end up with a liver. And Vermont is increasingly seeing problems with larger numbers of intact animals being given away, or the spay neuter clinics having people calling and being pretty desperate because they can't If they have a large female dog, they might not be able to get them spayed anywhere. And they're looking for just, will somebody do the surgery? Or there's an accidental litter and now they want to get mom spayed, but now you have a litter. That also needs to get done, which really increases the number of surgeries and the cost of those surgeries. And I'm very interested in stay up ons, intensive targeted spay neuter events, that there can be outside resources to help with. I helped set some up in Georgia before I left. And I have some ideas for how to get that going here. I need direction. That's what I'm asking you all for with all of this, as I've laid out what I see as the buffet of options, and tell me which ones to work on, and hopefully we can identify the resources that are needed for them.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone (Member)]: Reps down. Yeah. Will there be like a public dashboard so that stakeholders and the public, and we can kind of see the progress, the challenges and the resources? Because a lot of this is about education. And so I'm just wondering if you thought about setting up some kind of public facing dashboard, not just for us, but for My mom at home has texted me questions.

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: Yes. So actually, I was speaking to the Commissioner Morrison yesterday about getting a webpage set up for the division, where resources can be linked on there. Because one thing, in addition to a dashboard about how are we progressing on things, simply having a one space where the resources that are currently available, what educational opportunities are available, where are the pet food pantries, the hay banks. There's actually hay banks that will provide pay to horse owners who are stressed. Put all of this in one place. Where are the low cost spay neuter clinics and which ones will do large dogs? Have them all in one place. So yes, this is something I want to do. It has not happened yet because this was the priority, but that is something I was

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone (Member)]: just thinking when I asked you about how you're gonna help in more rural communities and you set up a pop up clinic, it would be helpful to have one space where people could see where those events are happening or what spay a thons are happening. Yeah. Yeah, and

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: even a publicized where the various municipalities are having their rabies clinics, right? They have a lot of the towns have rabies clinics in the spring, but it's hit or miss like you have to be on the right front porch for them to know where it's happening. And so, yeah, collect all that information in one place. Have all the animal control officers. Maine has a great resource where you can go on, you look up your town, you can see who your animal control officer is. There's their contact number, there's their hours. Here's who you contact after hours. This is where animals are taken if they're impounded with strays. It's all there on their website and we don't have that. Animal control officers don't necessarily know who the animal control officer is in another town and they pick up that dog. They know it's from the town, but they don't know. They can't match up the license number with any person because it's a Sunday and the town clerk's not open. So, yeah, I think having centralized information alone is very helpful.

[Rep. Sandra “Sandy” Pinsonault (Member)]: Matt Cooper?

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member, Burlington)]: This is state veterinarian, private practice just designated or do they have state roles?

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: The state veterinarian? So there's a state veterinarian and an assistant state veterinarian, both of whom work for the Department of Agriculture, and they work on maintaining the integrity of the food system, really. They're working on livestock, animals. If there's an outbreak of a disease, they're going there and discussing the quarantine measures that are needed in order to prevent the spread. Are providing educational opportunities. They're reviewing the practices of the commercial farms, the transporters of livestock, as well as the slaughterhouses and the dealers, the ones buying and selling them. So they are fully utilized on that. They are not in general available to help with cruelty cases. The agency of agriculture does not investigate or work on cruelty cases for livestock. Right now that's the same system as the dog and cat system with calling the police. And they don't have any role They have a very small role with respect to pets. They oversee the information about rabies of veterinarians, as well as some of the rabies They can answer questions about rabies quarantines and things like that, and they oversee the euthanasia board. So I've been talking about with rabies vaccinators. You all actually took a similar action with respect to euthanasia at some point in the past. I'm not sure how long ago that was, where it's not just veterinarians that can euthanize dogs and cats. There are lay people, generally shelter staff, who can be trained to euthanize and provide that service. And so you already have this model for doing those sorts of things. But the state vet and the assistant state vet are working on the food supply animals and making sure that there aren't any issues there. Webster?

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone (Member)]: Sorry, this will probably be my last question. Are you sorry?

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: I could talk to you all day.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone (Member)]: Don't be sorry. My mom, she's asking, she works on stuff in Alabama, if pet kidnapping is an issue here and she's wondering, we have the option to have free spay and neuter if we have an option for free shipping. So I would definitely want to include microchipping and things and there's ways to have that be free. So when I was in Georgia, one

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: of the things I started was a free spay and neuter program in my community. It started with animal control, can refer anyone to my organization and we will pay to spay neuter all of their animals. And we do basic vaccinations and we microchip with all of it. It expanded to anyone in Athens Clarke County, the city county municipality I was in. We will expand it or any of their animals if they contact us directly. We'll do anyone in the surrounding county if we can. We've had to restrict to only female animals because money, but microchipping was always a part of that. And you can get microchips really, really cheaply. The microchips that we've been using, every time I register 20 microchips, I get a new box of 20 for free and registration is free. And so we have microchipped thousands of animals and have not paid for a box in several years. And so there are ways to make microchipping incredibly cost effective. And I would want to do that as part of any sort of pop up clinics as well as any spay neuter that's happening.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone (Member)]: And are you saying pet kidnapping for profit or whatever? I know that happens in other areas of the country. Are you seeing or suspecting any of that happening here in Vermont?

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: I have not heard of it. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Generally, that's going to be if there's a fair amount of underground breeding. I have not heard of it here. So it could happen. Or animals can just get lost. By I mean, microfibing is awesome. But they travel. Did you know that microchips travel? No. So one of my dogs discovered that her microchip was in her ankle. She was microchipped between her shoulder blades, but they can travel under the skin. Dog skin is weird. Hat skin is even weirder. It's even weird, and so it can travel under the skin. And so you have to scan the whole body and sometimes you don't do that. I'm glad to

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone (Member)]: know it's not that expensive and maybe something that gets sold.

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: I mean, seriously, even if you have to pay for every chip, company I use is $3 a chip. It includes lifetime registrations. I'm not going to say their name because they're not sponsoring me. I'm not going to shuffle them, but maybe they will give us free chips from here. So here's I

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: mean, we've spoken a lot about all of this stuff, and I'm going to I'm going to introduce you here this afternoon. But. I'm a lot of it comes down to money, which stinks because lots of animal lovers in Vermont, right? People really care about it. And every time there's a hurdle, it's like people don't have enough money to care for their pets. We don't have enough money in the state budget to stand up everything that would be desirable for this. I appreciate so much that you've come up with some creative solutions about how to make this work, how to get certain things going. I think an incremental approach is hopefully possible and what we can do to get where we need to get on this. But can you speak a little bit to and we've been talking about this with other bills that we're working on, too, about how spending the money or some money upfront and is an investment that's really going to pay off later? If we're just talking purely financially, can you speak to how some of these programs will help in the future? I always think about the horses. Everyone talks about these poor horses. There are so many of them that need to be cared for. It comes from nonprofits and all these different organizations and donations. I feel like in that instance, spending money in the beginning would save a lot of time and money and heartbreak later on. But just speaking about the money part, can you speak to that a little bit in regards to sort of any of these programs or any of these initiatives? Yeah, so prevention is really much cheaper. And I know that's easy to

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: say that and it's harder to back it up with numbers, but it's cheaper than rehabilitating, right? If you think about horse, and I think that's a really good example because horses are fairly expensive to maintain. They're not cheap animals in the first place, but once the horse reaches a point where it's critically thin, it is having poof problems, it's having teeth problems, you're going to spend far more trying to get that animal back to health. The economically smarter thing to do is to euthanize the animal at that point. And that's not what we want to do. We don't want to say that because you've been neglected or abused, we're just going to kill you and be done with it. It's not what anyone wants to do. And it's not what I'm advocating, to be clear. And being able to provide, let's say the pop up vet care clinics I did in my neighborhoods in my area in Athens. We did basic shots, we saw parvo levels go down in those neighborhoods. And parvo is a deadly disease, it's easily transmissible between non vaccinated animals. And we saw parvo go down, and we saw it go down a little bit in our shelter as well. And we started actually, They're hopefully moving to having the animal control officers giving free parvo vaccinations in the field just to make sure that the animals are getting done. And that's an example where an $8 vaccine prevents. $1,000 of attempted therapy if that animal gets sick and then you get the herd health as well. Most of the animals are vaccinated, suddenly you're not going to have the outbreaks. You don't really have outbreaks of dog rabies in Vermont or elsewhere anymore, in large part because so many dogs are vaccinated or have been vaccinated. Even if they're not technically current today, they have some lingering immunity from prior vaccines. And that was a really effective campaign so that dogs are not actually a high risk animal or rabies anymore, which is kind of crazy in a good way. And so it's the same thing with spay neuter. If you pay to spay one female cat today for $85 you don't have a litter every four months that you then need to spay. Or that you need to rehome. Or that you have to at some point end up euthanizing or figuring out what do we do when we have more than we have spaces for. And so, not all of what I'm talking about is going to benefit from that sort of thing. If we're talking about the When I was talking about the types of cruelty there are, the cruelty that's based on poverty, simply providing those resources removes those people and those animals from the cruelty system. Now you don't have all the costs associated with the criminal justice system. Even if you put aside If you say, okay, let's say it costs as much to rehab this animal as it would have to feed them through that number of years. Even if you say those are equal, I question whether they are. But you don't have the criminal justice expenses associated with prosecuting. And you don't have the costs associated with seizing. Because when you do a large seizure of animals, there are a lot of costs, human time costs, as well as product costs associated with that, and then housing those animals. And the sooner you intervene, the better off you are. And Vermont has long been a place that the Northeast in general has long been a place that has not had the same sort of overproduction issues as the South. You have shorter reproductive seasons. You have shorter days in the winter, so animals just don't go and heat as many times each year. And outdoor litters just don't survive up here. That is changing. To some extent, having barring this winter, I guess. But you're having slightly warmer winters, and that means you're going to have more of those unaltered animals that are going to reproduce each year. That's And going to hit some tipping point where suddenly you are going to be in the position of having far more animals than you have placements for. Because that goes really quickly. For a while you're fine, you're importing animals from out of state, you're placing all the animals you have. Oh, now there's sort of a stasis. You're still importing some, you're ending up with strays that aren't getting reclaimed, which is where you are now. Where there are strays increasingly not being reclaimed when animal control officers pick them up. So they've been abandoned or they're not being taken back for some reason. The next step is those strays are also reproducing, and their offspring are reproducing. And so it's hard to give hard numbers in part because there aren't great controlled studies. But these things are all interrelated and an $85 spay for one cat right now is so much cheaper than worrying about the very many litters that result. Because there's not only because you also increase the risk in the system. So I have six dogs. Not because I ever said I want six dogs, but because I was living in an environment where the types of dogs I really like were getting euthanized simply because they didn't have homes. So I have more dogs in my home than I want. If something goes wrong and I stop being able to care for them, suddenly there are six dogs that need homes. And this happens with other people. What we saw was that there were people who had dogs, they didn't really want as many as they had. They got a female dog, they left her in the yard, she got pregnant, they kept one of the puppies. Guess what happens when you got mom and son puppy intact, you end up with more. They can't adopt them all out. They're fine having their five dogs in the yard. But then their landlord changes the rules and says, can't have large dogs. You can't have dogs outside. We could have dealt with that in my area if there's only that one female dog that had come in. But by having too many animals, good hearted people keep them. And if something goes wrong, you're dealing with five dogs, six dogs instead of one. The risk in the system increases the more you have households that are teetering on the edge. That maybe they have these animals and they can care for them today, but long term maybe they can't. And once you start having a lot more risk in the system, something's going to go wrong. And when it starts going wrong, it cascades. And so This is true on every level. If you think about any one person and their animals, it is unlikely any one person or one person's animals are going to greatly affect the overall health. But we're seeing more and more You're seeing more reproduction. More people keeping the results of the reproduction because they don't don't have a place they can turn these animals in. And that just increases the risk on each of these households. And that means that when something goes wrong, you might have 30 cats coming in from a single house. You might have 15 dogs coming in from a single house. That's when it gets really hard to deal with. Almost any amount of prevention is worth avoiding that outcome, because that outcome floods your system.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Yeah.

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: That's a very, I'm sorry, took a really long answer.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: I wanted to talk about this forever. We're going to have to have you back. We've kept you here for an hour. Does anyone, read the pen to mouth?

[Rep. Sandra “Sandy” Pinsonault (Member)]: I think one of the biggest problems that we have in our area is once once we find a dog or an unlicensed dog or an abandoned dog is where to take it because the shelter's full and we don't have a dog catcher. So it ends up going to the town manager's home and trying to place it. Facebook's the one who's been to help reunite, but

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member, Burlington)]: there's an issue for

[Rep. Sandra “Sandy” Pinsonault (Member)]: almost shelters. Too many get dumped off, it's protected, and they decide. Yeah,

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: and keeping that system moving so that, for example, seized animals aren't kept there for eight months. Think of how many animals could have that kennel and be rehomed in those eight months. And it helps. And so once again, this is a system that's all tied together. If you can keep the animals moving through the shelters more quickly, it means that your town manager might have to keep that dog for a week, but then can transfer them to the shelter for rehoming. But it's a matter of figuring out how do we keep this moving? Because the other option is to come up with billions of dollars of funding to duplicate a shelter system that is with municipal shelters. And there's a there's a good argument for having at least one state run impound facility. And I could see a lot of attractiveness that they're not cheap though. And you have to have staff there all the time for them. And so there are expenses for that. But there is a very real problem that a lot of the towns never entered into contracts with a shelter to take stray animals. And now shelters aren't really in a position to enter into new contracts because they're seeing how their space can get tied up for really large amounts of time. And there's preventative things that can be done. Microchipping is an easy one because it is much easier to re home a dog with a known history, If it's an average to good history than it is an unknown dog. Like if that stray dog, if you know that dog is house trained and good with other dogs, live with them, you're going be able to re home that dog much more quickly than if it's just a stray dog that came in. And so microchipping is one of the things that can help you that, because you can reach out to the person. Even if they say, I'm not in a position to take the dog back, but here's what I know about. Here's their vet history. They're actually vaccinated already. That makes it so much easier to rehome them. So there are ways to make that all just a little bit easier and the more levers we can tweak to make it easier, the better the system overall is going to function.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Anybody else have any other questions? I have a million more, but I'm going to save them for another time. I hope you're open to coming back more than once.

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: Oh, definitely. You obviously talk about this as

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: much as you want. I know.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone (Member)]: Keep up with it.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Yes. The report was fascinating. Thank you so much.

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: The best 46 pages you ever read. I know.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Funny. I know.

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: Was funny.

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member, Burlington)]: Rev It It

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: was good. There are a lot of reports come through here, some are more interesting than others. This was it was really eye opening, and and your hard work is appreciated. Thank you. Well, I appreciate

[Lisa Mylott, Director of Animal Welfare (Vermont Dept. of Public Safety)]: you having me here. And yeah, definitely let me know if you want me back or if you have any questions even before that.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: We will want you back and we will have questions. Thank you so much. And thank you to Repstone for you. Good mother of Repstone for participating from. She

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone (Member)]: says great topic. It's super beneficial. Great.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Okay. I think that's it, we're ready until, well, we're gonna break fifteen minutes early for lunch. Thanks everybody.