The specifics
Following a recent audit that detailed a series of operational failures at the city animal center, several changes aimed at improving services and animals' quality of life have been underway. One, recommended by a city consultant and approved by City Council on Feb. 1, will shift how the facility handles dogs with bite histories.
Even if a dog's bite history is known to animal center staff, Austin's current rules require that the animal be made available for public adoption or transfer before euthanasia can be considered. Additionally, outside rescue groups that might receive dogs from the animal center aren't required to report known bite histories to potential adopters.
The update approved this month lays out a standardized grading system for dog bites and allows staff to euthanize animals with the most severe bite histories without publicly releasing them.
Dogs will be evaluated on the Dunbar bite scale, which features six levels of severity. City staff would be allowed to more quickly euthanize dogs with a documented Level 4 bite or higher.
The Dunbar scale's Level 4 applies to incidents involving multiple skin punctures from a single dog bite, at least one of which is as deep as half the dog's canine teeth. The most severe incidents, Level 6, involve a dog killing a victim.
“What it does is it says, hey, if it’s bad enough of a bite, and if the staff looks at all of the circumstances around it and says, ‘It’s the best decision for public safety to not have this dog be rescued by a group or to be taken out and be put back in the public,’ then they’ll have the right to euthanize that dog and make sure it doesn’t do that kind of damage again," Deven Desai, the city's independent consultant assessing the animal center, told Community Impact.
While the change was approved Feb. 1, the practice will not officially roll out at the Austin Animal Center until August.
Desai said animal center staff will use the coming six months to pilot the process. And once the changes are in effect, records of all euthanasia decisions will be publicly available to review.
Separately, another policy adjustment was made Feb. 1 to clarify that the center's no-kill goal—which it must meet at least 95% of the time—only applies for domestic pets and not wildlife that are sometimes taken in but illegal to adopt.
By the numbers
The new city policy comes after a spike in serious dog bites in Austin recorded over recent years. From 2018 to 2023, the number of serious biting incidents in the city jumped nearly 200%.As the number of severe bite events rose, hundreds of dogs with known bite histories were being released to the public. More than 400 dogs with moderate bite histories and dozens with severe bite histories were either adopted or transferred from the Austin Animal Center from 2019 through mid-2023.
"It was just alarming to the staff to see that the increase was happening at such a rapid pace, and obviously far outpacing the city’s population growth during that time," Desai said.
What's next
Another key update referenced by city officials is the potential expansion of animal center services to additional places outside the existing facility in East Austin.
While the city doesn't have funding reserved to launch new animal center, Desai and council members expressed interest in finding a way to offer animal intake in other parts of town. Real estate staff are currently looking into that issue, and more discussion may take place during future city budget cycles.
Desai said the animal center's longtime overcrowding challenges, which in the past had partially been addressed by using substandard crates, could be eased with more square footage around Austin.
“We do have a need; it’s not just because the state has told us [using pop-up crates] is against the law, but it’s also not the right thing for the animal to be living its life in a cage," he said. "That’s really ... one of the impetuses why we need to get a secondary site. In addition to the fact that, frankly, our city’s grown so much. Going all the way out to Levander Loop, for example, from Northwest Austin is kind of a trek."
