EDITORIAL JUST KIDDING ANIMAL SERVICES HEAD MAKES A FOOL OF HIMSELF -- AND US.

IT didn't take long for Los Angeles' Animal Services head, Ed Boks, to start acting like a true Angeleno politician -- arrogant, elitist and showing contempt for the people he's paid to serve.

But he's even taken the classic L.A. political schtick one step further by claiming he was going to educate the people by lying to them.

That was Bok's explanation for why he adopted a new policy cutting the hours that the city's shelters would accept unwanted pets from 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to just a mere 14 hours, total, over a four-weekday period.

After the predictable explosion from animal advocates, Boks backpedaled, concocting a hard-to-believe story that he never intended to enforce such a change. It was just a trick to teach the public a lesson.

A more likely scenario is that Boks thought it would be a good idea to cut shelter hours as part of the effort to reduce the number of unwanted animals euthanized in the city. Perhaps, he reasoned, that if people couldn't find a convenient time to dump Fluffy or Fido, their owners would resolve to keep the cat or dog.

In a perfect world, maybe. But here in L.A. the city already had a problem with high numbers of abandoned animals dumped in the city's parks, streets and even highways.

Closing the shelters to people who are determined to get rid of Fluffy or Fido means many will find other, less humane ways of disposing of them.

Boks has a difficult job managing the passionate, often-agitated animal advocates and a city department that deals in sadness and death. But that doesn't excuse him from crafting dishonest public policy -- which indeed is bound to make his job here even more difficult.