One key to the new possibilities is Maggie Asbury, who was elected to the county Board of Supervisors recently. She is animal-friendly and is serious about helping the shelter to change. There are other people on the Board who may be interested as well, but cost is a limiting factor. One commissioner told Rhonda that he would like to see positive changes at the shelter, but he cannot support any increase in funding. The county is currently losing population and its economic situation is not good. On the one hand, the lack of any additional money from the county is a big handicap because the shelter is in an old, dysfunctional building and the current funding for the shelter was reported to Rhonda as being under $200,000 per year. That is an exceedingly small amount of money to operate a shelter that takes in over 2,000 animals per year. On the other hand, No Kill people are used to working around government funding restrictions by raising money in the private sector, so Rhonda is going to concentrate on showing the commissioners some ideas that can be implemented at no cost to the county. One of the most exciting developments in the last two weeks is that a No Kill consultant has offered to help. The consultant is going to make a presentation to county officials and find out if there is enough common ground for their team to be able to work with the county and make a difference. This would be a huge plus for Tazewell County if it proves to be feasible. Rhonda hopes to have her list of free resources available at the meeting as well. The meeting is being planned for later this month or early next month. Particularly important, and one thing that will be a high priority, is having low-cost spay-neuter programs as a centerpiece of efforts in Tazewell County. A few people have contacted Rhonda with some interesting ideas about how this could be done. She has also e-mailed with Matthew Gray of HSUS, the Virginia state representative, about the Pets For Life program, but is still trying to set up a time to speak to him. Another very exciting development is that local shelters in Virginia are making offers of help to pull animals from the county shelter. Rhonda has been contacted by the Richmond SPCA and by Debra Griggs of the Virginia Federation of Humane Societies. This would be huge, because one of Rhonda’s biggest problems in facilitating transports out of state are the associated costs. Transporting animals in state, to shelters that are well equipped to do their own quarantine, would be much cheaper as well as easier on the animals. Tazewell County has a large number of puppies that Rhonda has had difficulty in helping because of the expenses associated with puppies. Help from shelters within Virginia could save many of these puppies as well as the older dogs. A wild card in all this is that management at the shelter is in flux since the former shelter director retired. Rhonda is hopeful that new shelter management will embrace outside help and be enthusiastic about increasing the live release rate. Several other things have happened. One No Kill leader suggested to Rhonda that it would be worthwhile for her to start attending the HSUS Expo or Best Friends national conferences. She would love to attend both, but will have to see if finances will allow. In the meantime she will be able to attend the Virginia Federation conference next spring in Charlottesville.  She is continuing to work to place dogs that her rescue group, Tazewell ARC, has in their shelter. She also recently had a breakthrough in getting local teenagers interested in volunteering for the rescue. She sees young people as the key to changing attitudes about animals in the community. One thing that is becoming clear to Rhonda is that there is far more help available, at both the state and national level, to a public shelter than to a rescue. This is not surprising, since the organizations and grant agencies that support No Kill naturally see the public shelter as the most important piece of the puzzle in lifesaving. Rhonda is trying to maintain a balance between her focus on the shelter and her work with Tazewell ARC rescue. The photo above is a montage of over 100 dogs that Tazewell ARC has helped so far this year, and Rhonda hopes there will be many more in the future.

Today, on the first day of the new year, it’s time to take a look at how No Kill is doing nationally. I can’t tell the story of every successful program in 2015 because there were far too many of them. There is one national campaign that stood out, though, because in sheer numbers it is on pace to rival some of the greatest No Kill accomplishments ever. Like Mike Arms’ Home 4 the Holidays event, which has racked up over 1.2 million adoptions since it started in 1999. And Petfinder, established by Betsy Banks Saul and Jared Saul in 1996, which is currently instrumental in some 1.5 million adoptions every year. The campaign that is rivalling those great accomplishments is the Million Cat Challenge.* The Million Cat Challenge was launched on December 10, 2014 by two well-known shelter veterinarians, Dr. Kate Hurley and Dr. Julie Levy. Both have been very involved in the development of the underlying programs that became part of the Challenge. When Kate and Julie presented their ideas for cat management at a plenary session at the 2013 HSUS Expo, the groundswell of positive reaction was so great that they were inspired to start the Challenge to capture that momentum. The Challenge is set to run for five years, from the beginning of 2014 to the end of 2018, and the goal is to save 1,000,000 cats who otherwise would be killed in shelters. The animal shelter organizations that have signed on to the Million Cat Challenge have been responsible for saving almost 400,000 lives in the program’s first two years.** The Challenge had a very good year in 2015, with over 265,000 lives saved by its member organizations and 180 new shelters enrolled. And the program is growing fast, so we can expect the next three years to be even bigger – perhaps exponentially bigger. That rate of lifesaving compares well with the early years of Home 4 the Holidays and the early days of Petfinder, and it puts the Million Cat Challenge in the ballpark with the most exceptional No Kill efforts thus far. The Million Cat Challenge has five key initiatives, but it is perhaps best known for its return-to-field (RTF) program for community cats. RTF was a key concept in Rick DuCharme’s Feral Freedom program in Jacksonville, where it first gained national attention. It has also been a part of Dr. Levy’s Operation Catnip at the University of Florida for many years and was used by other programs as well. RTF is often thought of as similar to trap-neuter-return (TNR) for feral cats, but it is a broader concept. The typical situation for TNR is where a feral cat caregiver traps some or all of the members of a feral cat colony and takes them to a clinic where they are given a health check, vaccinated, sterilized, and then returned to their colony. RTF, by contrast, can apply to cats who are brought to a shelter by animal control, or by an individual for any reason. The question is not whether a cat is feral or tame, but whether, after vaccinations and sterilization, it can safely be returned to where it was found. The RTF concept recognizes the unique nature of cats and how they live in communities. RTF gives the shelter an additional way of saving the lives of cats, to go along with TNR for feral cats and traditional adoption/transfer for tame cats. The Million Cat Challenge has other very important programs too, including managed admission, alternatives to admission, managing capacity, and removing barriers to adoption. One of the advantages of the Challenge is that the participants are free to adopt as few or as many of the key initiatives as they want. And the initiatives themselves are things that do not require a lot of skills or money. The way the Challenge works is that a shelter signs up and agrees to report its statistics in the first quarter of each year. The report has two parts. One part is actual statistics from the previous year. The second part of the report, the “challenge,” asks shelters to pledge the number of additional lives that will be saved in the current year. The calculation of the lives saved by the Challenge for any given year is the comparison of lives saved to the baseline year of 2012. The ticker of lives saved that is on the Challenge website shows the confirmed increases from previous years as well as the estimated numbers of additional, program-based saves for the current year. The breakout, paradigm-changing success of the Million Cat Challenge helped make 2015 a very good year for No Kill. Getting huge numbers of cats safely out of shelters is good for dogs, bunnies, and other homeless pets too, because it means that shelters have more time and space to work on getting their remaining animals adopted. And four of the Challenge’s five key initiatives can have application to all animals in the shelter, not just cats. With programs like the Challenge doing so well, we can confidently say that the state of No Kill as we start 2016 is good. *The Million Cat Challenge is a joint program of the UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program and Maddie’s Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Florida. **As of January 1, 2015 there were 143 shelters enrolled in the Challenge, with pledges to save 118,020 cats. As of December 28, 2015, there were 323 shelters enrolled, with actual saves for 2014 and pledged saves for 2015 totaling 384,784 cats.

Jacksonville is a city of 837,000 people on the northeast coast of Florida.  It is the largest city in Florida and the 12th largest city in the United States. The city is located in Duval County, which has a population of about 865,000. The governments of the city and county were consolidated in 1968. The Jacksonville metro area has over 1.3 million people, which is the 4th largest metro area in Florida after Miami, Tampa-St. Petersburg, and Orlando. The Jacksonville Animal Care and Protective Services Division (ACPSD) is a city-run department that handles animal control and sheltering for the city and Duval County. The shelter accepts owner surrenders with no noted restrictions except for a small fee. It does not perform owner-requested euthanasia. ACPSD works closely with two large non-profits in the city. The Jacksonville Humane Society (JHS) takes in some strays and adoptable owner surrenders and pulls animals from ACPSD. First Coast No More Homeless Pets (FCNMHP) offers low-cost spay-neuter, vaccinations, and veterinary care, and does over 30,000 spay-neuter surgeries per year.  FCNMHP collaborates with ACPSD and Best Friends Animal Society in a program called Feral Freedom  that  has made Trap-Neuter-Return the default solution for feral cats in Jacksonville. In 2014 the city of Jacksonville and Duval County became one of the largest No Kill jurisdictions, with a live release rate for ACPSD of 92%. If animals who died or were lost in shelter care are counted as euthanasias, the modified live release rate was 90% for 2014. Combined shelter statistics for ACPSD and JHS have been provided by JHS, but are not in the format I use for calculations. JHS’s live release rate was even higher than ACPSD’s, though. Total intake for ACPSD and JHS for the year was 17,099, which is about 20 animals per 1000 people. That intake number does not include the feral cats who go through the Feral Freedom program. At the 2014 Best Friends national conference, the Jacksonville coalition presented a playbook detailing how they got to No Kill. For years they have had a heavy reliance on spay-neuter programs, including their model feral cat program, to bring down intake. The coalition is also doing a lot of adoptions – ACPSD and JHS did over 10,000 adoptions in 2014. That is 12 adoptions per 1000 people. ACPSD’s live release rate was 35% or less from the year 2000 up until Scott Trebatoski was hired as director in late 2008. The live release rate climbed to 50% in 2009, his first full year as director, then went to 74% in 2012 and 85% in 2013. Trebatoski left ACPSD in March 2014 to become director of the Hillsborough County (Tampa) shelter, and was replaced by Nikki Harris. Harris previously worked for the Nebraska Humane Society and FCNMHP before moving to ACPSD as shelter manager. Jacksonville-Duval County is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

Ventura County is located in southern California, northwest of Los Angeles. The population was 823,000 at the 2010 census. Its median household income is above the national average. Ventura County Animal Services (VCAS) has two intake shelters, and in 2014 they achieved a 91% live release rate with an intake of 9000 animals, according to a recent report from VCAS. This followed orders from the Ventura County Board of Supervisors in 2012 that VCAS become No Kill. Changes that VCAS made after the 2012 directive included starting foster and volunteer programs, seeking out rescues to work with, adding a veterinarian who was on board with treating the treatables, and play groups and pack walks for dogs. Tara Diller was hired as director in February 2014. Diller stresses taking animals out into the community rather than waiting for people to come in to adopt. A non-profit called Paw Works, founded in January 2014, has been helping with fosters, adoption events, and transports. In their first year they rescued over 770 homeless animals in Ventura County. They have a group of volunteer pilots, Air Paws, that do transports, and a barn cat program. Ventura County is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

The news is slow this week, so today’s post is on a subject I’ve been following for a while – the dysfunctional shelter situation in Augusta, Georgia. The Augusta Animal Shelter was in the local news this week when it reported that its shelter killing rate so far in 2015 is down 15% from the same period in 2014. That sounds good, until you read the rest of the story and see that so far this year the shelter has killed 1,912 pets and adopted out only 572. Why is the Augusta shelter so bad? A grand jury report released last January found that the shelter is “understaffed and undersized” and has an inadequate building in a poor location. The report also found that the “staff is doing an incredible job with what they have to work with.” The report found that the shelter’s 70% kill rate was due, among other things, to its location being hard to find and its starting salary being $19,500, which led to a lot of staff turnover. Median household income in Augusta is low – under $35,000 in 2013. Shelter intake appears to be very high. A page on the shelter’s website says the shelter takes in over 12,000 animals each year and returns only 550 to their owners. The website has a link to statistics, but it has been down when I’ve checked. The grand jury report said intake for the year was 10,000 in 2014. Augusta’s population is about 200,000, so if intake is 10,000 per year that is 50 pets per thousand people (PPTP), which is extremely high. The shelter accepts out-of-county surrenders for a small fee, which might be part of its intake problem. Lisa Floyd, who operates an organization called CSRA Life Saver that helps the shelter, says that the problem is too many animals. There are still places, mostly in the southeast, where there is a pet overpopulation problem, and it looks like Augusta might be one of those places. In my researches it seems like shelters with PPTP of 50 or above usually have to transport animals elsewhere for adoption while trying to reduce intake, if they are to get to No Kill. A claim of “too many animals” is often just an excuse for poor performance, but in the case of the Augusta shelter it appears to be simply a factual statement. The shelter lost its part-time veterinarian in 2014, and the city approved hiring a new veterinarian. No one applied for the job for months after the position was announced, and the shelter was without a veterinarian until a hire was announced a couple of months ago. The shelter’s advisory board has also had major upheavals in the last year. Is the high kill rate and general dysfunction the fault of shelter leadership? A story last year indicated that there was a lack of trust between rescues and shelter director Sharon Broady, and that it was costing animal lives. To Broady’s credit, though, it appears that since then she has been attempting to make improvements. The Augusta shelter is not exactly an attractive venue for shelter directors, any more than it is for veterinarians. Low wages, high staff turnover, and an inadequate and isolated shelter building is not a good combination for a city that wants to support excellent leadership. In looking at successful shelters over the years, there is usually one or more things that stick out that have made the community successful. It might be a great director who is so talented that he or she can overcome all obstacles. It might be a supportive and progressive community of people who spay and neuter their pets and who come to the shelter to get them when they stray. It might be city leaders who find enough money to support an attractive, modern, convenient shelter building that’s open on evenings and weekends. It might be a rescue group of volunteers who transport animals north. It might be a non-profit that takes over and does whatever the city shelter is failing to do. Augusta has some dedicated rescue groups, but that’s about it. Augusta’s combination of a cash-starved shelter, inadequate physical plant, extremely high intake, and low-income community presents a real challenge for No Kill. The city’s advantages are that residents are concerned about the shelter, local media regularly report on the situation, and shelter staff appear open to receiving help. So what could be done? In the last few years some of the big national organizations have been able to make an impact in communities by coming in from outside with one or more of three interventions – targeted spay-neuter, transports, and community cat programs. Augusta needs all three. The Augusta shelter has an adoption rate of about 6 or 7 per thousand people as far as I can tell from the fragmentary data. That is much less than No Kill communities achieve, but given the shelter’s circumstances I’m surprised it’s that high. It may be hard to increase that rate given the poor location of the shelter and the apparent lack of money to have adoption-friendly hours. I was not able to find any information on whether the city plans to take action on the grand jury report by building a new shelter in a better location or increasing funding to the shelter so that it can extend its hours. Short of that, the only way to get a high adoption rate would appear to be the private sector taking the animals out and marketing them locally in an effective way. The shelter has offsite adoptions, which may account for their recent increase in adoptions, but their main offsite venue appears to be the local pet store. Augusta could also use some help from consultants – although it is doubtful any money for consulting would be forthcoming and there may be constraints on the director’s power to change procedures. Just looking at the shelter’s website shows some things that need to be done, from stopping out-of-jursidiction intake to making the shelter’s hours more convenient to asking for appointments for owner surrenders. I think the Augusta situation is worth looking at because jurisdictions like Augusta are increasingly what the No Kill movement is facing. A lot of the low-hanging fruit in shelter improvement has already been picked. Today, communities where the live release rate is under 50% tend to have some serious systemic problems that may not be solvable simply by lobbying local government or firing the shelter director. Those communities may require people from outside to come in and provide resources, at least to get the shelter on its feet.

Top of the news this week is LifeLine Animal Project of Atlanta. Two years ago LifeLine, a non-profit formed by Rebecca Guinn in 2002, took over the contracts for the two county shelters that serve Atlanta. Currently the live release rates at both shelters are about 85%. LifeLine has just announced a new “I’m In” campaign to help carry the city to a 90% live release rate by 2016. If the goal is met for the entire year of 2016, then 6 months from now the two LifeLine shelters will be at 90% or above, and we will have another major city in the No Kill ranks. The centerpiece of the new campaign is to give Atlanta residents a way to participate in meeting the goal, by social networking as well as by direct support to the shelter through volunteering, fostering, adopting, etc. What a great way to involve the community and allow people who are not directly involved with the shelter to be part of this historic accomplishment! Rebecca Guinn, founder of LifeLine, is one of the speakers at the upcoming Best Friends National Conference in Atlanta, July 16-19. The amazing Williamson County Regional Animal Shelter in Texas has received the 2015 Paul Jolly Compassion Award from Petco Foundation. When a shelter is successful at saving healthy and treatable animals, it is because of the efforts of lots of individuals who rarely seek or get any recognition. Without the great network of rescuers, volunteers, and fosters that exists in our country, even the most gifted shelter director would not be able to succeed. A woman named Carol Parks, who lived on Orcas Island in Washington, was a rescuer who took a great interest in the Wasco shelter in California. She helped to coordinate rescues, and saved hundreds if not thousands of animals from Wasco. A couple of weeks ago Parks died from cancer. Yesterday many of the volunteers, rescuers, and shelter employees who had worked with her participated in a massive rescue of animals from the Wasco shelter, in her memory. Over 50 at-risk cats and dogs were pulled from the badly overcrowded shelter. What a great tribute to a rescuer. Thanks to Mark Penn for letting me know about this event. The Wasco Facebook page has many of the happy stories. The goal of the Million Cat Challenge is to save 1 million cats over a 5-year period. At the rate that results are pouring in, they may have to raise their goal. The Challenge was just launched a little more than 6 months ago, and the ticker is already up to over 240,000 cats saved. The map of participating organizations is getting really crowded. Lost Dogs of Wisconsin is running an in-depth series of articles on microchips. Part 1 is on the “900” microchips. Part 2 is on searching the database. A grand jury has found insufficient evidence to charge the Texas veterinarian who allegedly killed a cat with a bow and arrow. The ALDF has requested records on the case. After the decision was announced, Alley Cat Allies held workshops in Texas on humane cat care and anti-cruelty laws, followed by vigils. In transport news, 26 dogs and cats were flown from Oklahoma to Colorado. Charleston Animal Society in South Carolina is flying 38 dogs to Everett, Washington. The numbers add up. The Boston Globe reports that shelters in Massachusetts, including the Massachusetts SPCA and the Animal Rescue League of Boston, have seen substantial drops in cat intake since 2010. The shelters attribute the drop to spay and neuter efforts, and mention funding by PetSmart Charities and the state as supporting those efforts. Cat Cafe news: In Philadelphia. In Washington, DC. In San Francisco. And Montreal is opening North America’s first vegan cat cafe. The Best Friends Kitten Nursery in Salt Lake City, which is part of the organization’s No Kill Utah effort, has helped almost 600 kittens since its mid-March opening. A Wall Street Journal article reports that some rescues are curtailing pulls from New York City’s Animal Care Centers (formerly Animal Care and Control). Since New York City has made progress toward No Kill largely though the efforts of its coalition of rescues, this is not good news. The rescues argue that they are receiving sick animals that they cannot afford to rehabilitate. The shelter argues that it has preventive medicine protocols in place but that it receives many animals who have not had regular veterinary care and who come into the shelter with disease burdens.

Chaffee County is located in a mountainous, rural area of Colorado west of Colorado Springs. It has a 2010 population of 18,000 people, including the towns of Buena Vista (population 2600) and Salida (5200), the county seat. Animal sheltering is provided for the county and its cities by the Ark-Valley Humane Society (AVHS). I called AVHS and was told by a shelter official that the county has two animal control officers, one each in Buena Vista and Salida. AVHS does not have a formal contract with the county, but the animal control officers bring strays to AVHS for impounding. AVHS also takes in owner surrenders. The shelter does not have a surrender fee for county residents, but does charge a fee for out-of-county surrenders. The shelter official told me that AVHS does not have a waiting list or a requirement for an appointment. The shelter has several initiatives, including low-income spay-neuter assistance and Trap-Neuter-Return for feral cats, and an active volunteer program. AVHS has two shelters. The main shelter is located in Buena Vista and a satellite, called the Sunshine Shelter, is located in Poncha Springs. This video offers a look at the Sunshine Shelter. One unique thing about it is a garden filled with cat-and-dog themed outdoor sculptures by local artists. The AVHS 2012 annual report describes how the Sunshine Shelter has enabled AVHS to meet the needs of cats in Chaffee County and help other shelters with cats. Animal shelters in Colorado report to the state Department of Agriculture. AVHS’s two shelters report separately. The total intake of the two shelters as reported to the state was 1269 animals in 2012 (the intake of 988 animals stated in the AVHS 2012 Annual Report does not include the animals that AVHS took in from other shelters). This is a very high intake of about 70 animals per 1000 people. The live release rate for 2012 including dispositions of the transferred animals was 96% (95% if animals who died or were lost in shelter care are counted with euthanasias). In 2013, total intake for both shelters was 919 animals. The live release rate was 99% for the Buena Vista shelter and 97% for the Poncha Springs shelter. The modified live release rates were 98% and 96% respectively. Chaffee County, CO, was originally listed by this blog on October 26, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

According to a 2005 mayor’s task force report for the city of Houston and Harris County, animal shelters in the area killed 80,000 animals in 2004. The 2005 report gave total intake for the city and county’s 5 shelters as almost 120,000 animals in 2004. These numbers do not account for inter-shelter transfers, and the coverage area of the shelters may not coincide exactly with the boundaries of Harris County. And we do not know how much has changed since 2004, or exactly what was included in the 2004 intake numbers. But if the 2004 intake numbers still hold true today (as many local advocates claim), then with the county’s human population of 4.1 million there is shelter intake of about 29 per 1000 people. This is near the top of the estimated average range of 15 to 30 for shelter intake expressed as pets per thousand people (PPTP). There are communities in the United States with intake of 30 PPTP or above that manage to save all their healthy and treatable animals, but none that I know of that are as big as Houston and Harris County. The size of  the city is important because larger, more densely populated urban areas tend to have proportionally fewer housing units that allow pets, and therefore their adoption potential per thousand people is lower. The largest community I’m aware of that manages to maintain a high live release rate at a high PPTP is Washoe County, Nevada, which has a population of about 420,000 people and PPTP of 36. “No Kill” large cities generally have substantially lower PPTP than 30. Austin, for example, with shelter intake of about 17,000 last time I checked, and population of about 900,000, has a PPTP of about 20. Fairfax County, Virginia, in 2013 had a PPTP of 3.5. The Portland metro area has a PPTP of about 15. Atlanta is about 10. Even San Antonio appears to have had intake of only 23 PPTP recently. The state of Colorado, which was at a live release rate of 89% in 2013, had intake of 32 PPTP. The Colorado figure is not comparable to the large cities cited, however, since it includes intake from some private rescues as well as many small towns. In addition to the high shelter intake, there may be another factor at work in Houston, and that is the permanent stray population. The Houston shelters admit that they are not able to take in all the homeless animals in the city. When there are a lot of homeless animals in a city that are not being picked up and impounded, they compete with shelter animals for homes. If someone has three or four neighborhood cats hanging around, that person may be just as likely – or more likely – to take in one of those cats as to go to the shelter to adopt. If a rescue takes in a pregnant stray dog from the street and finds homes for her and her five puppies, that will be six less potential adopters at the city shelter. Thus, when we are trying to figure out how many animals a shelter in a particular city can adopt out, we must include the number of permanently homeless strays in with shelter intake, since all those animals are part of the pool of animals that potential adopters have available. How bad is Houston’s stray problem, and can it really be bad enough to seriously hamper the city’s effort to improve its live release rate? In the 1970s there was a nationwide pet overpopulation crisis, with shelter intake on average estimated as being some 5 times higher than it is today, plus a large number of dogs and cats in the environment who were never taken into shelters. A survey of mayors in 1974 showed that animal control issues were the number one complaint of citizens. Public health officials were concerned with the zoonosis threat from the large numbers of strays. Animal advocates reacted with a huge grassroots effort to get people to sterilize their cats and dogs. The effort was very successful, and animal shelter intake plummeted from an estimated 26 million nationwide in 1970 to 7 million in the year 2000. The number of animals killed in shelters during that time period dropped from roughly 23 million to 5 million. But there are still some places that never managed to fix their pet overpopulation problem. One of the people who is central to San Antonio’s No Kill effort told me that he had heard an estimate of 150,000 stray dogs in the city. Based on the number of dead dogs picked up by animal control in San Antonio my guess would be closer to 50,000 stray dogs, but whether it is 50,000 or 150,000, the city is not going to be a safe haven for all animals until it solves its stray problem. The estimate that you usually hear for Houston is that it has from 600,000 to 1.2 million stray dogs. At least one effort is ongoing to better quantify the number of strays. Sometimes estimates of strays are wildly overblown, and that may well be the case in Houston. The estimated numbers are not outside the bounds of possibility, though. In the early 1970s a respected scientist, Alan Beck, did an ecological survey of the free-roaming dog population in the city of Baltimore. He estimated a stray dog population of as many as 1,690 free-roaming dogs per square mile in one neighborhood and an average of up to 750 per square mile for the city as a whole, including wealthier neighborhoods with few strays. Houston has 600 square miles of land area according to the US census bureau. If Houston did have 1.2 million stray dogs that would be 2,000 strays per square mile. The lower end of the estimate of stray dogs in Houston of 600,000 would be about 1,000 per square mile. It may be that Houston’s lack of a zoning code (it is unique in this regard) and its geography, with four major bayous and their tributaries running through the city, have produced an environment that will support a large number of stray dogs. I suspect that the true number of stray dogs in Houston is less than 1.2 million, and perhaps even less than 600,000, but the higher number does not appear to be completely impossible given what was found in Baltimore in the 1970s. More importantly, the fact that the 1.2 million estimate may be overblown should not cause us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. All indications are that Houston does have a serious problem with a permanent homeless dog population. We cannot simply say that because the 1.2 million number may be overblown, therefore there is no stray crisis and the shelters are just making up an excuse to kill. On the contrary, whether the number of stray dogs is 1,200,000 or 600,000 or even less, it is still a serious problem that cannot be ignored in the city’s effort to reduce its kill rate. Look at it this way – even if the number of non-impounded stray dogs is only 120,000, that number is enough to crush the city’s animal sheltering system. If all of those stray dogs were impounded in one year, the PPTP for the county would be 59. No community I’m aware of has achieved a 90%+ live release rate with a PPTP of 50 or higher, except in a few cases of small communities that exported a large percentage of their shelter intake to other jurisdictions. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t see how any shelter director on earth, no matter how talented, could achieve No Kill in a jurisdiction the size of Harris County at an intake rate of 59 PPTP per year. At least not without transferring tens of thousands of animals out of the jurisdiction each year. So what can be done? In cities where owned dogs have a high sterilization rate the number of feral and permanently stray dogs declines almost to zero. It appears that the reproduction rate for stray dogs (unlike community cats) is not high enough to sustain a high stray population, given the hazards of cars and shelter killing, without input from unsterilized owned dogs. In cities with high rates of sterilization of owned dogs, almost all of the “stray” dogs that come into the shelter are not permanently homeless street dogs, but instead are lost or recently abandoned dogs. In Boulder, Colorado, for example, some 90% of stray dogs are returned to their owners. Houston’s apparently high population of permanently homeless street dogs may be an indication that unsterilized owned dogs are seeding the population of strays. In other words, Houston may be one of the few cities in the United States that has never fully dealt with the pet population crisis of the 1970s. It may be that the reason the number of stray dogs in Houston today is reported to rival or exceed the number of stray dogs in Baltimore in the 1970s is that Houston is still back in the 1970s in terms of spay-neuter rates for owned pets. Houston has recently made an agreement with Emancipet in an effort to get a large sterilization program going. This is a great step in the right direction, but the question is whether it will be enough. In the short term, until the stray problem is conquered, the city may need to redouble its efforts to transfer dogs out of the city to places that have a more manageable PPTP number. Houston already has a transfer program to send dogs to Colorado, and maybe they need to seek out other transfer partners as well. As for cats, BARC has joined the Million Cat Challenge, and if BARC fully implements the program that will go a long way toward reducing the rate of cat killing. There are four other shelters in the area, though, that do not appear to be implementing the Million Cat Challenge program. Only a few years ago the southern part of the United States was the place where No Kill hopes went to die. In the last five years we’ve had large jurisdictions like Austin (and nearby Williamson County), Atlanta, Jacksonville, and Tampa either getting to a 90%+ live release rate or making major progress. With Houston (and perhaps other cities in the south), however, we seem to still have the lingering problem of large numbers of strays, apparently being seeded by the owned-pet population. It’s a problem that needs to be fixed, both figuratively and literally, before Houston can truly be No Kill. And it is a problem that the entire community needs to tackle, not just the city, and not just the shelters. The shelters need to take responsibility to do the best they can, including full participation in the Million Cat Challenge and seeking out more opportunities for transfers, but the shelters are going to keep being overwhelmed as long as their intake is so high.

Midland County, as you would expect from the name, is located near the center of Michigan. It is primarily rural, neither wealthy nor poor, and has a population of over 80,000 people. The county seat is the city of Midland, which has about 42,000 people. Up until January 1, 2011, the county government handled animal control and sheltering. The live release rate for the county animal control office in 2010 was only 52% (scroll down in the link to Midland County Sheriff’s Office Animal Control). On January 1, 2011, the Humane Society of Midland County (HSOMC) took over the animal shelter and things quickly changed. The live release rate went up to 95% for the year 2011 (see “Humane Society of Midland County” in the link). The big difference was in adoptions. For example, under the county’s management in 2010 there were only 134 kittens adopted while 168 were killed. Under HMOSC in 2011, there were 605 kittens adopted and only 23 killed. The county adopted out 178 adult cats in 2010 and killed 530, whereas HSOMC in 2011 adopted out 611 and killed 67. In 2012 the live release rate improved slightly to 96%, with an intake of 2295 dogs and cats. In 2013, HSOMC won the Michigan Pet Fund Alliance award for outstanding medium-size shelter in the open-admission category. The shelter’s intake for the year was 2675 dogs and cats. It sterilized all animals before adoption, and did not report any transfers. Its live release rate was 97%. I called HSOMC and asked about their owner surrender policy. They accept surrenders from any county resident, if the resident has a valid driver’s license to prove residence. No appointment is required, but the shelter does charge a small fee ($25). In preparation for taking over animal control, HSOMC hired a new director in December 2010 — Beth Wellman. Wellman was previously shelter coordinator for the Ionia County Animal Shelter, which had an 84% live release rate in 2010 during her tenure. Midland County, MI, was originally listed by this blog on June 3, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

No Kill advocates rarely address financial issues in animal control and sheltering. That’s natural enough, because we believe that the primary reason shelters should want to save animals is that it is the right thing to do. When we do address finances we tend to look at it by comparing the revenue of kill versus No Kill shelters. Again, natural enough, because that is the most direct way of looking at how much No Kill costs. But there is another way of looking at animal shelter finances, and that is to ask what incentives are created by the method of funding. Although outcomes can have a big effect on the funding of private animal shelter organizations, outcomes may be having little or no effect on the funding of their municipal counterparts. And that is the problem we have to attack when dealing with municipal shelters. Municipal animal shelters and dog pounds started out back in the 1800s with payment for the employees based on the number of animals they impounded. This payment system has persisted up to today in many places, with cities funding animal control and sheltering entirely or in part based on the number of animals impounded. Outcome for the animals impounded is not a consideration in funding in these cities. Since space in shelters is limited, this funding method creates a very powerful and direct motive for shelter directors to have as much turnover in the shelter population as possible. That means getting animals out the door as quickly as possible. Killing is the fastest way to get an animal out the door, since an animal can be killed as soon as the hold time is up, and another animal put in its place. If funding is entirely based on intake, then the shelter director does not care if the shelter loses money on the disposition. The holy grail for a shelter funded on intake is to keep length of stay as short as possible, regardless of how that is done. We as advocates have been stressing the fact that it can be cheaper to adopt out an animal than to pay the cost of killing it and disposing of the body, and that the cheapest thing of all is to keep animals from coming in the door in the first place. Those arguments are not going to impress a shelter director who is paid based on intake numbers, though. That shelter director is not going to care whether he or she makes money on each animal “transaction.” The only thing that matters is intake, because the cost effectiveness of disposition does not affect the money they receive from the municipality. When a shelter is funded based on intake, the director has a very powerful incentive to oppose any measure that would reduce intake. Help desk? No way. Diverting cats to a community cat program? Not going to do it unless they can be impounded first. Returning animals in the field? Forget it. Spay and neuter? Shelter directors will give lip service to spay and neuter, but how enthusiastic will they be about it when a successful spay and neuter program will reduce their funding? Funding a shelter based solely on intake is also a motive to label as many animals as possible “unadoptable” due to bad temperament. If an animal has a bad temperament it will be killed as soon as the hold time is up. Then the shelter can take in another animal and make more money. When I first started looking at shelter statistics, I thought the ridiculously high number of “behavior” killings in traditional shelters was just a way to disguise killing for time or space. It is that, but it is also a way to institutionalize a short length of stay. All the incentives connected with funding shelters based on intake are wrong. We advocates wonder sometimes why traditional shelters are so reluctant to change. Maybe we should be looking at the incentives that are in place due to the way the shelter is funded. Private, non-profit shelters, even those with contracts to run municipal shelters, are not as subject to these bad incentives because they do not need to rely solely on the municipality for their income. They have an incentive to save as many animals as possible because their ability to fundraise depends in large part on how well they do at saving animals. This is one reason why so many No Kill communities today have their animal sheltering done by a non-profit. So, how to fix this? I think we need to consider whether the way we as advocates have approached the issue of finances is the best approach. We have tried to argue that No Kill is cheaper, but we have done so on the basis of what amounts to anecdotes and best-case scenarios. City officials are not going to be swayed by slick brochures prepared by advocates. Before they will believe that No Kill is cheaper than catch-and-kill they would need to see professionally audited comparisons prepared by neutral auditors, and I’m not aware that any such audits have been done. There are so many moving parts to No Kill transitions, and cities are so different, that I’m not sure such audits even could be done in a meaningful way. Personally, I think we should be arguing based not on whether live releases are cheaper, but on what the tax payers want. The evidence I’ve seen, based on the success of ballot measures to support better animal sheltering with tax dollars, is that people overwhelmingly want their local shelters to save animals and they are willing to pay for it. Another sound argument is that there are intangible benefits to No Kill that are not captured by a dollar-and-cents analysis. This argument is supported by the fact that the best cities in the country are overwhelmingly either already No Kill or working on getting there. Local advocates who are trying to reform shelters might want to make record requests to educate themselves on exactly how the local shelter is funded, and do surveys on what local people would be willing to spend in tax dollars on life-saving sheltering, before approaching city officials. Instead of berating traditional shelter officials for being evil people, we should look at the incentives they are working with, and try to change those incentives when they are bad. One final note – a very quick way to change the incentives is for local advocates to start their own non-profit to take over the municipal sheltering contract or pull large numbers of animals from the shelter. A non-profit animal shelter that is supported in part or entirely by public donations makes money by saving animals’ lives and does not have to deal with the perverse financial incentives that afflict city shelters. This approach can work even in a city where tax payers are not willing to pay for a better municipal shelter, where current shelter management is so bad that it’s abusive, or where city officials turn a deaf ear.

Eagle County is in a mountainous area of Colorado west of Denver, and has about 52,000 people. The county government provides animal control and sheltering through Eagle County Animal Services (ECAS). An ECAS representative told me that, in addition to serving the unincorporated county, the shelter has contracts to provide animal services to all the municipalities within Eagle County. The towns within the county include Avon (population 6000), Basalt (4000), Eagle (7000), Gypsum (6000) and Vail (5000). The representative said that ECAS takes in owner surrenders when they have room. The Eagle Valley Humane Society (EVHS), a private non-profit, is also located in Eagle County. A representative of EVHS told me that they take in owner surrenders with no conditions. EVHS has several programs, including a trap-neuter-return program for feral cats and free obedience classes and counseling for adopters. ECAS and EVHS are independent organizations and, although they both serve Eagle County, they do not have a public-private partnership. In 2010, ECAS reported an intake of 590 animals and a live release rate of 97% (scroll down in the link). The rate was 95% if a modified live release rate is calculated including the categories of owner-requested euthanasia and died or lost in shelter care in with euthanasia. EVHS reported a 97% live release rate and a 96% modified live release rate for 2010, with intake of 203. For 2011, ECAS again reported a 97% live release rate and a 95% modified live release rate, with intake of 583. EVHS in 2011 reported a 98% live release rate and a 97% modified live release rate, with intake of 231. Eagle County is one of a group of communities in the area west of Denver that report to Maddie’s Fund and the Asilomar Accords as part of the Northwestern Colorado Coalition. Other members of the coalition are Garfield, Pitkin, and Summit counties and the cities of Aspen, Rifle and Glenwood Springs. The coalition reported an overall 97% live release rate in 2010 and 98% in 2011 (see pages 1-2 in the links). Both ECAS and EVHS report their statistics yearly to the state of Colorado. In 2012, ECAS took in 708 animals and EVHS took in 155. ECAS’s live release rate was 91%, and the EVHS live release rate was 99%. For 2013, ECAS took in 513 animals with a live release rate of 91%. The  live release rate including shelter deaths as part of the euthanasia category was 90%. EVHS took in 204 animals including 136 strays and owner surrenders, 76 transfers from within the state, and 10 transfers from out of state. EVHS had a 99.5% live release rate (97% including shelter deaths). Eagle County, CO, was originally listed by this blog on May 7, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

Washoe County in Nevada (population 421,000), includes the cities of Reno (population 225,000) and Sparks (90,000). The three jurisdictions have a public-private partnership for animal control and sheltering. The municipal Washoe County Regional Animal Services (WCRAS) handles animal control for all three jurisdictions. WCRAS is known for its very successful return-to-owner program, which re-homes a high percentage of animals in the field and actively seeks to find the owners of impounded animals. The great majority of animals not returned to their owners are transferred to the private, non-profit Nevada Humane Society (NHS) for placement. NHS also handles intake of owner surrenders from Washoe County residents. The shelter requires an appointment and a small fee for surrenders. Leadership at WCRAS changed in 2012 with the retirement of its director, Mitch Schneider. Recently, WCRAS became a stand-alone department. In another big change, Bonney Brown, who started as director of NHS in 2007, resigned in 2013. A Best Friends blog from July 2011 provides a look at how she used pet retention and creative marketing, along with other programs, to reduce intake and increase live outcomes. The new director for NHS is Kevin Ryan, who was previously director of Pet Helpers, a non-profit in Charleston, South Carolina. Under Ryan’s leadership, Pet Helpers was credited with an initiative that increased the save rate in Charleston County from 37% to 77%. The combined statistics for WCRAS and NHS for 2012 showed a save rate of 92% for cats and dogs, calculated as a percentage of intake. For 2013, the save rate was 90%. The 2013 save rate includes deaths in shelter care with euthanasias. Combined intake was 15,350 in 2013, down slightly from 15,516 in 2012. Reno, Sparks, and Washoe County, Nevada, were originally listed by this blog on April 16, 2013, based on their 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.