OUT THE FRONT DOOR

San Antonio is a fast-growing city in south-central Texas with a population of 1.3 million people.  It is the county seat of Bexar County. Greater San Antonio has a population of over 2.2 million people. In 2006, San Antonio Animal Care Services (ACS) had a live release rate of only 10%. At that time, the shelter put forth a strategic plan to achieve live release of all adoptable animals by 2012. The shelter failed to reach the goal, however, and in September of 2011 it put forth a new strategic plan in which it acknowledged that its live release rate was only 31%. The 2011 strategic plan identified three elements as “critical” to achieving a high live release rate: (1) a strong licensing program, (2) spay/neuter partnerships, and (3) high-volume rescue partnerships. The report noted that San Antonio “has existing strong spay/neuter partnerships, and has simplified the licensing program within the past year.” As to the third element, the report stated that the city “is challenging the animal welfare community to take on an additional 6,000 animals annually from ACS shelters.” There have been many changes since the 2011 plan was released. Early in 2012, the city announced that Austin Pets Alive!, which had been helping ACS, was ready to partner with the city of San Antonio through a new organization, San Antonio Pets Alive!. The San Antonio Humane Society took in over 2000 pets from ACS in 2012, as well as accepting animals directly from the public. Late in 2012, ACS welcomed a new director, Kathy Davis. The city announced an agreement with another non-profit, the Animal Defense League of Texas, which manages a 2.2 million dollar shelter built by the city. In 2013, San Antonio gave up handling animal control and sheltering for the unincorporated parts of Bexar County. The No Kill city of Kirby may partner with Bexar County to construct and manage a new shelter. San Antonio recently announced that for the year 2014, ACS had an 84% live release rate. The shelter’s live release rate for cats is 92%, and only adult dogs are still under 90%. ACS has joined the Million Cat Challenge, and Davis said that San Antonio was proud to be a part of the Challenge as a city that had gotten to No Kill status for cats. If the current rate of improvement continues, San Antonio’s overall live release rate could go above 90% in 2015. San Antonio is counted in the blog’s Running Totals as an 80-90% community.

Whidbey Island, which is part of Island County, Washington, is at the northern edge of Puget Sound, 30 miles north of Seattle. The island has over 58,000 residents and its largest city, Oak Harbor, has about 22,000 people. The Whidbey Animals’ Improvement Foundation (WAIF) handles animal sheltering for the island. WAIF contracts with Island County and the city of Oak Harbor to provide shelter services, although the contract payments do not cover the total cost for the services. WAIF, a non-profit, fund-raises for the remainder. WAIF has a holding facility for strays in Oak Harbor. Unclaimed strays are transferred to WAIF’s main shelter in Coupeville, about 10 miles from Oak Harbor. The shelter has weekend hours on both Saturday and Sunday. WAIF also has a cat adoption center in Oak Harbor, and a “cat cottage” in Freeland, Washington. Construction is underway on a new shelter located on a 10-acre site, with completion anticipated this fall. WAIF reports live release rates above 90% since 2005, with the exception of two years when it was at 89%. The live release rate for 2014 was 95%. In 2014, WAIF had intake of 841 animals, down from 903 in 2013. The shelter returned 75% of dogs to their owners in 2014 and 6% of cats, far above national averages in both categories.  Adoptions were 64% of live outcomes. Whidbey Island is counted in the Running Totals as a 90% community.

The Association of Shelter Veterinarians (ASV) has a series of position statements that it has promulgated on various issues such as TNR, pediatric spay-neuter, pound seizure, etc. Right now, the ASV has a draft position statement called “The Use of ‘No-Kill’ Terminology” that is open for member comment until August 15th. You can read the draft here. I’m not a veterinarian or a member of the ASV, so my vote does not count, but if I had a vote on this draft position statement the vote would be “no.” The draft is three short paragraphs. The first paragraph seems pretty harmless other than requiring the reader to negotiate through two sentences of poorly written committee-speak. It isn’t quite word salad, but almost. I think the idea of the paragraph is that animal shelters should always put the needs of animals first, regardless of whether the shelters call themselves “No Kill” or not. I don’t disagree with that sentiment, although it seems so obvious that I wonder why it is necessary to spend one-third of the position statement on it. Moving on to the second paragraph, the ASV draft says that “No-Kill” terminology is unclear because it can be used to refer to any of a series of euthanasia policies along a “spectrum” that ranges from (I’m paraphrasing here for brevity and clarity) (1) not killing for time or space, (2) not killing healthy animals, (3) not killing treatable animals, and finally (4) not killing animals at all. The paragraph ends by stating: “As such, the ASV discourages the use of terminology that defines an organization based on euthanasia practices.” I agree that the term “No Kill” is ambiguous and means different things to different people, but it seems to me that the ASV is throwing the baby out with the bathwater in saying that, because the term “No Kill” is ambiguous, shelters should not define themselves based on euthanasia policy. If the problem is the ambiguity of the No Kill term, the solution is to use other terms that are clear, not to stop talking about euthanasia. In fact, that last sentence in the second paragraph could be taken to recommend against a shelter adopting any euthanasia policy at all. Surely the ASV cannot have intended to come to that conclusion. I think what the ASV is trying to say in the second paragraph is that shelters should not label themselves “No Kill,” but it’s disappointing that a paragraph that takes No Kill to task on the ground of ambiguity is itself so ambiguous. But it gets worse. The third paragraph is the doozy. The third paragraph argues that shelters, in addition to sometimes needing to euthanize animals who are untreatable or are public health threats, should have the option to kill animals for time or space (they call it exceeding capacity for care). Specifically, the draft position paper says, apparently with approval, that “euthanasia of healthy and treatable companion animals is sometimes utilized in order to maintain a shelter’s capacity for humane care.” Yikes. This is no longer dealing with just “terminology,” which is the ostensible subject of the draft. Instead, the third paragraph has veered over into substantive policy by stating that capacity issues sometimes require shelters to kill animals. Did the ASV really mean to stick this gigantic policy conclusion into the third paragraph of a position paper that is supposed to be about what words we use? There are currently shelters all over the United States – open admission municipal shelters – that deal with time and space (aka capacity for care) issues without either killing healthy and treatable animals or allowing them to suffer. There are ASV veterinarians who work in such shelters and have been a very big part of their success. Surely the ASV does not really mean to endorse what this draft paragraph says. I strongly advise the ASV Position Statement Committee and ASV board to ditch this document and start over. First, figure out what you want to say. Do you oppose No Kill terminology because it is ambiguous, or because it is divisive, or both? Or do you oppose No Kill itself as a substantive matter because you believe that shelters should have the option to kill for time or space? These are all separate topics and should not be mushed together, as they are in the logical hash that is this draft position paper. If you oppose No Kill terminology because it is ambiguous, it does not logically follow from that alone that organizations should not define themselves based on euthanasia policies. If a term is unclear, it makes perfect sense to recommend that the term not be used at all, or not be used unless it is clarified by context. It does not make sense to conclude that the whole topic that the ambiguous term refers to (in this case, euthanasia policies) should be declared off limits. If you are opposed to No Kill itself as a substantive matter (rather than just the terminology) because you believe that shelters should have the option to kill for time or space — honestly, that is not the kind of thing that you can toss off in one short paragraph in a position paper, especially a position paper that is ostensibly about terminology. And especially without any explanation of why you have decided that capacity issues cannot be dealt with by means other than killing. That third paragraph says something that I can’t believe you really meant to say. The question of whether shelters have to kill for capacity reasons is the most important issue in animal sheltering today. You don’t need to poke this metaphorical elephant, because everyone knows that it is a complicated issue that we are all wrestling with. Taking the attitude that it is a fit topic for a throwaway sentence in a position paper that is ostensibly on another topic is incomprehensible. If you are determined to address this topic, you owe it to your profession not to do it in the careless, poorly written, poorly organized, logically incoherent, ambiguous, and superficial way embodied in this draft. Shelter medicine in general, and the ASV in particular, are critically important to shelter lifesaving. A great deal of the progress that has occurred in shelter lifesaving since 1999 is directly due to shelter medicine. ASV veterinarians are at the forefront of some of the most effective innovations in lifesaving that are being made in sheltering today. Everyone who supports shelter reform, whether they call it “No Kill” or something else, has a stake in seeing the ASV succeed and grow. Don’t embarrass yourselves by adopting this deeply flawed document as a position statement of your organization.

One of the first things that new students learn about in law school is the famous 1803 Supreme Court case of Marbury v. Madison, which was decided when our country was still new. That was an exciting time, because the fundamentals of how our country was going to operate were being created and put into place. Marbury v. Madison was important because it held that it was the duty of the courts to “say what the law is.” From that day forward, the courts have been the final word in interpreting the law. Who has the final word in saying what No Kill is? Who speaks for No Kill? No Kill is very different from the law. While the law is a set of rules, No Kill is a process. While the law must treat each citizen equally, No Kill must be applied in a wide variety of different circumstances. And while the law is designed to provide a stable framework that gives society a certain consistency and predictability, No Kill is constantly changing as new techniques evolve and progress is made. Although the concept of a lawgiver from on high does not fit very well with the ethos of No Kill, there is another great American institution that fits No Kill perfectly – the public square. The public square in the early days of the United States was a literal place in the center of town where people would gather to debate the issues affecting them and decide what to do about those issues. It was quintessential democracy, and it had all the strong points and the discomforts of pure democracy. There were lots of different viewpoints, lots of creativity, and lots of conflict. It was not a particularly comfortable process, but out of it arose the wisdom of the people. The miracle of democracy is that you can take a bunch of average people, put them together, give them a problem to solve or an issue to decide, and more times than not they will come up with a pretty good solution. The process of the public square is not perfect, because it can be demagogued or highjacked. Over the years our constitution has been amended and interpreted to include protections for small, disfavored groups, so that we can be sure that everyone has a voice in the public square. Today the “public square” is more often metaphorical than real, as we carry on our debates in print, on television, and by social media. Richard Avanzino, the person who created the idea of No Kill communities at the San Francisco SPCA in the years from 1979 to 1994, would, I think, agree with the idea of the American people as the voice of No Kill. Avanzino believes that each person’s contribution, whether it be fostering an occasional pet or starting a rescue or running a No Kill city or running an advocacy organization, is an important part of No Kill. He told me that he does not believe that No Kill is a cookbook, and that he would never presume to tell a community how they should go about No Kill or what would work for them. He is a fan of bottom-up thinking, not top-down. In fact, what we think of today as the core components of the San Francisco approach to No Kill morphed over time, developing organically from the experience and creativity of volunteers and staff. The offsite adoption program, which dates back to 1980, started when volunteers decided to take shelter pets downtown to their work places at lunch hour so their fellow workers could see them. That worked well and the initiative grew. Eventually the SPCA made offsite adoptions a formal part of operations, and the program developed to the point of having several sites around town with dedicated vans for setting up in the morning, delivering more animals during the day, and breaking down the sites at night. It all started with the ideas of volunteers. Today I frequently see people make statements about what “No Kill” means, or how a shelter or community should get to No Kill – or an accusation that some shelter or community is not really No Kill. I see people proposing that new No Kill advocates should be instructed in a certain way – told that they have to use a cookbook, or that the traditional shelter establishment is full of uncaring people and it is always a waste of time to work with them. I see people issuing edicts about the “right” way to calculate live release rates. Anyone who has a different idea on any of these points is called an enemy of No Kill, or worse. We need to counter these attempts to shut down dialogue. We need to make a conscious effort to ensure that No Kill sticks with its roots as a democratic creation – a bottom up process based on creativity, open-mindedness, and a belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity. No one individual or group has the right to define No Kill or to speak for No Kill. Instead, we should all have the right to be heard and speak our minds without fear of being insulted or ridiculed. Out of that process will emerge a consensus that shows the way forward in each time and place. That has historically been the strength of the No Kill movement. We got where we are today by creativity and inclusiveness, not by following rules or shutting people out. We must keep our public square open and free, and resist those who want their voices to be the only ones heard.

There have been two very important trends in No Kill in 2014. First is the expansion of the movement to include a lot more leaders with a variety of approaches, and second is the creativity demonstrated by brand new techniques and programs for lifesaving. These new trends mean that the movement expanded both in breadth and depth in 2014. The increase in the number of leaders has resulted in No Kill progressing beyond an earlier stage as a rather monolithic movement. As interest in the movement has grown, it has branched out in many different directions. We now have several different theories of how to approach No Kill, each one with its adherents. This has led to some splitting of the movement. I see this as healthy, because it means that ideas can be tested against each other and that No Kill can be adapted to different circumstances. One of the differences in approach is a growing distinction between top-down and bottom-up reform. Top-down reform involves trying to get a city or county to do the heavy lifting of shelter reform, and uses pressure from citizens to force or persuade the local government to replace shelter management with No Kill management and commit whatever resources are needed. Bottom-up involves citizens improving the shelter themselves, by methods ranging from volunteer involvement to formation of one or more non-profits to take over specific tasks or even bid on the shelter contract. The top down approach seems to work well in places where local government is disposed to be, or can be persuaded to be, engaged and sympathetic. Bottom up seems to work well where local government is disinterested or hostile, or where top down has been tried and failed for some reason. Bottom up can gradually bring about a change for the better in the attitude of the local government as citizens prove that No Kill ideas can work and be cost-effective. 2014 has been the year of the No Kill consultant. More and more, cities and counties are turning to consultants to help them with the many choices to make in finding No Kill techniques to fit their particular circumstances. This is a trend with a lot of potential, and it illustrates the fact that No Kill can be somewhat daunting for local governments. The steps a city or county needs to take depend on where the community is starting from and the local circumstances. Good consultants can help local governments sort all that out. Consultants are a new leadership class in No Kill. As time goes on their experience in many different communities can be invaluable for helping No Kill chart its future course. There is no substitute for recent, boots-on-the-ground experience in a wide variety of circumstances. No Kill consultants can serve as a bridge or compromise between the top down and bottom up approaches. Consultants often seem to be brought in where local governments want to make some changes but they do not want to be on the hook for doing something radical, or they are simply uncertain who to listen to. Consultants might, depending on the circumstances, suggest leadership, operational, or program changes. Consultants can also uncover problems that no one realized were there, as with the recent Manatee County, Florida, report which found that very few shelter employees supported No Kill. Perhaps that was due to very poor previous implementation of No Kill, but whatever the cause it is a problem that must be addressed. The demand for consultants is part of a growing recognition and acceptance of the fact that No Kill is not just a simple matter of plugging in modular programs. In the past, sometimes No Kill advocates seem to have felt like they had to present No Kill as a cheap, one-size-fits-all set of programs that gave immediate results when properly implemented. This simplistic approach was perhaps motivated by a fear that acknowledging that No Kill could be complicated might lead to resistance on the part of government officials. Today, as cultural ideas about the value of pets have continued to change and improve, citizens do not have to be so defensive in asking for shelters to do better. Large national organizations like HSUS and the ASPCA have been assuming more and more of a leadership role in No Kill. Both HSUS and the ASPCA have signed on to some radical new ideas for how shelters should handle cats, and this has helped greatly with the acceptance and rapid spread of those new ideas. Large mainstream national organizations can serve a similar function to consultants in making it palatable for local officials to implement No Kill ideas. By giving No Kill ideas their imprimatur, the large national organizations can take the weight of decision-making off the shoulders of local officials who may know little about sheltering. In the past there has been some degree of mistrust and separation between No Kill and the large national organizations, HSUS and the ASPCA. Some elements of No Kill have viewed HSUS and the ASPCA as enemies of No Kill, and in the past there have been some pretty hard words said on both sides. To the extent that this was ever appropriate, it no longer is. Unfortunately, there is one exception to this new era of cooperation and respect between the large national organizations and No Kill, and that is PETA. PETA appears to still be stuck in a mode of implacable opposition to No Kill. Another trend in No Kill in 2014 is that it is now big business. When I first started documenting No Kill communities about four years ago, the great majority of the communities I researched were small, and many of them were tiny. Today I don’t even bother trying to keep track of all the new small communities that are popping up with No Kill efforts, because I’m too busy trying to keep up with the bigger cities. Along with the increasing diversity of No Kill leadership, we have had broad acceptance of some groundbreaking new ideas in 2014. These are brand new No Kill programs for how to reduce intake and increase live releases. One really important thing about these new programs is that they are user-friendly because they make a shelter’s job easier, not harder. For example, a program of leaving community cats in place or offering shelter-neuter-return can be easier than picking up stray cats, holding them for several days, and then killing them. And a managed admissions program makes a shelter’s workload easier to handle than random drop-offs. Marketing has been a linchpin of No Kill for some time, but it continues to grow and change. 2014 was the year the mega-adoption event went mainstream, with many communities having one or more giant adoption events in venues that get a lot of foot traffic. Mega-adoption events are becoming community festivals that go far beyond the traditional shelter adoption special. They fit in very well with the idea that the local shelter should be an integral part of the community. Shelter marketing is spreading into more and more venues. A couple of the more striking new marketing ideas in 2014 were cut-outs of available pets lounging on sofas and chairs at furniture stores, and shelter pets being integrated into a traditional production of the Nutcracker. One way to look at this explosion of new leaders and new ideas in 2014 is that it represents No Kill getting back to its roots. When No Kill was developing in the 1980s and 1990s, it was very creative and new leaders and new ideas were welcomed. Then No Kill went through a period of regimentation where many advocates believed that there was only one right way to get to No Kill, and any deviation from that one right way had to be summarily rejected and fiercely criticized. In 2014 it has become unmistakable that we are now in an era where once again new leaders and ideas are welcomed. That may be the most important takeaway from 2014.

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.

The Association of Shelter Veterinarians (ASV) has removed its draft statement on No-Kill terminology, which was in a comment period. Thank you ASV for listening to people’s concerns. PetSmart Charities has issued an in-depth report on how San Antonio went from killing 90% of shelter animals 10 years ago to saving almost 90% today. The turnaround happened in several steps, including a planned effort to get all the animal welfare organizations working together, removing legal barriers to TNR, finding high-volume rescue partners, establishment of an adoption center, and massive spay-neuter efforts for owned pets. San Antonio was one of the few cities that in 2005, ten years ago, still had a serious problem of permanently homeless dogs roaming the streets, not to mention lots of community cats. Thanks to spay-neuter and TNR, the populations of free-roaming cats and dogs are down. Still, the San Antonio organizations handle a lot of animals – adopting over 24,000 cats and dogs and transferring more than 13,000 a year. The community also spays or neuters 58,000 dogs and cats per year. An important part of the story has been funding, which has come in part from the San Antonio Area Foundation, Best Friends, and PetSmart Charities. San Antonio is an amazing No Kill success story, and kudos to PetSmart Charities for providing this analysis. The Humane Society for Tacoma and Pierce Counties, in Takoma, Washington, wants to change the image of free-roaming cats. Instead of calling them “feral” they have moved to using the term “community” to describe free-roaming cats. They hope this change will help people realize that not all free-roaming cats are wild. The humane society is also trying to change the reputation of stray cats, stressing that they control rodent population. In addition to the new image for community cats, the shelter has a TNR program for them that has resulted in decreased intake. In Pima County, Arizona, the local No Kill group is partnering with the shelter to get special-needs animals adopted. No Kill Pima County, in collaboration with the shelter, has created a website to feature adoptable animals who might otherwise get overlooked because they are older or have handicaps. Hank’s Flights, a volunteer-pilot transport group based in Montgomery County, Texas, has transported 183 dogs and 20 cats since it started up in October 2014. Hank’s Flights is run by two families, and the pilots are brothers Howard and George Turek. They also volunteer with an organization that provides air transport for veterans. More good news from Baton Rouge, where the Companion Animal Alliance is continuing its efforts to make the city No Kill. Local rescue groups have stepped up their efforts to recruit fosters for animals at the city shelter, and it has paid off with 245 dogs and 86 cats going into their foster programs in the first quarter of 2015. One foster family has provided a temporary home for 15 dogs in the past year. The Stockton, California shelter continued its effort to reduce shelter killing recently with a free adoption Sunday. The Stockton shelter is running at a 79% live release rate for the first 6 months of 2015, compared to 75% for all of 2014 and 50% for all of 2013. The big improvement from 2013 to 2014 was primarily due to support from the San Francisco SPCA. Since the first 6 months of the year includes the worst part of kitten season, it is possible that the Stockton shelter will be over 80% for the year. Intake for the first 6 months of 2015 was 5,643 dogs and cats. A new director, Phillip Zimmerman, started at the shelter in January. The board of the tiny Alger County Animal Shelter, which is No Kill, unexpectedly fired director Kathy Glish recently, and some local residents are not happy. All but one board member of the shelter resigned after the backlash to the firing, so perhaps a reconciliation is still possible. Here is a nice feature about the Palm Springs Animal Shelter, and their turnaround from saving under 50% of intake four years ago to over 95% today. The key has been a public-private partnership between the city and the Friends of the Palm Springs Animal Shelter. NBC and Telemundo are hosting a Clear The Shelters day on August 15th. Quite a few large cities are participating, including over 30 local shelters in the Chicago area and over 40 shelters in the San Francisco Bay area.

Duluth, Minnesota, is a city of 86,000 people located at the western tip of Lake Superior. The city of Superior, Wisconsin (population 27,000), is just across the bay from Duluth. The metro area of the two cities is referred to as the Twin Ports. Duluth has a city animal control department and a shelter where strays are held for several days. If an animal is not reclaimed during the hold period, it goes to the Animal Allies Humane Society. An Animal Allies shelter official told me in a telephone conversation that Animal Allies contracts with Duluth and three additional jurisdictions in Minnesota for animal sheltering — Hermantown (population 9000), Proctor (population 3000), and the southern sector of St. Louis County. Animal Allies also signed a contract starting January 1, 2012 for animal sheltering for the city of Superior. Animal Allies has shelter facilities in Duluth and Superior. Animal Allies accepts owner surrenders by appointment. The shelter official told me that they try to schedule appointments as they have room for intake, but they make exceptions and will take in an animal immediately if an owner cannot wait for a spot to open up. Animal Allies launched the Campaign for Zero in 2010 for the city of Duluth. They describe the campaign this way: “This campaign aimed to eliminate the euthanasia of healthy cats and dogs entering both shelters in the Duluth community.  January 1, 2011 marked its successful completion and since then, saving the lives of every healthy pet, in addition to scores of treatable animals, continues to be achieved by progressive spay/neuter, adoption, and humane education initiatives. When Animal Allies began operating the City of Superior owned shelter on January 1, 2012, the Campaign for Zero expanded with the organization.” Animal Allies has statistics posted on their website for 2009 through 2011 for the Duluth community (Animal Allies and Duluth Animal Control),  and for the Twin Ports area (including Superior) for 2012 and 2013. The live release rate was 88% in 2009 and 93% in 2010, the first year of the Campaign for Zero. For 2011, the coalition reported a 95% live release rate. The 2012 Twin Ports live release rate was 97%. In 2013, the Twin Ports live release rate was again 97%, with a total intake of 3334. The live release rate for 2013 was 95% if owner-requested euthanasia and animals who died or were lost in shelter care are included. Duluth, MN, was originally listed by this blog on April 17, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

Polk County, located in the North Carolina foothills southeast of Asheville, has a human population of 21,000. The Foothills Humane Society (FHS) is a non-profit animal shelter that handles stray intake and animal sheltering for all of Polk County. The shelter also serves towns in northern Greenville and Spartanburg counties over the border in South Carolina, which adds about 4,000 to the human population served by the shelter. The shelter describes itself as “open admission.” FHS reports very high save rates. On a website page that is no longer available, the shelter reported that its save rates were 98.7% in 2010, 97.8% in 2011, and 98.9% in 2012 (the 2011 statistics are available here, and 11-month statistics for 2012 here). They reported taking in 1705 cats and dogs in 2012, including feral cats. The shelter e-mailed me their full statistics for 2012 upon request, which verify the 98.9% figure for that year. The shelter reported no owner-requested euthanasia, and had a 97% live release rate if the “died or lost in shelter care” category is included in euthanasias. For 2013, the shelter reported that it “maintained a 98% placement (live release) rate.” Intake was 1202 animals, or 1609 if feral cats are included. One of the big reasons for the success of FHS is the Po’ Kitties program, which was started in 2007. Po’ Kitties performs TNR on feral cats in the shelter’s service area, and is the default solution for feral cats. It appears to have reduced euthanasia of feral cats to near zero. FHS reports that Po’ Kitties served 540 cats in 2012 and 407 in 2013. FHS has implemented many improvements and programs in recent years. In an annual report that is no longer available online, FHS reported that it renovated its shelter in 2012, adding a catio and an intake center. It offered low-cost spay-neuter services, including free spay-neuter for pit bulls. The shelter supplied donated cat and dog food to recipients of the Meals on Wheels program and to owners who could not afford pet food. Another key to the shelter’s success was its foster program. The shelter reported that in 2011, 262 animals went into foster. FHS also had an active transfer program, transferring 350 animals to rescue in 2011 and 393 in 2012. In 2013, the shelter reports that it increased its return-to-owner rate by 32%, purchased a transport van with an ASPCA grant, and partnered with 30 rescue groups. It continued its shelter improvements, one of which was the addition of an on-site emergency shelter for horses. The shelter had over 100 volunteers who logged 5700 hours in 2013, and 52 active foster homes. Polk County, NC, is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

If you follow some of the most popular No Kill social media sites, you might get the idea that things for shelter animals are terrible. Those sites feature an onslaught of negative news – cruel acts by shelter workers, mistakes by ACOs, indifference by city leaders. Today I want to give everyone a “good news” break by taking a look at the bigger picture, which is amazing. Shelter save rates have been climbing steadily for the last 20 years. As of the year 2000, live release rates were about 25% nationwide, up from 10% in earlier years. From 2000 to 2010, the nationwide live release rate doubled, going from about 25% to 50%. In the last 5 years that progress has continued, with the rate going up to 65% or even 70%. That’s huge. The glass is now 2/3 full. It’s interesting to note that the progress in shelter save rates parallels the progress of the internet. In the 20 years that Petfinder has been in existence, the estimated live release rate nationwide has gone from perhaps 10% to 70%. Petfinder was the first website that allowed shelters to market their animals directly to adopters. For shelters that had no advertising budgets in the 1990s and few employees with marketing skills, Petfinder was a game-changer. It was an entirely new way of communicating with adopters that went beyond anything that had been available previously. The ability to market pets through Petfinder was also a major stimulus for the formation of rescues, which had suffered from the same marketing problems as shelters. The number of rescues in the period from 1995 to today has probably increased even faster than the live release rate. The progress in shelter save rates also correlates with the increase in the spay-neuter rates for owned pets, starting in the early 1970s and including the advent of pediatric sterilization in the 1990s. In 1970 there were five times as many pets per thousand people in shelters as there are today, far more than any community could adopt out. From 1970 to 2000, humane advocates engaged in a massive spay-neuter campaign that caused shelter intakes to drop some 80% in relative terms. Without this, No Kill would not have been possible. The strongest advocates for the historic spay-neuter campaign from 1970 to 2000 were people in the traditional shelter industry. So you could say that it was the traditional shelter industry that paved the way for the advent of No Kill starting in the mid-1990s. Within the last 5 years many communities have topped out their live release rates, hitting 90% or more. Today we have Seattle, Portsmouth, San Francisco, Washington DC, Atlanta, Richmond, Denver, Austin, Salt Lake City, Jacksonville, New York City, Tampa, and Fairfax County, Virginia, at 80% or above. Many of those metro areas are over 90%. In most of these big cities people have been working diligently since the 1990s or early 2000s and have been slowly and steadily bringing up their live release rates. Today more than 35 million people in the United States live in a jurisdiction that is known to be saving 80% or more of shelter animals. If we add in all the jurisdictions that are at 80% but don’t publish their statistics, that number is probably 40 million or more. No Kill status has been recognized as an important attribute for a well-managed city. The number of people who want to adopt shelter dogs is approaching the number of shelter dogs needing homes. Transports have been professionalized and now run like well-oiled machines. The new cat paradigms offer a humane and sensible way for shelters to save every savable cat. Virtually all of the important stakeholders on the national scene are in agreement on the new cat paradigms. Some grass-roots No Kill advocates are critical of transports and the new cat paradigms. I hope they will give these programs a chance – after all, one of the big criticisms that No Kill advocates make of the traditional shelter industry is that it’s too quick to reject new ideas. No Kill advocates should not fall victim to that same mistake themselves. Amazing things are being done in shelter medicine. Back in the 1990s it was almost unheard-of for shelters to vaccinate on intake, something that is now becoming routine. The Association of Shelter Veterinarians was founded in 2001, and its growth has been phenomenal. Today, No Kill shelters can save a high percentage of parvo puppies and neonatal kittens. It used to be that heartworm and ringworm were death sentences, but today they are treated. Shelter veterinarians have gone beyond the traditional role of treating the sick and have become involved in shelter design, behavior interventions, and consulting. So don’t let the bad acts or indifference of some shelter workers and ACOs weigh you down. The No Kill communities movement that started in the mid-1990s is approaching its goal. With so much of the country already doing very well, the cities with the worst shelters and the rural counties and little towns that have not been paying much attention to their shelters will get the help they need to improve. As the problem areas dwindle in number we will be able to concentrate more resources on them and fix them faster. Things are getting better at such a rapid pace that it’s hard to keep up with all the good news.

Grand County is in north central Colorado and had a population of 15,000 people as of the 2010 census. Municipalities in Grand County include Granby (population 1700), Kremmling (1400), and Winter Park, a resort town with a permanent population of 1000. I spoke to an official at the Grand County Animal Shelter (GCAS), located in Granby, who told me that the county sheriff’s department runs the shelter. GCAS serves the entire county, including the towns, and there are no other shelters in the county. Grand County Pet Pals (GCPP) is a private non-profit that assists GCAS and maintains the GCAS website. Grand County is also home to Mountain Pet Rescue (MPR), a foster-based rescue located in Winter Park. MPR specializes in transporting heavy-coated dogs of the working breeds in from out of state. These dogs are popular in the Colorado mountains and MPR reports that there is a shortage of them. GCAS charges a $20 fee for owner surrenders. Sometimes they ask people to wait to surrender animals if the shelter is full, but they always make exceptions if the owner cannot wait or if they think the animal would be better off impounded. Their general rule is to accept owner surrenders only from their jurisdictions, but they have occasionally made exceptions in the past and taken surrenders from outside the jurisdiction. They do not have a TNR program, but they have live traps that they lend to people who trap ferals. The shelter then neuters the cats and places them as barn cats. Shelters in Colorado report their statistics to the state’s Department of Agriculture each year. In 2012, GCAS took in 309 dogs and cats. This is an intake of 21 pets per 1000 human population. If MPR’s intake is counted, the intake is 45 pets per 1000 population. GCAS’s live release rate for 2012 was 98%. The live release rate was 97% if animals who died in shelter care are included with euthanasias. MPR also submits statistics to the state. In 2012 they took in 354 dogs, of which 301 were transported in from out of state, and they took in 6 owner-surrendered cats. They had a 100% live release rate, which drops to 99% if the 4 dogs who died in their care are counted against their live releases. In 2013, GCAS took in 266 animals and had a 99% live release rate. They had no animals die in shelter care and did not report any owner-requested euthanasia. MPR reported taking in 515 dogs and 9 cats in 2013, with a 99.8% live release rate. MPR’s live release rate was 99.6% if the one dog who died in shelter care is counted against the live release rate. Grand County was originally listed by this blog on December 12, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.