Las Animas County is located in southeastern Colorado and has 16,000 residents. Its county seat is Trinidad, which has 9100 residents. The county covers a large area and is sparsely populated outside of Trinidad. There is also a city in Colorado named Las Animas, but it is part of an adjacent county. Las Animas County and Trinidad both have their own animal control officers. They take animals to Noah’s Ark Animal Welfare Organization, located in Trinidad, which is the impoundment facility for the city and the county. I spoke to a representative of the shelter, who told me that Noah’s Ark accepts owner surrenders from Las Animas County and Trinidad. They ask people to make an appointment but take animals immediately if an owner cannot wait for an appointment. They also accept animals from surrounding jurisdictions when they have room. Noah’s Ark submits its statistics to the state of Colorado. For 2013, total intake was 1255 animals. This gives the shelter an extremely high pets-per-thousand-people rate of 78. The live release rate was 93%. The modified live release rate including shelter deaths was 90%.

Is No Kill possible everywhere? I think the answer to that question is “yes.” That said, we have a problem that I have not seen discussed very much, and that problem is becoming more and more evident as No Kill sweeps the country. I’m talking about pet overpopulation. Now I know that saying “pet overpopulation” to some No Kill advocates is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, so let me explain. I do not think we have a nationwide pet overpopulation problem. If we could evenly spread out our homeless animals across the United States we would be able to find homes for all of them. The problem is that our homeless animals are not spread out evenly – in some places we have too many and in some places we have too few for the local adoption demand. In reporting on No Kill now for almost 5 years, my impression is that there are two things that most communities that get to No Kill have – a substrate and a trigger. The “substrate” is made up of all the conditions that exist in the community that will make No Kill easier to achieve. Those conditions may include a population that is more educated, wealthier, and more responsible than average. It may include terrain and climate that keeps down the number of strays. It may include the availability of a large veterinary school with a shelter medicine program. It may include a forward-thinking local government. It may include local non-profit animal welfare agencies. If I were going to use one word to describe a community that has a good substrate for No Kill, that word would be “progressive” – not in a political sense but in the sense of being forward-thinking and competent. The “trigger” for No Kill is a group of people who are able to use the substrate available in the community to increase shelter lifesaving. No Kill is not a one-person show. There is simply too much work involved for one person to do it alone, even in very small communities. But one person or a small group can provide the leadership that serves as the trigger. People who can serve as the trigger seem to be much more common in places that have a good substrate to start with. That is not surprising, because the talents needed to be a good trigger include what we see with very successful professionals, and that type of person is much more commonly found in progressive communities. Conversely, communities that are poor in resources tend to be poor in talent. And those poor communities have a poor record when it comes to No Kill. No Kill is not the first animal-welfare movement that poor communities have missed due to a lack of resources. In the 1970s we had a serious pet overpopulation problem nationwide. Back then it was common to see homeless animals in the street in most American communities. But around 1970 the humane movement embarked on a huge push for spay-neuter. Private veterinarians got on board and began recommending spay-neuter as a routine part of pet health care. Progressive communities embraced the spay-neuter message, and as the sterilization rate for owned pets soared in those communities the number of homeless animals in the street tanked. Some poor communities missed the boat, though, and those places continued to have large numbers of intact animals roaming the streets. In those communities today, the number of homeless animals on the street makes it look like 1970. From 1970 to 2000, as the number of homeless pets declined, shelter intake fell by about two-thirds even though the number of owned pets more than doubled during that time. It is hard to overstate how important the disappearance of stray animals from the environment, with the accompanying plunge in shelter intake, was for No Kill. It was this sharp fall in shelter intake and in the number of homeless animals in the environment that allowed No Kill to become possible. Shelters were able to have more “market share” because they were no longer competing for homes with the neighbor who had a litter of puppies, or the strays hanging out in the alley. But in some less progressive communities intake is still very high, and shelters in those communities face an insuperable task in trying to rehome all their animals locally. There are solutions. Transports will save dogs. Return-to-field will save community cats, both tame and feral. But the problem is that implementing transports and the new cat paradigms requires resources and leadership – the very things that are lacking in the communities that need them most. Our poorer, less educated communities do not have the conditions or the leadership for progressive shelter programs. They struggle to implement the new cat paradigms, struggle to be able to pay for transports, and struggle to find resources for low-cost spay-neuter outreach. So, what to do? That’s a big question facing No Kill going forward, and there do not seem to be any easy answers. I’m starting a new series on the blog, following the efforts of a few people in one small, poor county in the Appalachian hills of Virginia who are trying to get their community to No Kill. This community is particularly interesting because, while it has a few advantages, overall it has a great many disadvantages that stand in the way of the effort to build No Kill. As No Kill becomes the standard model for animal sheltering, communities like this will be our last great problem. The community I will be following is Tazewell County, Virginia. It is located in the far southwestern portion of the state, along the border with West Virginia. Its population in the 2010 census was just over 45,000 people, but the population is estimated to have fallen to around 43,500 since then. The county is typical of Appalachia in that it is mountainous with “hollows” that have been cut out by rivers and streams. Median household income in the county is $36,000, compared to $64,000 for the state of Virginia as a whole. One in four of the residents of the county did not graduate from high school. The county is isolated, with the nearest big cities some 3 hours away. Local news is mostly about car crashes, crime, and sports. The Tazewell County Animal Shelter is run by the county. It is in an old building located next to the landfill. The shelter lacks quarantine capability, and disease is reported to be common. In the 5 years from 2010 to 2014, the shelter’s live release rate according to the state reporting system ranged from 37% to 56%. Shelter intake in those same years has averaged almost 60 animals per 1,000 people, which is astronomical. In 2012 the sheriff’s department took over animal control and tried to round up all the stray dogs in an effort to “clean up” the county. They quickly realized that task was impossible. Cats in Tazewell County are considered free-roaming and are not picked up by animal control. So even though shelter intake is shockingly high, it does not represent the true number of homeless animals in the community. There are a few bright spots. Just in the last few months an animal-friendly person was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. The old shelter director retired not long ago, and the new director, while not a No Kill advocate, does not appear at this point to be hostile to efforts to help the shelter save more lives. A new shelter building is being planned, although it will not be fancy. There are no local ordinances that forbid trap-neuter-return (TNR) or require stray cats to be impounded. And there are some people in the county who have organized to try to improve things at the shelter. One group of about a dozen people, headed by local rescuer Rhonda Kay, formed an organization called Tazewell Animal Rescue Coalition, or Tazewell ARC, in 2013.  Rhonda is also trying to get another group, the Appalachian Dog Project, off the ground to help a wider area. In an interview I had with Rhonda yesterday we discussed what she is up against in trying to save the area’s homeless animals. Rhonda concentrates primarily on dogs, since they make up most of the shelter’s intake and most of the animals killed, and her group does not have the resources to take on large-scale TNR. She told me that on the short trip from her house to the local grocery store she will see several homeless dogs. Her group does not need to pull dogs from the shelter because they get as many animals as they can take in from people who have stray dogs on their property. Rhonda’s group is certified to do stray-hold in Virginia, so they are able to take in these animals directly and try to find their owners. They use social media, and with the small size of their community they are able to return a good portion of the dogs to their owners. But many have no homes. State statistics show a surprisingly high adoption rate for the Tazewell County shelter of about 14 dogs and cats per 1,000 people. Rhonda says this is because, although the shelter takes in animals only from Tazewell County, people come from out of the county to adopt. But even with this high rate of adoption per 1,000 people, the numbers coming into the shelter are so large that the euthanasia numbers are even higher. Rhonda says trying to increase adoptions locally is not a viable strategy because most households in the area already have as many dogs as they can care for. Rhonda believes that low-cost spay-neuter is the ultimate answer to the problem in Tazewell County. She is currently waiting to hear from the Virginia representative for HSUS, because she is eager to discuss the HSUS Pets For Life targeted spay-neuter program with him. She realizes, though, that spay-neuter is a long-term solution, and to save the dogs right now her group is trying to do transports. I say “trying” because Rhonda has experienced a great deal of difficulty in raising funds for the vetting and transport expenses that her group has to pay. In recent years states have imposed requirements that animals being transported have to have health certificates, and that means that the animals must have shots, be wormed, and pass a veterinary examination before transport. Receiving rescues may impose additional requirements on top of the state requirements, including that the animals be spayed or neutered and clear of heartworm before being shipped. Many states that receive a lot of transported animals have imposed quarantine restrictions, and rescues in those states have to spend their money building and maintaining quarantine facilities, leaving less money for things like spay-neuter and heartworm treatment of incoming animals. These various state requirements, some of which are good and some of which are probably excessive, have raised the costs and slowed the momentum of transports. Rhonda has faced problems both with finding receiving rescues and with raising money for transports, but she says raising money is the worst problem. If she had enough money, she could find receiving rescues for 50 dogs per month, rather than the smaller number she is able transport now. That 600 dogs per year would go a long way toward helping solve the problem for dogs in Tazewell County. The shelter killed 443 dogs in 2014. If Rhonda could transport 50 dogs per month she could save many of the shelter dogs and also a good number of the free-roaming homeless dogs that are not picked up by the shelter. I asked Rhonda what she had done to try to raise money, and her efforts amazed me. She reeled off a long list of businesses she had contacted, businesses she had tried to partner with for promotions, various sales efforts the group had tried, social media appeals of several types, direct appeals to local donors, and grant applications to national agencies. She has had little success with these efforts, and Tazewell ARC’s budget is less than $12,000 per year. Rhonda says that there are many homeless puppies in Tazewell County, but puppies are even more expensive than adults to transport. Puppies coming from the shelter may have been exposed to disease, and a litter of puppies breaking with parvo can quickly deplete Tazewell ARC’s resources. They have had this happen in the past and managed to save the puppies, but they are reluctant to focus on puppies while their financial resources are so uncertain. Rhonda’s group does not practice “open adoptions,” at least not to the extent that most No Kill groups do today. Some people might disagree with some of the policies of Tazewell ARC, but they have chosen their policies based on their assessment of local conditions. In addition to working on low-cost spay-neuter and transports, Rhonda is hoping that the new county supervisor who is animal-friendly will take an interest in the shelter and have some ideas for making progress. She has a meeting scheduled with the supervisor soon. If that looks promising Rhonda wants to start trying to build bridges with the new shelter management. I asked Rhonda if she felt that her group had adequate leadership in areas that require some technical skills, such as business planning, marketing, customer service, and fundraising, and she said “no.” She would love to have help in those areas, but has been unable to find local people who have those skills and are interested in improving things for homeless animals. I asked if she had contacted successful No Kill leaders and shelter directors for their suggestions, and she named several people whom she had attempted to contact. Most had not answered her e-mail queries, and of the few that had, none had any suggestions that she had not already tried. In the next weeks and months I hope to follow Rhonda’s continuing efforts to help the homeless animals in Tazewell County. She herself will tell you that her skills might not be as good as the skills of someone with a professional background in marketing, customer service, business management, or law. But right now all that the animals in Tazewell County have is her and her group, and a few other people with a couple of other groups. I was very impressed with what Rhonda has been doing. She works hard and is open to trying anything that might help. I could tell in interviewing her that it is discouraging to have so little success, but in spite of the difficulty of what she is trying to do she remains upbeat about the possibilities. I do not know how this story will turn out. Will Rhonda and her group be able to start making some headway? Will the new county supervisor turn out to be a key to change? Will the new shelter director make a difference? Will the HSUS Pets For Life program be able to help? Will Rhonda be able to raise money to expand the transport program? Will she find some people who can provide effective mentoring? Or will things stay the same, and will Rhonda’s group burn out as they keep finding doors closed? Will their kennel capacity fill up with dogs for whom they cannot find either transport or local adoption? Stay tuned. And if you think you can help, please contact Rhonda through Tazewell Arc.

Here is my latest article for the Huffington Post blog. I’ve included all the big cities that have made it to No Kill or are almost there. Let’s get the word out about the good news on No Kill! In just the last few years we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of major cities and metro areas in the United States whose animal shelters have either reached “No Kill” status or are getting close. People define “No Kill” in different ways, but the most common definition of a No Kill community is one where all the shelters in the community, taken together, save 90% or more of the community’s homeless pets. Six years ago there were no large cities that were No Kill by that definition. The first one was Austin, in 2011. Back then it was thought that large cities would probably be the last places where No Kill was achieved, because city shelters take in lots of animals and budgets are often tight. Yet today, just five years after Austin achieved No Kill, big cities are leading the way. One common way big cities get to No Kill has been by cooperative public-private efforts. Austin, for example, has a large non-profit, Austin Pets Alive!, that takes a substantial number of animals from the city shelter and finds adoptive homes for them. Austin also has another large non-profit, the Austin Humane Society, that does trap-neuter-return (TNR) for feral cats. Jacksonville, Florida, similarly has three organizations that are working closely together to make the city No Kill. The Jacksonville city shelter works with First Coast No More Homeless Pets, which does TNR and mega-adoption events, and the Jacksonville Humane Society, which pulls animals from the city shelter. Both Austin and Jacksonville had extremely high community save rates last year, in the mid-90% range. The non-profits in Austin and Jacksonville also work with surrounding communities to help them improve their save rates. The leadership of Austin Pets Alive! has been very instrumental in the success of San Antonio, whose city shelter just achieved a 90% save rate last December. And First Coast No More Homeless Pets has helped neighboring counties increase their shelter lifesaving. Some metro areas have large coalitions of shelters spanning several jurisdictions that work together. In the Portland, Oregon, metro area, shelters from four counties serving over two million people have achieved shelter save rates over 90%. The Denver metro area also has a large coalition that has reported save rates over 90% (although Denver’s success is marred by a long-standing pit-bull ban). Colorado’s shelters are saving about 90% of intake across the state. That includes thousands of dogs from other states that Colorado shelters take in each year. Another way that No Kill can happen is when advocates start a non-profit that bids on and wins the contract to run the city shelter. Then they reform it. This can be difficult in cases where the non-profit has to go it alone, but it has the virtue of putting advocates in complete control of the shelter. A good example of this method is Atlanta. Ten years ago probably few people in the United States would have believed that Atlanta would be No Kill in 2016, yet that is the goal of LifeLine Animal Project, the non-profit that in 2013 won the contracts to run both of the city’s shelters. LifeLine does not have a partner comparable to what we see in Austin or Jacksonville, yet it has already increased the save rate at both of its shelters to about 85%. In Kansas City, Missouri, as in Atlanta, a non-profit formed by No Kill advocates won the city contract. The Kansas City Pet Project was formed only just in time to make the bid. They managed to make the city No Kill in record time, within six months of their start date. They showed that it was not going to be business as usual when they held their grand opening on New Years Day, the first day of their contract in 2012. These cities are not flukes. There are similar stories in Baltimore, Washington DC, Seattle, Miami, the Salt Lake City metro area, the Richmond metro area, and San Francisco. There are large metro counties like Fairfax (outside of Washington DC) and San Diego that are on board. And many medium-sized cities and metro areas such as Asheville, Williamson County (just north of Austin), and Washoe County (home to Reno) have outstanding programs. Perhaps the most surprising transformation has been happening in New York City. The city shelter system in New York serves all five boroughs and takes in some 30,000 animals every year. The system has struggled with a lack of resources since the city took over animal control and sheltering from the ASPCA in 1994. In 2003, a non-profit named the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals, headed by Jane Hoffman, began to build a unique system for helping the city shelter. The Mayor’s Alliance is a large consortium of shelters and rescues, currently numbering well over 150 organizations, that pulls animals from the city shelter. The Mayor’s Alliance has evolved to the point that it now provides an interface for the complicated task of coordinating so many organizations in the placement of many thousands of animals. It’s a big, messy system that seems chaotic sometimes, but in 2015 the New York City shelter system had an 86% live release rate. There is no reason why every city in the country cannot do what these cities have done. With high-intake cities like San Antonio, Austin, Kansas City, and Atlanta going No Kill, there is no longer any room for excuses. The deciding factor is not how wealthy or progressive the city is, but whether local humane advocates are willing to step in and make No Kill happen. LifeLine Animal Project, Kansas City Pet Project, First Coast No More Homeless Pets, the Jacksonville Humane Society, the Animal Shelter Alliance of Portland, and the Mayor’s Alliance are examples of how it gets done.

The organized humane movement in the United States began right after the Civil War. From 1866 when the first SPCA was founded until the end of the progressive era around 1920, the three cities that were the center of the humane movement in the United States were New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Each of these cities had its great leader in humane work. In New York City it was Henry Bergh. In Philadelphia it was Caroline Earle White. In Boston it was George Angell. These three people were the most prominent champions of animal welfare in the United States in the post-Civil-War period. Today these great leaders are not talked about much and many people are unfamiliar with them. Following is a quiz about them. I hope you find it interesting. 1. Which of the three humane leaders founded the first national humane organization in the United States? A. Henry Bergh B. Caroline Earle White C. George Angell Answer: A – Henry Bergh, who founded the ASPCA in 1866. Two years later in 1868 White founded the Pennsylvania SPCA and Angell founded the Massachusetts SPCA. In 1869, White founded another SPCA, the Women’s Branch of the Pennsylvania SPCA, after she was precluded from participating in the leadership of the Pennsylvania SPCA due to her gender. 2. Which of the three humane leaders was a vegetarian? A. Henry Bergh B. Caroline Earle White C. George Angell Answer: B – Caroline Earle White. White worked very hard on humane transport of cattle and other animals from the western plains to slaughterhouses in the midwest and east, but progress was slow. The cruel treatment of meat animals may have been what motivated her to become a vegetarian. 3. Which of the three humane leaders proposed an ordinance in 1880 to allow the mayor to appoint people to catch any cat found in a public area and kill it unless reclaimed by its owner within 3 hours? A. Henry Bergh B. Caroline Earle White C. George Angell Answer: A – Henry Bergh. Bergh’s proposed cat ordinance was criticized by people who feared that the three-hour holding period was not long enough to allow people to reclaim their pets. Bergh stated that the ordinance was “for the sake of suffering humanity as well as the wretched cats.” The ordinance was approved by the New York City aldermen but was never approved and put into effect by the mayor, possibly due to a lack of funds to implement it. 4. Which of the three humane leaders proposed a lecture series at a prominent university that would link the humane movement to other great reform movements of the post-Civil-War era such as women’s suffrage? A. Henry Bergh B. Caroline Earle White C. George Angell Answer: C – George Angell. He proposed the series of lectures to the president of Harvard. 5. Which of the three humane leaders was successful at persuading the city to allow his or her humane organization to take over the cruel city dog pound? A. Henry Bergh B. Caroline Earle White C. George Angell Answer: – Caroline Earle White, whose Women’s Branch SPCA took over the Philadelphia city pound in 1870 and replaced it with a shelter. The Philadelphia dog pound had been one of the cruelest in the country, where dogs were held without food and killed by a painful method after their hold period expired, and White took it over to stop the cruelty. Bergh proposed in 1873 to the mayor of New York that the city build a shelter like the one in Philadelphia and allow the ASPCA to run it, but the city declined. Angell believed that there were not enough homeless dogs in Boston to justify building a pound or a shelter. 6. Which of the three humane leaders said that animals had a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? A. Henry Bergh B. Caroline Earle White C. George Angell Answer: B – Caroline Earle White. Although both White and Bergh made “rights” statements about animals, they do not appear to have believed in a literal right to life for animals. In the case of cats and dogs, all three of the humane leaders appear to have accepted the killing of homeless cats and dogs. They probably saw it as a necessity given the lack of any practical method to cut down on breeding (the capability to do mass spaying of dogs and cats would not mature until the 1960s or 1970s), and the public’s intense fear of stray dogs due to the threat of rabies (commercial rabies vaccines for dogs were not available in the 1800s and early 1900s, and post-exposure vaccination for humans was not available until late in the 1800s). The concern of the three humane leaders was not to abolish shelter killing, but to ensure that impoundment and killing be done in a way that was as humane as possible.

Vigo County (population 108,000) is located in Indiana, on the border between Indiana and Illinois. The county seat is Terre Haute, a city of 61,000 people. The Terre Haute Humane Society (THHS) contracts with Vigo County and the city of Terre Haute for animal sheltering for strays, and it also takes in in owner surrenders.  The shelter is part of the Vigo County Animal Coalition, a group of organizations that includes the City of Terre Haute Animal Control, Vigo County Animal Control, and local rescues. THHS is currently fundraising for a new shelter. THHS does not post full statistics on its website, but it does post “incoming,” “saved,” and “euthanasia rate” figures on its home page, currently covering the years 2000 to 2011. These figures show a 90% or above “saved” rate for 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. THHS posts “incoming” and “euthanasia” rates for 2012 and 2013, listing the euthanasia rate as 1.6% for 2012 and 2.8% for 2013. Intake was 2202 for 2012 and 2375 for 2013. Vigo County is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community

San Francisco is a combined city and county located in northern California. It has a population of about 837,000 people. The city/county shelter is San Francisco Animal Care And Control (ACC). The ACC performs all the functions of a municipal shelter, including animal control and accepting owner surrenders, and it has an adoption center. It has had a partnership known as the “Adoption Pact” with the private San Francisco SPCA since 1994. The SPCA pulls animals from ACC under the agreement, and it also does some intake directly from the public. The San Francisco SPCA has been recognized as a leader in the field of animal sheltering since back in the 1800s. And of course it is well-known for its origination of the No Kill communities concept in the 1990s. The SPCA today continues to be innovative, as with its shelter-neuter-return program for community cats. In addition to animals that the SPCA accepts from ACC under the Adoption Pact, it also takes in many animals from outside of San Francisco, including under an agreement with Stockton. The ACC and the SPCA have reported their combined statistics for years. In the 1990s the Adoption Pact achieved live release rates of over 75%, which was the highest of any major city at that time. In more recent years the combined live release rates have generally been in the mid-80% range. In 2013, the coalition finally broke the 90% barrier, with a combined 92% live release rate (excluding transfers between ACC and the SPCA). The ACC offers owner-requested-euthanasia, and if that number plus animals who died in shelter care are counted as euthanasias the live release rate was 89%.

Michigan is one of the handful of states that (1) require shelters in the state to report their statistics and (2) make the reports available online. The Michigan Pet Fund Alliance has kept track of these statistics for years, and recently they’ve released a summary covering the nine years from 2007 to 2015. The statistics show a big decline in shelter euthanasia, from 118,369 in 2007 to 27,250 in 2015. That’s a drop of 77%. A survey of most-improved shelters that the Michigan Pet Fund Alliance did recently showed that the shelters attributed their success to a change to a “compassionate director.” While a change to a new director may well have been a factor in some shelters in the state, the statistics show a quite different story for the state as a whole. According to the Michigan Pet Fund Alliance report, about 88% of the drop in the number of animals killed from 2007 to 2015 was due to fewer animals coming into Michigan shelters. Only 12% of the drop in shelter killing was due to more animals going out the door alive. Thus, the reason that Michigan shelters improved so much since 2007 was largely because shelters had fewer animals to start with, not because of any big increases in adoptions and return-to-owner. I reached out to Deborah Schutt, head of the Michigan Pet Fund Alliance, and asked her if she had any ideas about why shelter intake had dropped so much between 2007 and 2015. The first thing she mentioned in response was low-cost, high-volume spay/neuter programs. She pointed out that All About Animals Rescue (AAAR), which was founded in 2005, has been doing almost 25,000 surgeries per year, including TNR and return-to-field. Shelter intake in the county where AAAR is headquartered has dropped from 8,023 to 2,400 since 2009. Michigan’s shelter intake in 2015 was about 14 animals per 1000 people, which puts it on the low end of the average range of intake. In 2007, intake was about 23 animals per 1000 people, which is considered to be average. Some people have the misconception (no pun intended) that spay/neuter programs were an invention of No Kill. That’s incorrect. Although No Kill embraces spay/neuter programs, the big campaign to get people to spay and neuter their pets was started by humane advocates and the traditional shelter industry circa 1970, before the No Kill movement existed. At about the same time, shelter intake in the United States began to plummet. Shelter intake is thought to have been static in the U.S. as a whole since around the year 2000, but Michigan demonstrates that there is still more to be gained, at least in some places, by low-cost, high-volume spay/neuter programs. Pet retention programs can also reduce intake. Roughly half of shelter intake on average is owner surrenders, and some pet retention programs have claimed high rates of success. Managed admission can also reduce intake, as experience has shown that many owners are able to find a new home for their pets themselves, especially when the shelter helps them arrange a social media campaign or referral to a rescue. It is unclear whether such programs have been widespread enough in Michigan in the years from 2007 to 2015 to have contributed much to the fall in intake. It’s interesting that shelter intake in Colorado increased a small amount — about 3% — from 2007 to 2015, during the same period when shelter intake in Michigan was dropping by 37%. Yet Colorado today has a higher average live release rate than Michigan. This reinforces the idea that No Kill progress can be made in a variety of different ways. It may be that one of the reasons that shelter consultants have such a good success rate in improving community live releases is that they know how to look at the whole picture and see what needs to be changed. For a small shelter run by a non-profit in a resort or college town, a director with good marketing and management skills may be all that’s needed, and the transition to No Kill may be quick. In a city like San Antonio or Dallas with a serious stray problem, low spay/neuter rates, and low return-to-owner rates, one or more large, non-profit partners and an aggressive spay/neuter program may be needed. No Kill may take years to achieve in those tougher circumstances. The Michigan Pet Fund Alliance is having their annual conference next week. They deserve kudos not only for collating shelter statistics all these years, but also for telling Michigan shelters how they are doing and giving awards to high-performing shelters. Their work has no doubt been part of the progress in Michigan.

Lake County is in west central Colorado and has a population of 7300 people. The city of Leadville, the county seat, has 2600 inhabitants. Lake County is in an extremely mountainous area, and it has an elevation that is mostly above 9000 feet. The county contains the highest peak in Colorado, Mt. Elbert. The Leadville/Lake County Animal Shelter (LLCAS) is run by the city and county. I called the shelter and was told that LLCAS accepts owner surrenders from its jurisdiction subject to a small fee and on a space-available basis. The shelter is open 7 days a week and closes only on major holidays. Statistics from the Colorado Department of Agriculture for 2012 show that LLCAS took in 181 dogs and cats in 2012 and had a live release rate of 99% for 2012 (98% if the one animal who died in shelter care is included with euthanasias). The shelter’s intake is 25 animals per 1000 people.

Rappahannock County, Virginia, borders the Shenandoah mountains west of Washington, DC. It is a rural county with 7400 residents. The county provides animal control and owns the animal shelter building, but contracts out operations to the Rappahannock Animal Welfare League (RAWL), a private non-profit. RAWL describes the arrangement as follows: “Within the delegation of responsibilities, Rappahannock County employs the animal control warden, provides and maintains an accessible kennel and office on county property, and pays RAWL a fee to operate the facility. From that point, RAWL assumes the balance of the responsibilities: staffing, management, daily care, supplies, veterinary trips, inoculations, arranging the reclaim of lost animals and coordinating adoptions.” RAWL primarily takes in dogs. In addition to the dogs impounded by animal control, it accepts owner surrendered dogs subject to a waiting list. If the owner is a resident of Rappahannock County and cannot wait, RAWL will take in the dog immediately. Rappahannock’s animal control, which is part of the sheriff’s department, does not pick up cats unless they are sick or injured. They treat the sick and injured cats and try to re-home them. A private rescue, RappCats, accepts owner surrendered cats subject to a waiting list when they are full. I spoke to a representative of RappCats, who told me that they have a small shelter for cats. They work with people to help keep cats in their homes or colonies. In 2012, RAWL took in 253 dogs and had a live release rate of 96%. RappCats did not report its statistics to the state of Virginia in 2012. In 2013 both RAWL and RappCats reported to the state. The combined statistics, with intake of 371 cats and dogs, showed a live release rate of 96% for 2013. No animals were reported as having died in shelter care.

“No Kill” is a loaded term. Some people love it, some people hate it, and a lot of people are just confused by it. How did this happen, and should we try to do anything about it? The first organization to popularize the term “No Kill” in a big way was North Shore, back in the 1970s. North Shore was a limited-admission private shelter that used very innovative marketing techniques to place dogs and cats that it pulled from open-admission public shelters. Some people were upset over the term “No Kill” because they thought the implication was that open-admission shelters were “kill” shelters. So the term “No Kill” was controversial right from the start. It did not help that the term is made up of two negative words, “no” and “kill.” As the years went by more and more private, limited-admission organizations began calling themselves No Kill. By 1990, “No Kill” was synonymous with “limited admission.” The general belief was that only organizations that could limit the number of animals they took in could avoid killing for time or space. Meanwhile, shelter intake nationwide had been falling sharply since the 1970s, and by the 1990s shelter intake was down in some places to the point where the idea of a No Kill community could take shape. In 1994, the San Francisco SPCA and the city of San Francisco signed the historic Adoption Pact that guaranteed a home to all healthy animals who went into the city’s shelter system. Rich Avanzino, the head of the San Francisco SPCA, began to use the term “No Kill” in a new way to refer to an entire community, including the open-admission shelter for the city. Avanzino wanted to expand the Adoption Pact to include treatable animals, and he defined the term “No Kill” to mean that all healthy and treatable animals in the community would be saved. When the Adoption Pact was signed he hoped that San Francisco would be No Kill very shortly. At the first No Kill conferences held by Lynda Foro in the mid-1990s one of the questions that came up was whether “No Kill meant no kill.” In other words, did “No Kill” mean never killing an animal? The answer was that the term “No Kill” was meant to distinguish between killing and true euthanasia. Putting to death an animal who was terminally ill and suffering, or vicious, was true euthanasia, but killing a healthy or treatable animal was simply killing. The idea that workers in traditional shelters were morally culpable for “killing” animals had always been an implication of the No Kill term, but now the implication was verging on an open declaration. At the time that Avanzino was pursuing the goal of saving all the healthy and treatable animals in San Francisco, people in other parts of the country were working toward the same goal for their communities. Communities in the states of Colorado and New Hampshire were examples. Both of those states, like San Francisco, had populations with progressive, socially responsible views. By the year 2000 San Francisco, New Hampshire, and Colorado were all saving about 75% of their shelter animals. This was a great achievement at a time when the specialty of shelter medicine was in its infancy and most shelters did not have the capacity to prevent infectious diseases, care for orphan neonatal kittens, or routinely treat conditions like ringworm or heartworm. Many of the most progressive communities, like the ones represented by the state federation in New Hampshire and many of the communities in Denver, refused to use the term “No Kill.” Those communities used a model of cooperation and coalition building, including working with traditional public shelters. They felt that, however much they might agree with the goal of saving shelter animals, the term “No Kill” was divisive and would hurt their efforts to work together. In the 2000s shelters continued to get better at lifesaving, aided by the growth of the internet, the development of the specialty of shelter medicine, and the use of marketing and community-engagement techniques. In 2007 Nathan Winograd, in his book Redemption  (page xi of the 2nd edition), proposed the idea that about 90% of shelter animals were healthy or treatable. This idea was popular and many people found it easier to think in terms of “90%” rather than “healthy-treatable.” So now we had three ways to define No Kill: (1) as limited admission shelters taking in only animals that can be placed in homes, (2) as communities saving all healthy and treatable shelter animals and euthanizing the unhealthy and untreatable ones, and (3) as communities saving 90% or more of shelter animals and euthanizing 10% or less. None of these definitions addressed the problem that many of the shelters and communities that qualified as “No Kill” rejected the term. In recent years a fourth definition of No Kill, that No Kill should literally mean that no animal is ever killed, has been put forward by some people. In the view of these people, vicious animals should be given sanctuary care and terminally ill animals should have hospice care to make them comfortable until they die naturally. In other words, these people reject the premise of early No Kill advocates that No Kill did not mean no euthanasia. At the same time, some proponents of the idea of No Kill as a percentage have argued that the percentage of healthy-treatable animals is really 95% to 100%, not 90%. Other people have argued that shelter populations in different communities have different characteristics, and that 90% is too high to be realistic for some communities. With the increasing use of social media in recent years by some No Kill advocates to reach members of the public who are unfamiliar with how animal shelters work, the rhetoric has sometimes taken on an overtly hostile tone. It is not unheard-of to see people on social media referring to people who do shelter euthanasia as “murderers.” Social media lends itself to hyperbole and much of this is just letting off steam, but it’s easy to understand why many people who are trying to build and maintain community coalitions have continued to distance themselves from the “No Kill” term. And therein lies the fundamental problem with the “No Kill” term. Regardless of exactly how we define shelter success – as saving all healthy-treatables, as saving 90%, or in some other way, the “No Kill” term does not capture the universe of shelters or communities meeting that standard. Let’s say that we manage to agree on a definition of No Kill as referring to communities that save 90% or more of their animals. Our definition will fail at its purpose of defining those communities because a great many of them will refuse to identify themselves as “No Kill.” Is it any wonder that the public is confused when so many community shelters that meet the definition of No Kill deny that they are No Kill? So what should we do about this? The ongoing controversy and confusion over “No Kill” that has now lasted for some 40 years is part of the growing pains of the shelter reform movement. Early No Kill advocates failed to recognize the fact that massive pet overpopulation in the 1970s and 1980s put open admission shelters in a no-win position. Conversely, when shelter intake fell by the 1990s to a point where high save rates became possible in many communities, the traditional shelter establishment was slow to realize that the world had changed. Leaders in many local communities were able to get past the misunderstandings and work together, but unfortunately we did not have any leadership at the national level that was able to realize what had happened and bring the two sides together. Instead, we had further polarization. Fortunately, that is now changing. In the last year or two we have had some encouraging signs that the leaders of virtually all of the important national organizations that are interested in animal sheltering are moving forward with an emphasis on coalition building that (1) includes all stakeholders and (2) promotes new ideas that work. Look, for example, at the supporting organizations of the Million Cat Challenge. Perhaps it’s time to ditch not only the “No Kill” term, but the concept that the shelter world is divided into the savers and the killers.

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.

New Hampshire is a small state in New England with a cold climate and mountainous terrain. The state has a population of 1,300,000 people as of the 2010 census. The largest city in the state, Manchester, has a population of 100,000. The capital city, Concord, has 43,000 people. Animal shelters in the state belong to a private organization called the New Hampshire Federation of Humane Organizations (NHFHO). The federation was formed in 1979, and the eight founding members are the major intake shelters in the state. NHFHO currently lists 16 members in the shelter-rescue category. The shelters report their statistics to the NHFHO, but the Federation does not make statistics on individual shelters available to the general public. Instead, it makes aggregate data for all shelters available. For 2013, the NHFHO report showed a 91% live release rate with intake of 14,434 cats and dogs. The live release rate was 90% if owner-requested euthanasias and animals who died or were lost in shelter care are counted with euthanasias. For the 2012 calendar year, the NHFHO released aggregate data that showed a 91% live release rate. New Hampshire is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.