Right now several states still have gas chambers in active use in animal shelters. Reformers are working hard in those states to get gas chambers banned, but they are running into local resistance in many places. It is puzzling that there is still any opposition to getting rid of gas chambers, because all of the leading national organizations that have weighed in on the issue say that euthanasia by injection (EBI) is the preferred method of euthanasia for shelter dogs and cats. The textbook “Shelter Medicine for Veterinarians and Staff” notes that the Association of Shelter Veterinarians, ASPCA, HSUS, and the American Humane Association (AHA) “all recommend EBI of sodium pentobarbital as the only acceptable method for euthanasia of dogs and cats in animal shelters.” The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), in its 2013 Euthanasia Guidelines, says that “the preferred method of euthanasia” in animal shelters is EBI. The Euthanasia Reference Manual published by HSUS states that EBI is the best of the available euthanasia methods for shelter animals, and lists gas chambers among the methods that “are not considered to be humane euthanasia, and should never be permitted in a shelter setting.” The National Animal Control Association states that EBI using sodium pentobarbital is the “only method of choice” for humane euthanasia of shelter dogs and cats, and it “condemns”  the use of gas chambers. The people who want to continue using gas chambers in shelters generally rely on three arguments. None of those arguments stand up to scrutiny and none of them are accepted by experts in the field. The first argument is that gas chambers are safer for the humans involved when they are dealing with aggressive or feral animals. This argument seems plausible at first glance because people tend to think of EBI as requiring handling of the animal, while the gas chamber just requires pushing a button. But what this argument ignores is that the technician has to handle the animal to get it into the gas chamber in the first place. EBI is actually safer than the gas chamber for the technicians because a press gate or squeeze cage can be used to restrain an animal for the few seconds required to give a pre-euthanasia sedative. The restraint technique is used in TNR to get feral cats ready for surgery, and it is both safe for the technicians and as humane as possible for the cats. Anyone who has seen experienced people preparing feral cats for surgery will realize how much more humane the restraint-sedation technique is than stuffing a fully conscious, struggling, terrified animal into a gas chamber. And speaking of danger to the human technicians, gas chambers are dangerous things to have in any building. The “Shelter Medicine for Veterinarians and Staff” textbook notes that carbon monoxide exposure has been documented in the death of one shelter worker and the illness of another. Gas chambers that leak low levels of carbon monoxide can cause serious health problems in shelter personnel. There is no way to tell if a chamber is leaking without monitoring it, because the gas has no smell or taste. And handling the gas is dangerous because it is explosive. The second argument made by those who want to keep using gas chambers is that EBI is more expensive. This argument is factually incorrect. AHA did a study of costs of EBI versus gas chambers and found that EBI is cheaper – far cheaper, in fact. The 2009 study found a cost of $4.66 per animal for the gas chamber versus $2.29 for EBI. Sodium pentobarbital is a controlled substance, but the majority of states allow direct registration for animal shelters to obtain the drug. Concern about the ability of shelters to get sodium pentobarbital without having to go through a veterinarian should never be a barrier to banning gas chambers, because if a state lacks direct registration it could be instituted at the same time as the ban on gas chambers. The third argument made by people who want to keep the gas chamber is that a gas chamber is emotionally easier on shelter personnel because they do not have to look at and touch the animal as it dies. Again, the experts in the field do not agree with this reasoning. Many studies have found that performing euthanasia is stressful for shelter workers regardless of the method used. The key is how workers deal with the stress. If they distance themselves from their emotions by distancing themselves from the animal’s death, it is harder on them in the long run. Being able to feel the sadness and tragedy of an animal’s death is actually a sign that a shelter worker is coping with his or her emotions in a healthy way rather than ignoring them or shutting them off. I suspect that what is really occurring with resistance to getting rid of gas chambers is just resistance to change, and a desire not to have to go through the learning curve of adopting a new method. Those concerns should not stand in the way of banning gas chambers. When every national organization with expertise on the issue, including the AVMA, has expressed the clear opinion that EBI is superior to the gas chamber in all respects, that should be the end of the debate.

Most industries pay attention to where they were in the past and where they are now. Changes over time in the parameters that are important to an industry allow people to figure out what has worked and how progress has been made. One example of statistics being used to measure progress over time are the medical industry’s use of changes in the causes of human mortality. If we see that more people are dying of diabetes, we know that spending more money on diabetes research and therapy would be a good use of tax dollars, for example. The animal shelter industry has traditionally paid little attention to statistics. When animal shelter statistics are invoked, it is often with the purpose of promoting a particular agenda rather than in an unbiased search for the truth. A big part of the reason that the shelter industry has paid little attention to statistics is that we do not have any national mechanism for collection of even the most basic shelter statistics, such as how many shelters there are, what their annual intake is, and how many animals are killed in shelters each year. In spite of the lack of statistics, though, there are a few things we can learn from what we have. Even though the absolute numbers we have are estimates, some of the trend lines are pronounced. Trends over the last 45 years show that sterilization has reduced the number of animals killed in shelters far more than all the other No Kill techniques combined. Even if we look only at the last 15 years, during which No Kill techniques have come to be in wide use, sterilization has still done more to reduce shelter killing than No Kill. This does not mean that No Kill is unimportant – far from it. But it does suggest ways to think about how to improve the situation in some of our most intractable high-kill cities today – cities like Dallas and Houston. Check out this graph of estimated shelter intake and shelter killing from 1970 to 2000: Chart 1 From 1970 to 2000 shelter killing appears to have tracked shelter intake very closely, and during that 30-year period both numbers plummeted. Shelter intake declined from an estimated 26 million animals per year to about 7 million, a reduction of 73%. Shelter killing fell from about 23 million per in 1970 to some 5 million per year in 2000, a 78% decline. Even if those numbers are somewhat off, the trend is pretty unmistakable, and it is borne out by actual numbers from several individual cities and counties. Since shelter killing is a dependent variable to intake, and killing closely tracked intake from 1970 to 2000, an important question is why intake fell so dramatically. There are only three possible reasons for intake to decline significantly. One would be if enforcement changed so that animal control officers were taking in fewer animals. That does not appear to have been what happened between 1970 and 2000. In fact, if anything, enforcement increased during that time because more and more shelters started taking in cats. The second possible explanation is that people became more responsible pet owners and owner surrenders therefore dropped. This may well have happened to some extent. Several shelter directors and workers who were active in the 1970s and 1980s have told me that they noticed that people were more reluctant to surrender animals for trivial reasons. But owner surrenders were only 30-50% of intake in the period from 1970 to 2000, so that alone could not account for the enormous plunge in intake. The third and by far the most likely reason for the fall in intake was two mass sterilization campaigns that took place between 1970 and 2000. These campaigns appear to have resulted in fewer strays in the environment and fewer litters born to owned pets. The first of these spay-neuter campaigns began in the early 1970s at a time when there was a lot of publicity about the pet overpopulation crisis. Pet overpopulation was a real crisis in the 1970s. Shelters were killing an estimated 23 million animals per year at a time when there were only about 60 million owned pets and only about 63 million households in the United States. Thus, there was more than 1 homeless animal each year for every 3 owned pets and every three households. There were also lots of strays in the environment that were never picked up by animal control, and lots of litters being born to owned pets, whose owners gave the puppies and kittens away to friends and neighbors. The pet overpopulation crisis was probably a primary reason why private veterinarians began in the 1970s to recommend to their clients that they spay and neuter their pets. Before the 1970s it was rare for veterinarians to recommend sterilization, both because the surgeries were riskier back then and because veterinarians were not convinced that sterilization was healthy for pets. The second wave of mass spay-neuter progress happened from 1990 to 2000, when organizations began offering large-scale low-cost sterilization programs and pediatric spay-neuter was proven to be a safe technique and became common. It appears likely that sterilization was primarily responsible for the fall in shelter intake of some 73% from 1970 to 2000. Another thing we can deduce from Chart 1 is that in spite of having far fewer animals to deal with, shelters were not taking any effective steps from 1970 to 2000 to increase their live releases. Live releases were about the same in 2000 as in 1970, at about 2 million per year. The fact that live releases stayed the same indicates that shelters during that 30-year period were not making efforts, or at least not making successful efforts, to get more animals out the door alive. Instead, they were relying entirely on fewer animals coming in the door as the way to reduce shelter killing. No Kill did not really take off in the United States until around the year 2000. By 2000 there were quite a few communities that were saving a majority or all of their healthy animals and a lot of their treatable animals. There were even several small city and county shelters that were saving 90% or more of their intake by 2000. No Kill increased rapidly in popularity in the period from 2000 to 2015, and by 2015 a substantial proportion of the U.S. population was living in communities that had an 80% or better live release rate. In Chart 2, we see that in the years from 2000 to 2015, shelter intake stabilized and shelter killing continued to decline, but at a slower rate. Thus, from 2000 to 2015, shelter killing is no longer in lockstep with intake. Another factor must have been present that was increasing live releases. It seems very likely that that factor was No Kill. Does the fact that shelter intake held steady from 2000 to 2015 mean that sterilization programs during those years were no longer important? Not really, as shown by Chart 2: Chart 2 Chart 2 shows that the number of owned pets has continued to grow dramatically from 2000 to 2015, even as shelter intake remained flat in those years. In 1970, the ratio of owned pets to shelter intake was about 2.6 to 1. It is reasonable to assume that such a ratio would still hold true today in the absence of effective spay-neuter initiatives. With a ratio of 2.6 to 1, shelter intake would have been some 50 million per year by 2000 and some 65 million per year by 2015, instead of the 7 million yearly shelter intake we have actually had from 2000 to 2015. If spay-neuter efforts from 2000 to 2015 have prevented an increased intake of 15 million animals per year (65 million minus 50 million) and No Kill efforts from 2000 to 2015 have reduced shelter killing by 2 million per year (5 million minus 3 million), then it is clear that spay-neuter has continued to be the most effective technique to reduce shelter killing even after intake leveled off in the year 2000. It’s not even close. Nevertheless, even though the numerical effect of No Kill programs has been much less than the effect of traditional spay-neuter, No Kill is still an essential part of stopping shelter killing. The two million per year shelter animals that are currently being saved by No Kill shelter reforms is a huge accomplishment, and that number can continue to grow until the great majority of the 7 million animals who come into shelters each year are saved. No Kill also has an importance that goes beyond the numbers. No Kill can make shelters into welcoming community centers. It can prevent the tragedy of a family having to give up a pet because of finances or behavior problems. It can stop the emotional trauma that workers in high-kill shelters suffer. It can illustrate the fact that animal lives have value. And it can influence pet care and veterinary medicine. That’s quite a lot. Now we get to the importance of all this for deciding policies today. One obvious lesson is that sterilization programs remain important to keep shelter intake suppressed. Another less obvious takeaway is that there are some communities that unfortunately do not seem to have been reached by the spay-neuter campaigns of the last 45 years. In the south part of Dallas, Texas, for example, it is reported that 85% of owned dogs have not been sterilized, compared to 12% nationwide. In cities with high intake, or high numbers of free-roaming animals in the environment, a comprehensive spay-neuter program may be the fastest way to bring shelter killing down even today. This illustrates the importance of looking at each community individually when deciding on how to reform the shelter. Some communities may need an old-fashioned sterilization campaign before they can ever hope to sustain a No Kill effort.

In the summer of 2000 she had a life-changing experience when she went with her parents on a vacation to Greece. She was dismayed by the number of street dogs and cats she saw. People told her that the dogs and cats had caretakers who fed them, but they had no homes and she could see that not all of them had enough food. One night as she and her parents were leaving a restaurant she saw a starving dog huddled in the street. She fed that dog and others that she saw, but was overwhelmed with the magnitude of the need and a feeling of helplessness. When Makena returned to the United States she began to think seriously about what direction she wanted to take in life. She decided that she wanted to work on animal welfare, and the memory of the starving dog she saw in Greece led her to decide to help homeless animals. That fall, she quit her promising career in marketing and took a job with the Richmond SPCA as its Director of Education. In a few months she was promoted to Director of Operations. The Richmond SPCA in the early 2000’s was one of the best places in the United States for a person who wanted to make a difference for homeless animals. The Richmond SPCA CEO, Robin Starr, had visited the San Francisco SPCA during Rich Avanzino’s tenure and was implementing his No Kill programs in Richmond. Makena stayed at Richmond for 7 years before moving in 2007 to another groundbreaking No Kill shelter, the Charlottesville-Albemarle SPCA. She was associate director there for two years, working with Susanne Kogut. In 2009, a board member for the Lynchburg Humane Society (LHS) contacted Makena for advice. Lynchburg is an independent city in Virginia, about an hour southwest of Charlottesville and considerably more rural and blue-collar. LHS had the animal sheltering contract for the city and had been running the shelter for decades. Lynchburg’s live release rate was only 51% in 2008. The LHS board members had read Nathan Winograd’s book Redemption and decided that they wanted to shake things up and improve, and that was why they contacted Makena. One of the things Makena recommended was that LHS hire an executive director, since the only leadership the shelter had was the part-time oversight of a board member. The board agreed, and offered Makena the job. She took over in July 2009. LHS had some major obstacles in the way of improving its live release rate. The shelter building was very old and cramped, and almost impossible to sterilize. The staff had been doing things the same way for so long that it was hard for many of them to change. One of the first things Makena did was to ditch the shelter’s overly restrictive adoption requirements and institute open adoptions. She tripled donations to the shelter in two years. She instituted TNR and managed-admissions programs, and oversaw the takeover and successful restructuring of a failing spay-neuter clinic. In 2010, her first full year as director, the live release rate was 84%, and by 2011 LHS’s live release rate was over 90%. Makena continued to innovate, and was one of the early adopters of the new cat paradigms after reading the California draft whitepaper in 2013. LHS is now a member organization in the Million Cat Challenge. Perhaps Makena’s biggest single accomplishment to date has been the new LHS shelter, which just opened in March. She set an ambitious fund-raising goal for the shelter of $4.8 million, and exceeded that goal by raising $5.2 million. The great majority of this money was from private donors, as the city’s contribution to the building is only a modest fee to lease the stray-hold area. Makena’s marketing background has helped her keep the shelter in the public eye. Last summer LHS was runner-up in its division in the ASPCA Rachel Ray challenge. Makena used the competition aspect of the contest to get the city cheering for the shelter. She hopes to continue that kind of intensive marketing this year. The new shelter should help in the effort, as it is in a better location and provides a much better experience for visitors than the old shelter. Makena also wants to expand the help that LHS is already providing to the county and other nearby jurisdictions, and do more work on helping owners keep their pets. The guiding principle for Makena and her board is to try new things. A new idea may not always work, but you won’t know until you try it. It is that attitude that has taken LHS from a failing traditional shelter to one of the most innovative No Kill shelters in the nation. Makena will be presenting a talk about LHS at this summer’s Best Friends National Conference in Atlanta.

One of the big things that sets No Kill apart from traditional animal sheltering is that No Kill treats the treatables. The development of shelter medicine over the last 15 years has helped make it possible to give shelter animals the same chance at treatment as animals with homes. But that’s only the beginning of the advancements shelter medicine has made and is making. Shelter medicine is just now beginning to mature as a specialty, and its practitioners are going beyond simply treating shelter animals to developing protocols for all aspects of shelter care. Fifteen years ago there was no shelter medicine specialty and most people thought that a shelter job was the bottom of the barrel for a veterinarian. The first formal class in shelter medicine did not take place until 1999. It was a cooperative effort between the ASPCA and Cornell University and was taught by Dr. Jan Scarlett and Dr. Lila Miller. Also in 1999 Maddie’s Fund awarded a grant for the first shelter medicine residency program, at the University of California at Davis. The resident was Dr. Kate Hurley, who is now head of the UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program. Another big milestone was the formation of the Association of Shelter Veterinarians (ASV) in 2001. In 2002, UC Davis started its pioneer shelter medicine program. In 2004 a textbook of veterinary medicine was published. Today many veterinary schools have shelter medicine programs or residencies or both, shelter medicine classes are offered as continuing education at conferences, and there are over 1500 members of the ASV. Just last April, the executive board of the American Veterinary Medical Association unanimously voted to recognize shelter medicine as a specialty. Maddie’s Institute is the “academic division” of Maddie’s Fund, and it has produced and made available a series of informational videos and webcasts on shelter medicine and other topics. As Rich Avanzino says, shelter medicine is a hybrid between herd medicine and companion animal care. Infection control in an animal shelter requires looking at the shelter population as a whole, but shelter veterinarians may also go to great lengths to save individual animals. Shelter veterinarians must balance the cost considerations common to herd medicine with the focus on the life of each individual that governs companion animal medicine. Shelter medicine specialists are involved today with so many aspects of sheltering that it’s hard to imagine how shelters ever got along without them. Shelter vets have developed protocols on infection control, including vaccinating on intake. They are making big changes in how temperament is evaluated in shelters. Housing for mental and physical health, shelter flow-through, length-of-stay, and capacity control are all issues that shelter medicine has influenced. TNR programs are dependent on help from the veterinary profession. One of the most exciting new directions in No Kill is the Million Cat Challenge, which is run by Dr. Hurley and Dr. Julie Levy of the Maddie’s Shelter Medicine program at the University of Florida. Another phenomenon we are seeing is that academic shelter medicine programs can work in their local communities to raise live release rates. The University of Florida program is a good example, as it has worked with the Alachua County and Gainesville shelter system for years. The University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine has a program, Operation Catnip, that does TNR for feral and unowned cats. The involvement of shelter medicine programs has helped expand the scope of what shelters can do. Fifteen years ago it would have been highly unusual for a shelter to even attempt to treat a parvo pup, for example. Today such tough cases are much more likely to be treated and saved. Shelter medicine specialists can also serve an important primary or supporting role in consulting. The Irvine, California, shelter has been the subject of a lot of criticism in the last several months, and the city brought in a shelter-medicine consultant who trained at the UC Davis program to weigh in on the issues of euthanasia and behavior evaluations. There have been some bumps in the road. Because shelter medicine is so new and because it is a hybrid type of practice, it does not always fit neatly into existing rules and expectations. An example of this has been the controversy in Texas over the powers of shelter veterinarians. Hopefully problems like these can be worked out expeditiously now that the importance of shelter medicine in lifesaving is beyond question.

The specialty of shelter medicine, which has grown at a fast pace from its beginnings 16 years ago, is critical to No Kill. Shelter medicine has been key not just to medical treatment of the treatables, but also to reducing shelter stress through housing and enrichment, fixing behavior problems, preventing disease, designing shelter buildings, and developing programs for shelter flow-through and capacity control. It is no accident that No Kill and shelter medicine have grown in parallel over the last 16 years. The field of shelter medicine is growing so fast that it’s hard to keep up. But one way to get a good grounding in the subject is to read “Shelter Medicine for Veterinarians and Staff,” Second Edition (2013), edited by Lila Miller and Stephen Zawistowski. Dr. Miller, who is often referred to as the founder of shelter medicine, was the first African-American woman to graduate from Cornell’s veterinary college, at a time (1977) when the profession was beginning to diversify. She, along with Dr. Jan Scarlett, taught the first formal class in shelter medicine at Cornell in 1999. Dr. Miller was a co-founder of the Association of Shelter Veterinarians (ASV) in 2001. She co-wrote the textbook “Infectious Disease Management in Animal Shelters” with Dr. Kate Hurley. She has been with the ASPCA since 1977, and is its director of veterinary outreach. In 2008 she received the American Veterinary Medical Association’s Animal Welfare Award, and in 2014 she received the ASV Meritorious Achievement Award. Dr. Zawistowski has a PhD in behavior and genetics from the University of Illinois. He has written, co-written, or edited several books in addition to the shelter medicine text, including a history of the ASPCA (“Heritage of Care”) and a textbook about companion animals (“Companion Animals in Society”). His research work has been published in several journals and he is a founder and co-editor of the “Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science.” He has served for many years as Science Advisor to the ASPCA, and is a well-known speaker on animal welfare subjects. He was a founder and officer of the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy. Their textbook lists 51 contributors, including Dr. Kate Hurley, Dr. Julie Levy, and Dr. Jan Scarlett. It has an 80-page introductory section that includes articles on shelter statistics, design, management, and legal issues, among other topics. Following are sections on husbandry, infectious disease, animal cruelty, shelter programs, behavior, and sterilization. Individual articles cover everything from stress and quality of life for shelter animals to population management to wildlife and equine care to animal hoarding to foster care to behavior enrichment to community cat management to pediatric neutering, along with all the other topics you would expect in a shelter medicine text. Although this text is written for shelter veterinarians and staff, it has lots of valuable information for anyone who is interested in shelter issues. People who are trying to reform shelters from the outside may not always realize the complexity of issues that shelters face in trying to save animals. The sections on proper care of the various species found in animal shelters covers almost 200 pages, for example. The spay-neuter section is over 100 pages. The chapter on foster care shows not only how valuable foster programs are but how many factors must be considered in setting up and running foster programs. The extensive section on disease control shows the planning and constant vigilance that is required to keep animals healthy in the shelter environment. The cost for this textbook is modest given its size and the amount of information it contains. As a non-professional, I learned a lot about the intricacies of modern shelter management from it, and would recommend it for anyone who is interested in shelter issues. Animal shelter management is a field that is changing at dizzying speed, and this textbook provides a good way to get an overview of the issue.

Hastings, Minnesota, is a city of 22,000 people located near the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin, about 30 miles from Minneapolis. The nearby city of Rosemount, Minnesota, also has a population of 22,000. The impound facility for the two cities is Shamrock Animal Hospital. Animal Ark is a non-profit organization headquartered in Hastings which has a shelter that contracts with Shamrock to take in animals who are not returned to their owners. Animal Ark also accepts owner surrenders without geographic limitation, subject to a waiting list. In 2013, according to statistics sent to me and posted on Facebook, Animal Ark’s live release rate was 99%. Their intake was almost 700 cats and dogs. Shamrock does not report its statistics, although the Animal Ark director said that he was unaware of any impounded animal euthanized at Shamrock in recent years. Animals that come into Shamrock with medical and behavioral issues are transferred to Animal Ark along with the healthy ones. Hastings and Rosemount, MN, are counted in the Running Totals as 90%+ communities.

This Tuesday, April 21, at 9PM EST, Scott Trebatoski is giving a free webinar on Return to Field (RTF) for community cats. The webcast, presented by Maddie’s Fund, will have a 20 minute presentation and a 40-45 minute Q&A session, and did I say it’s free? Go ahead and sign up even if you cannot participate live, and Maddie’s will send you an e-mail with a link to watch it on demand as soon as it’s available. There has been quite a bit of controversy over RTF programs, with some people believing that such programs discriminate against cats or make it less likely that owned cats will be reunited with their owners. I’ve even seen comments from some people who believe that RTF is just a way for shelters to artificially jack up their live release rates. Trebatoski’s webinar is a chance for people who have reservations about RTF to talk to an expert and find out what RTF is really about and why it works so much better for cats than the traditional shelter approach. By the way, Hillsborough County, Florida, where Trebatoski is now director, is replicating the success of his previous city, Jacksonville. Since Trebatoski became director in Hillsborough a year ago, the live release rate has rapidly increased and in the last few months has been pushing 90%. In March 2015 the live release rate was 89% using the traditional calculation and 87% including animals who died or were lost in shelter care. Intake in March was 1,137 dogs and cats, and average length of stay was under 7 days. Hillsborough County includes the city of Tampa, and has an estimated population of about 1.3 million people. In more RTF news, the state of Arizona has passed a law that exempts cats from the state’s mandatory 3-day hold period on the condition that they are sterilized and returned to field. Francis Battista of Best Friends has posted a blog on this new law and its importance to the Best Friends-PetSmart Charities community cat initiative in Pima County, Arizona. The blog has a nice summary of why RTF programs lead to better outcomes for cats (including a much higher chance of being reunited with their families) than traditional hold times. HSUS’s Animal Sheltering magazine has an article in the March/April 2015 issue about the Chico, California, city shelter’s adaptation of the new cat paradigms to their local circumstances. The shelter first got buy-in for the program by consulting with the city government and the community. Owner surrendered cats now go to a local non-profit. The city shelter takes in sick or injured stray cats and orphaned kittens, and refers healthy community cats for TNR. Cat euthanasia dropped from 1,273 in 2011 to 88 in 2013, while cat intake dropped from 2,839 to 442. This program allows the shelter to concentrate on the sick, injured, and orphan stray cats who really need their help, while the healthy stray cats who are doing well remain in the field where many of them have homes. The Charleston (South Carolina) Animal Society’s new kitten intensive care unit is now open. The society takes in 2500 kittens each year. The news about dogs this week was mostly scientific and medical. Scientific American and Science magazine are reporting on research showing that when dogs and people gaze into each others’ eyes, both species have an increase in neurochemicals that are important in bonding. In other words, your dog really is feeling love for you when he or she looks into your eyes. The canine flu outbreak in the Chicago area has been identified as caused by an H3N2 subtype. This is the first identification of an H3N2 subtype outside of Asia. Currently available canine vaccines are for the H3N8 subtype, and it is not known if there is any cross-immunity. The H3N2 virus can also infect cats. The Koret Shelter Medicine Program has made this list of resources available. Maddie’s Fund has a new article on treatment of parvovirus in a shelter setting. In other shelter and rescue news, Salt Lake County, Utah, is reporting that it had a 93% live release rate in 2014. The Jacksonville Humane Society has started a campaign for funds to build a new permanent shelter to replace the one that burned down in 2007, killing 86 animals. The HSUS is making an initial investment of $600,000 in programs to improve the situation for street dogs in Puerto Rico. And Dogster has a nice interview with a caring ACO officer in Atlanta to celebrate ACO Appreciation Week.

The headline this week is that the Million Cat Challenge hit 250,000 cats saved under their program – 1/4th of the way to their goal of saving 1 million cats. Since it’s a five-year goal, they are looking very good to hit the goal early. The way it works is this. When a participating shelter signs up, their progress is measured against the baseline year (2012) by the greater of two numbers – reduction in cat euthanasia or increase in cat live releases. By having the alternatives, a shelter can get credit for for pet retention or diverting cats to TNR or RTF programs, as well as for increasing adoptions. The program has Five Key Initiatives, and a shelter can choose which ones it wants to implement. The Million Cat Challenge now has 263 participating shelters. That’s pretty good for only a little more than 6 months in existence. There is a lot more going on from this effort than can be gleaned from just looking at the website. Many large jurisdictions in the country (and in Canada) have started to implement the ideas behind the five initiatives. These concepts were considered revolutionary when some of them were endorsed in the California draft whitepaper less than two years ago, but they have rapidly been accepted and supported by the leadership of the shelter industry and are well on their way to becoming mainstream. It’s very possible, in my opinion, that in the 4+ years remaining in the Challenge, we will see not just 1 million, but all healthy and treatable shelter cats saved by these methods. The cat cafe phenomenon hit a new high this past week with an article on Vox about the DC cafe, Crumbs & Whiskers. For DC residents and many people in other parts of the country Vox is a must-read, so this is great publicity. A related idea to cat cafes is to get cats into workplaces, as with Seattle’s popular Kitty Hall program. The Humane Society of Broward County in Florida has rolled out a program called Office Cats that sends adoptable cats and their luggage to small businesses in the area. Neighborhood Cats is offering a “see-through” rear release door for cat traps, for those wily ferals who say “no thank you” to regular traps. The ASPCA Cornell Maddie’s Shelter Medicine Conference is being held from July 31 to August 2 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Dr Stephanie Janeczko, one of the presenters, has tips for transporters, including the critically important health requirements you need to know before taking transport animals across state lines. Baton Rouge has been struggling to go No Kill since 2011. The early efforts were not as successful as people had hoped, but the community kept at it and progress has been made. Now the Companion Animal Alliance (CAA), which runs the city shelter, has announced that a state-of-the-art new shelter building will have its groundbreaking next year. The new shelter will be located on land leased to CAA by Louisiana State University, near the LSU veterinary school. The architectural firm that was selected to design the shelter visited Portland, Oregon, to get ideas for the new building, and CAA officials have visited other shelters as well. The cost for the new building will not be known until the design is finished, but the fundraising campaign is scheduled to begin this fall. The Waco, Texas, effort to go No Kill has been very successful so far (the city shelter is running at an 88% live release rate for 2015), and now the shelter building is getting a $2.5 million makeover. The city has supplied $1 million of the cost and the rest has been raised by private donations. Since this is a renovation and rebuilding on the site of the current shelter, officials will have to accommodate the animals currently in residence and coming in the door, in spite of temporarily reduced space. The shelter is asking for fosters to help tide it over during the renovation. The new building will be set up for better animal care and disease prevention and will also have a new adoption center, a veterinary clinic, and play areas. Maddie’s Fund’s essential blog, Chew On This, has been relocated. The Maddie’s blog may be the single most useful blog going for people who are actually running shelters and want practical, professional guidance they can use. Speaking of Maddie’s Fund, it has now made 2013 statistics available for the shelters that report to it under the Asilomar Accords format. The data is in the form of a comparative database. Here is a nice feature about Colorado Animal Rescue and the Aspen Animal Shelter, two of Colorado’s many No Kill shelters. Steve Dale raises the interesting question of whether the veterinarian who allegedly shot a defenseless cat in the head with an arrow in Texas would have been indicted for animal cruelty if it had been a puppy that was killed instead of a cat. Delaware state and local officials are rallying and discussing how to handle animal control and sheltering after the First State Animal Center and SPCA dropped a bombshell last week with their announcement that they are getting out of their contracts in September. The contracts cover animal control and sheltering for all three of the state’s counties and the city of Wilmington. First State made the decision to end its contracts early because it was concerned that its employees, who have been looking for other jobs since the state announced its intention to take over animal control, would resign and leave it without enough staff to service the contracts.

Montmorency County, Michigan, is located in the northern part of Michigan’s lower peninsula, and has about 10,000 residents. Up until 2009, the county sheriff’s office handled animal control. The Elk Country Animal Shelter (ECAS) is a 501(c)(3) organization that supported the county shelter for years and finally took it over entirely in April 2009. Animals were kept in outdoor kennels at the sheriffs office and ECAS’s first order of business was to create a shelter building where the animals could be indoors. The shelter accepts owner surrenders and does not list any restrictions on surrenders on its website. Here are the live release rates for the county as reported to the state of Michigan for the four years since ECAS took over the shelter: 2009 — 97% 2010 — 97% 2011 — 97% 2012 — 97% The shelter’s mission was endangered in 2012 when a contract dispute with the county caused ECAS to stop formally taking in strays. Volunteers for the shelter went out on their own time and rescued strays and took them to a neighboring shelter. Fortunately the dispute only lasted a couple of weeks, and on April 11, 2012 the county approved the funding asked for by the shelter.

Bird conservationists are perhaps the most effective opponents of Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs for feral cats. The conservationists argue that scientific studies show that cats kill huge numbers of birds, and that therefore cats must be removed from the environment to protect birds. TNR supporters argue that estimates of cat predation are overblown and, in any event, TNR is the only successful way to manage cat populations. Although most of the bird conservationists won’t come right out and say it, what they all seem to want is to round up and kill all homeless and feral cats and to force people who own pet cats to confine them indoors. Current estimates are that there are at least 80 million pet cats and tens of millions of feral cats in the United States. Recently I began studying the science of the cat-predation issue. Because the science is controversial I expected to find what I usually see in scientific controversies, which is evidence on both sides of the issue. What I actually found ran completely counter to my expectations, and shocked me. In journal article after journal article, and book after book, I found cat-predation studies that were flawed by small sample size, samples that were not shown to be typical, unjustified generalizations, a failure to account for confounding factors, and a tendency to assume that predation of individual birds necessarily resulted in damage to bird populations at the species level. After perusing the studies and writings of many bird conservationists I came to the conclusion that they were unable to see the data clearly. As someone who is a great believer in the scientific method, and who respects scientists, I don’t say this lightly. I’m used to scientists being the people we can rely on to look at issues dispassionately and give us objective conclusions based on data. I had always assumed that there must be some “there” there in the cat-predation controversy, simply because there are reputable scientists who strongly believe that cats harm bird populations. So it was a very rude awakening when I began to study the data and saw how unconvincing the evidence against cats in general, and TNR in particular, actually was. I don’t have the space in this blog post to dissect the weaknesses of all the scientific studies, and others have done that anyway (see Peter Wolf’s “Vox Felina” blog, linked in the left sidebar). The point that I want to make here is somewhat different, and that is that the bird conservationists, regardless of the validity or lack of validity in the studies they publish in journals, exhibit contradictions in their own writings about cats that are clear evidence of their lack of objectivity on this issue. As a case in point, we need only look at John M. Marzluff’s book “Welcome to Subirdia.” Marzluff is a respected professor of Wildlife Science at the University of Washington. I thought “Welcome to Subirdia” was a delightful and important book, and I would recommend it to anyone. The thesis of the book is that green suburbs are unexpectedly wonderful habitat for birds, and nurture a wide variety of bird species. But in spite of Marzluff’s happy message of birds doing extremely well in the suburbs, his book is marred with inexplicable internal contradictions when he talks about cats. To start with, we know that there are probably as many free-roaming cats in the suburbs as there are anyplace on earth, except possibly for some neglected urban areas. Given this, how would you complete the following syllogism: In the suburbs we find an abundance of bird species, cats are also abundant in the suburbs, so — Choice A:  cats do not harm and may even help bird species, or Choice B:  we need to confine or kill all the cats in order to save the birds. It seems to me that any rational scientist would pick “A” to complete the syllogism, but Marzluff pretty clearly agrees with “B.” In fact, on page 85 of the book he says that cat predation on birds is “horrifying.” On page 173 he says that the “most uniformly serious” peril to birds and other animals in the city is the free-roaming domestic cat. But wait, Dr. Marzluff, wait! Didn’t you just explain to us in a very well-written and convincing way that green suburbs are among the best habitats for birds? Didn’t you tell us on pages 15-16 that you found more bird diversity in Central Park in New York City than you did in Yellowstone? And aren’t there a whole lot more domestic cats in the suburbs than in Yellowstone?– my head is hurting. There’s more. One of Marzluff’s students did an experiment to examine causes of mortality of fledgling birds (pages 91-93). Unlike many bird-mortality studies, this one seems to have been designed and carried out fairly well. It was perhaps a bit small, with a sample size of 122 fledglings, but that number is large enough to be at least indicative, although not conclusive. The best thing about the study design was that the birds were radio-tracked. This allowed Marzluff and his student to determine the location and movements of the fledglings for the approximately three to nine weeks that the batteries lasted. The period of a few days when a bird is learning to fly is one of the most vulnerable time periods of its life. If cats really do account for 10% of deaths of all birds in the United States (as Marzluff maintains, see pages 85 and 188) then we would expect cats to kill a substantially higher percentage of fledglings – 20%, 30%, perhaps even upwards of 50%. The results were extremely interesting. What the study actually showed was that cats were “implicated” in the death of only one fledgling. And Marzluff admits that it was not clear that the one fledgling was actually killed by a cat, and it could have been killed by another mammal or even another bird. Now, one would think that a good scientist like Marzluff, on receiving this data from an experiment that he and his student performed themselves, might scratch his head and say — maybe cats really aren’t as bad as we thought. Or at least — this is interesting, we need to study this in more depth. But that isn’t what Marzluff said. Instead, he dismissed the “rarity” of cat predation in the study (by which I think he means the “non-existence” or “near non-existence” of cat predation in the study) by opining that it was due to the presence of coyotes in the area. If coyotes were prevalent enough in the area of the study to chase away or kill off all the cats, then one would think that coyotes would have killed some of those fledglings themselves. Perhaps they did. But Marzluff believes that coyote predation is good for bird populations (page 199). According to Marzluff, cats kill birds (bad), but coyotes “cull” their prey, which is good because it is nature’s way and they only kill the injured, weak and overly abundant. Predator coyotes are wonderful, while the slightly smaller predator cat is horrible. Okay, now my head is going to explode. I really don’t mean to pick on Marzluff. Others are worse than him. I’m discussing “Welcome to Subirdia” in this blog post because it happens to offer a particularly clear example of the way the cat issue seems to twist the thinking of even good scientists. So, back to the question – why does this happen? Why are bird conservationists, who make their careers by being logical and fair and sticking to the data, seemingly so blinded by their anti-cat emotions that they cannot see the data clearly? If I were going to study the issue I would start with two hypotheses. One is the hypothesis that bird conservationists have an animus toward cats because they view cats as an “invasive” species. As I discussed in a blog post last month, there is recent thinking that the whole “invasive species” thing is really just mother nature’s reaction to the massive changes that humans have made in the environment. My second hypothesis is that there is a prejudice against cats due to the perception that they are cruel killers because they sometimes seem to torment their prey or play with it before killing it. Scientists ought to know, if anyone does, that species do not survive and thrive the way cats have if they waste energy. Therefore, there is probably a reason for the way cats sometimes make their kills. One obvious reason would be that they are learning or improving hunting skills. Cats are not very big, and in some habitats they need to kill prey animals, such as rats, that are almost as big as they are. A cat does not have the luxury of the size and weight of a coyote or wolf. Since cats cannot always overpower their prey by brute force, they have to fight with skill and tactics – which takes practice. Whatever the reason or reasons for the animus that bird conservationists have toward cats, it has consequences. We need look no further than Washington, DC, where a battle is now being waged between TNR advocates and conservationists who want to round up cats and take them to shelters (where the feral ones would be killed) and force owners of pet cats to keep them indoors on pain of death (death to the cats, not the owners, although sometimes one wonders). This is already a long blog post and I don’t have space here to get very deeply into the related question of why bird conservationists reject TNR. There is one glaring logical contradiction here, too, though, that I want to touch on. Even if we all were to agree that cats are damaging bird populations at the species level (an idea that Welcome to Subirdia very neatly refutes), one would think that bird conservationists and cat advocates could nevertheless agree on TNR, because TNR not only reduces the number of cats, it also reduces the need of cats to hunt, since colony caregivers feed the cats. Moreover, probably 99% of the labor and supplies that are expended on TNR and colony care are donated by volunteers, without costing taxpayers or businesses a dime. Catch-and-kill methods have to be repeated every two years at least, they are expensive, and the advocates of the catch-and-kill method have not figured out how to keep people from sabotaging it by very naturally doing everything they can short of going to jail to save their neighborhood cats. The bird-conservationist ranks do not seem to contain enough people who are willing to catch and kill cats all over the country with volunteer labor and supplies, so the bird conservationists expect governments to pick up the tab for their cat-killing program. This adds insult to injury, because it means that citizens who pay taxes are forced to pay for killing cats, when in fact the majority do not approve of the wholesale slaughter of cats. This is not a winning scenario for the conservationists. It can only lead to long, drawn-out, pitched battles that the conservationists will ultimately lose, because they are not only in the wrong, they are in the minority. One would think that the bird conservationists would realize that TNR is the best solution that is actually possible to achieve, even if it is not their favorite solution. Instead, they continue to oppose TNR, holding out for the unrealistic option of somehow finding, catching and killing every cat that wanders outdoors, and forcing people who disagree with them to pay for it. We can’t send all the bird conservationists back to science school, so all we can do is hope that eventually rationality will prevail. In the meantime, pick up a copy of Welcome to Subirdia. I’m sure you’ll love it. It’s a very convincing argument that birds do better with cats around.

The right sidebar of this blog has a list of communities that are saving 90% or more of their animal shelter intake. In order to be listed, the shelter that takes in strays for the community and the organizations that take in owner surrenders (if different from the shelter) must as a whole be saving at least 90% of their intake, and they must have maintained that rate for at least one year.* Today, I added the 200th community to the right sidebar (and the 201st). Taken together, these communities have over 7 million residents. When I first started researching shelters in early 2011, there were about a dozen communities in the United States that had been identified as saving 90% or more of their intake. Several communities hit the 90% mark in 2011, and by January 1, 2012, I had listed 26 communities. By January 1, 2013, the number of identified 90% or better communities was approaching 100. And now, with more than two months still to go in 2013, the number has exceeded 200. And that’s not all. I’m currently researching more than a dozen cities and counties that are candidates for listing as sustained 90% communities, and additional ones pop up all the time. Then there are the many communities, including several large cities and counties, that have just recently achieved 90% or have live release rates in the 80th to 89th percentile and are improving (many of these communities are listed in the Worth Watching tab and category). One thing to note is that the year a community is identified and listed by the blog is not necessarily the first year that the community attained 90%. There appears to have been at least one community that achieved and sustained the 90% rate back in the 1990s, and by 2010 there were many more 90%+ shelters than anyone knew about (since there is no national registry for shelter statistics). Most of the communities I’ve listed have attained 90% since 2010, though. The pace of change is rapid and it’s accelerating. People across the country are realizing that their own animal shelter could be saving 90% or more and they are organizing to make that happen. There are conferences and seminars all over the country where successful shelter directors tell packed audiences how they can reform their local shelter. I can’t wait to see what 2014 brings. I’d like to thank all the people who have sent me tips and suggestions for communities to research. Keep in mind that the whole community has to be at a 90% or better live release rate in order to be listed. I don’t list individual private organizations that do not take in strays, even if they are saving 90% or more of their intake, because without the strays they don’t represent the entire community. A community doesn’t qualify for a listing unless all the intake organizations in the community, taken together, are at or above 90%. *Although the general rule for the blog is that a community that has saved 90% or more of shelter animals for at least a year qualifies for a listing in the right sidebar, there are a couple of exceptions. I won’t knowingly list a community that has a shelter that uses a gas chamber, and I won’t knowingly list a community that has a breed-specific ban (communities with breed-specific restrictions are evaluated on a case-by-case basis).

Arlington County, in northern Virginia, is just across the river from the District of Columbia and is a highly urbanized community of 221,000 people. The Animal Welfare League of Arlington (AWLA) is a private organization that contracts with Arlington County to provide animal control and sheltering services. The shelter’s website states that the shelter accepts owner surrenders. The shelter asks people who have to surrender their pet to schedule an appointment, bring in the pet’s medical records, and fill out a pet personality profile. There are pet retention services available. The shelter has a suite of services that it offers the community, including low-cost spay-neuter, safekeeping, and a TNR program. It offers no-interest loans to low-income people for emergency pet care. Another innovative program offered by the shelter is its “Baby-Ready Pets” program, originally developed by the Providence Animal Rescue League and the Rhode Island SPCA. It is a two-hour workshop offered to expectant parents to help them “prepare their home and their pets for the arrival of the new baby and to make sure that it is a safe and (relatively) stress-free experience for all.” The shelter offers humane education and birthday parties at the shelter. AWLA posts its fiscal year statistics on its website. In the fiscal year ending in June 2011, the shelter had an 89% live release rate. In the fiscal year that ended in June of 2012, the shelter had a 92% live release rate. The shelter reported 278 owner-requested euthanasias for the 2011-2012 fiscal year, and 5 animals who died in shelter care. If those deaths are counted in with euthanasias, the live release rate was 78%. I spoke to shelter director Neil Trent about the number of owner-requested euthanasias, and he stated that the shelter requires that an animal brought in by an owner for euthanasia must meet the shelter’s standards for euthanasia. He remarked that the shelter, located as it is on the edge of a large urban area, receives requests for owner-requested euthanasia from beyond its jurisdiction. In fiscal year 2012-2013, AWLA had an intake of 1618 animals, not counting owner-requested euthanasia requests. The live release rate was 92%. The shelter performed 232 owner-requested euthanasias and had 13 animals who died or were lost in shelter care. If those animals are counted in with euthanasias, the live release rate was 80%. Arlington, Virginia, was originally listed by this blog on April 18, 2013, based on its 2011-2012 fiscal year statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2012-2013 fiscal year statistics.