OUT THE FRONT DOOR

In just the last year there has been an enormous increase in communities that are reporting saving 90% or more of their animals, and an even bigger increase in communities reporting 80% or more. Because there are so many communities to report on, I no longer have enough time to do the amount of research needed for my traditional listings. So I have to make a choice — either do as many listings as I can the way I’ve always done them (which would mean most 90%+ and 80%+ communities don’t get listed at all), or change to a new method where I list all reported communities but the listings are not researched in-depth (which would mean that I make listings based on shelter press releases and media reports without independently verifying them and without researching things like shelter policies, other organizations in the community, local controversies, etc.). I’ve decided to go with the second option, because what my readers want is to know about all communities that are doing well, not just a fraction of them. The downsides are that there will be less information in each listing, and that listings will be based on media reports which may not always be correct. I think the number of bad listings will be pretty small, and I will take them down when I find out about them, but there probably will be an occasional one. The way I’m going to implement this is to list in the right sidebar every community that I feature, lumping together 90% Documented, 90% Reported, and Worth Watching. New listings may be full-length features as they are now or shorter posts, depending on how much information the shelter has made available. The right sidebar will be called Notable Communities. Each post will have a notice stating whether it is 90%+, 80%+ or Worth Watching, but the posts will not be separated by those subcategories in the right sidebar. At some point soon I may need to save space in the right sidebar by listing only the most prominent community in a group of communities. For example, listing Williamson County, Texas, and not Round Rock. I will not be able to update listings yearly as I have been doing. That means that people will have to be careful in using the listings on individual communities and may have to do some of their own research to get the latest numbers. As for the Running Totals, my plan is to delete the current count, which is based on number of communities, and go to a count based on human population living in 90%+ and 80%+ communities. I’m going to do a spreadsheet where I will list each 90%+ community and each 80%+ community and its population and post those totals as separate Running Totals. Again, these numbers are going to be subject to the caveat that I will not have checked each community as closely as I used to. In other developments, the News Bits page has become the blog’s most popular feature. I have plans to migrate News Bits over to Facebook eventually, but it may be a while until I get around to that. In the meantime, when a News Bit involves a newly announced 80% or 90% community, I may post it as a blog as well as a News Bit, so that I can link to it in the right sidebar. So over the next month or two the blog may look like a construction zone, and it might even blow up a few times, but hopefully we will come out of it with a better idea of just how successful No Kill really is.

I’d like to say thanks to everyone who commented and sent me e-mails about the blog’s listing criteria going forward. The suggestions were really great and have helped me a lot in making a decision. I’ve decided to go with the idea of asking the non-transparent shelters to provide their statistics to me as an official statement which can be uploaded to the blog. The way I’m going to implement this is to move all communities that do not have their statistics publicly accessible to a separate, temporary page on the blog that I will call “Other 90%+.” Then I will send an e-mail, with a copy of the Basic Matrix attached, to the shelter directors for each of the “Other 90%+” communities and ask that the matrix (or a similar form) be filled out and returned to me within 30 days, along with a statement from the director that the form represents the shelter’s statistics for the year 2013 and that I have permission to post it or link to it on the blog. In the meantime I will reduce the running totals to reflect the smaller number of communities in the right sidebar. There will be quite a drop in the totals, but hopefully it will be only temporary. Communities that do not respond to the inquiry within 30 days will be moved to the Worth Watching page or dropped. In order to keep the requirements for listing uniform across the board, I’m going to require that shelters either list publicly, or send to me for posting, statistics that include at least intake, adoptions, returns-to-owner, transfers, and euthanasias. If I have any question whether transfers are to other 90%+ organizations I will check that with the shelters. If a shelter operates as part of a coalition and coalition statistics are provided, the statistics must be corrected for intra-coalition transfers. This will take some time to implement, so the blog will be a mess for the next few weeks. Thanks in advance for your patience. Even if we come out of this with a much smaller number of communities, I think it will be worth it because we will have much more uniform information about the communities that are listed. For whatever reasons, most shelter directors do not make statistics a priority. That will never change unless we start supporting the idea that transparency is important.

Several public shelters reported progress on live releases this week. The Southern Pines Animal Shelter in Mississippi takes in almost 5000 animals per year and provides animal sheltering for a county of 75,000 people as well as for surrounding counties. They had a live release rate of over 75% for 2014, but in the last 5 months they have been over 90% each month. Shelter manager Ginny Sims attributes the improvement to new programs, fosters, volunteers, and new partnerships. Sacramento’s city shelter, the Front Street Animal Shelter, has made great strides since director Gina Knepp took over in 2011. Now comes word that the Sacramento County shelter has also improved by using adoption specials. Director David Dickenson says the live release rate at the county shelter so far this year is 75%. The Los Angeles Animal Shelter reports a 73% save rate currently, with 85% for dogs and 57% for cats. Best Friends, through its No Kill Los Angeles initiative, is trying to reduce the kill rate for cats with a neonatal kitten program and support for TNR and return-to-field. The City of Calistoga, California, has decided to grant a contract to the Petaluma Animal Services Foundation (PASF) for animal control and sheltering. This article about the process describes how a social media campaign helped to persuade city officials to select PASF over a rival bidder based on PASF’s history of higher live release rates, even though the PASF bid will cost the city slightly more. In transport news, shelter dogs are being flown as carry-on passengers on commercial flights from the Big Island of Hawaii to the Portland, Oregon, area. About 60 dogs have been placed through this program so far. Brent Toellner has two blog posts on length of stay – the importance of managing it, and how to decrease it. And Peter Wolf’s Vox Felina blog is celebrating its five-year anniversary. The fourth in the Maddie’s Fund series of free webcasts on the five initiatives of the Million Cat Challenge is set for Tuesday, April 28, at 9 PM EST. The presenters are Ollie Davidson, program director at the Tree House Animal Shelter in Chicago, and Kathleen Olson, director of a Washington state shelter with intake of over 12,000 animals per year. Both shelters improved the shelter environment and saved more animals after instituting capacity for care programs. Register here. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer is criticizing NYC Animal Care & Control. The AC&C has a five-year contract with the city. The Humane Society of Silicon Valley won the Shorty Award in the Best Social Good category for its “Eddie the Terrible” marketing campaign. PetSmart Charities has an interactive page showing its impact by state. The Center for Shelter Dogs has many webinars covering a variety of topics. The Humane Society of Utah has a cat room with remote-controlled toys that people can operate online through the iPet Companion website. In addition to amusing the cats, the shelter hopes that the promotion will call attention to available cats and help change the perception of the shelter as a sad place.

There’s so much news these days about 90%+ and Worth Watching communities and shelters that I can’t even stay close to keeping up with it by blog posts. So – I’ve added a new feature to the blog, the News Bit page. There will be a News Bit each day, and to make it even easier to find, I’ll put a link to it in a heading in each post. The running total in the blog’s subtitle has been expanded and moved to the News Bit page. In addition to the total of communities reporting 90% plus, I’ve added a total of the human population in those communities. Enjoy!

The city of Portland, Oregon, has a population of 584,000 people. It is the county seat of Multnomah County, which has 735,000 people. The Portland metro area (which includes part of the state of Washington) has almost 2.3 million people. The Animal Shelter Alliance of Portland (ASAP) is a coalition of six organizations, some of which are municipal and some private, that provide animal sheltering in the Portland metro area. The municipal members of the coalition (shelters that are responsible for stray intake) are Multnomah County Animal Services (MCAS) (serving the city of Portland and Multnomah County), the Bonnie L. Hays Shelter (BLH) (serving Washington County), and Clackamas County Dog Services. The private members of the coalition are the Oregon Humane Society, the Humane Society for Southwest Washington (HSSW) (which works with Clark County Animal Control), and the Cat Adoption Team. Together these six organizations serve four counties — Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, and Clark — containing about 2 million people. ASAP estimates that its six members care for 90% of the animals needing sheltering in the four counties. Coalitions such as ASAP are becoming a trend, as more and more municipal shelters seek out and work closely with private partners. In such situations you have to look at the community coalition as a whole, rather than the individual shelters, to get an accurate idea of what is going on. For example, the Clackamas County municipal shelter does not pick up stray cats and does not accept owner surrendered cats, but it offers cats for adoption that have been taken in by other area organizations. Conversely, the Cat Adoption Team takes in cats but not dogs. MCAS and BLH accept owner surrenders only when they have room, but owner surrenders are accepted by HSSW and OHS. The ASAP coalition increased the live release rate for the metro area from 62% in 2006 to 79% in 2011. Maddie’s Fund reported that the coalition had an 85% live release rate for 2012, with a combined intake of almost 32,000 animals. The coalition’s live release rate first exceeded 90% in 2013, with a live release rate of 91% for an intake of just over 30,000 animals. If owner-requested euthanasia and animals who died or were lost in shelter care are counted with euthanasias, the live release rate was 86% for 2013. (The ASAP statistics are linked here.) With ASAP’s service area of about 2 million people, it was the largest metro area in 2013 to report a 90% or better live release rate under the standard calculation. Multnomah County’s live release rate for 2013, calculated separately on MCAS intake alone, was 87%. It is not unusual, when you have a coalition, for a shelter that does animal control intake to have a lower live release rate than other intake shelters in the coalition, since animal control generally involves the most difficult situations such as hoarders, dog-fighting busts, etc. When other shelters in the area of the animal control shelter are doing intake of owner surrenders, it can artificially depress the success rate of the animal control shelter. In 2014, Both MCAS and the coalition as a whole improved their live release rates (the full coalition Asilomar statistics are not posted as of this writing.) MCAS has reported 90.2% for 2014, and ASAP as a whole has reported a 93% live release rate for 2014 (see header in link). The Portland metro area is counted in the blog’s running totals as a 90%+ community.

Augusta County, Virginia, is located in the Shenandoah Valley area west of Charlottesville. Its population was 74,000 in the 2010 census. The county contains two independent cities: Staunton (population 24,000) and Waynesboro (population 21,000). The total population of the county and the two cities is 119,000. In 2011, the Shenandoah Valley Animal Services Center (SVASC) took over animal sheltering for Augusta County, Staunton, and Waynesboro. The shelter took in 2447 animals in 2013, the most recent year for which full statistics are currently available. Animal control officers for Augusta County, Staunton, and Waynesboro immediately return or euthanize a few of the animals they pick up, but the great majority go to SVASC. The Augusta Regional SPCA, located in Staunton, also takes in animals – 1337 in 2013, including 464 owner surrenders and 240 transfers.  There are several rescues in the county, including Augusta Dog Adoption, Cat’s Cradle, and the Mosby Foundation, that take animals from SVASC. SVASC’s full statistics for 2014 are not yet available online from the state system, but the shelter recently reported to the media that its live release rate increased to 94% in 2014 from 82% in 2013. Augusta County is one of the places where it is very difficult to calculate a live release rate even with the state reports, due to multiple intake shelters and transfers among shelters. SVASC’s current shelter is inadequate, and the three jurisdictions it serves have committed $420,000 to expand the shelter this spring. The expansion will add cage space, six isolation rooms, and separate areas to house puppies and small dogs. Augusta County, Staunton, and Waynesboro are counted in the Running Totals as 90%+ communities.

Brown County is located in eastern Wisconsin, bordering the Green Bay area of Lake Michigan. Its population is 248,000 people. Its county seat is the city of Green Bay, which has a population of 104,000. The Bay Area Humane Society (BAHS) is a private non-profit that provides animal sheltering for the county and all of its cities and towns, except for the city of Green Bay. BAHS accepts owner surrenders subject to a waiting list when they are full. BAHS used to provide animal sheltering for the city of Green Bay. In June of 2013, though, Green Bay officials began sending animals picked up by animal control within the city limits to a veterinarian’s office for the stray hold period. Recently the city has been considering moving animal control and sheltering back to BAHS. BAHS reports its statistics in the Asilomar Accords format. In 2014 the shelter took in 3780 cats and dogs and had a 94% live release rate. If owner-requested euthanasias and animals who died in shelter care are counted as euthanasias, the live release rate was 91%. Owner-requested euthanasias dropped considerably in 2014 from previous years. In 2013, BAHS intake not counting owner-requested euthanasias was 4640 and the live release rate was 88%. In 2012, the shelter took in 5043 cats and dogs (not counting owner-requested euthanasias), and the live release rate was 85%. Brown County is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

King County, Washington, has a population of almost 2 million people, and its county seat is Seattle. Many of the people in the county live in the suburbs of Seattle. In 2008, the county reported a live release rate of 77%, substantially better than in previous years. A consultant submitted a scathing report on the shelter, however, which at that time was known as King County Animal Care & Control. The consultant concluded that, among other things, animals were often left without food and water for substantial periods of time. The county council then decided to make changes. In July of 2010, the county implemented a regional plan for animal control, breaking the county up into four regions which each had their own animal control staff. Animal sheltering was consolidated at the county shelter in Kent, Washington. A new manager was appointed. The new entity was know as Regional Animal Services of King County (RASKC). RASKC accepts owner surrenders on a space available basis. RASKC serves the unincoporated area of King County and 25 cities and towns. For 2011 and 2012, RASKC reported a live release rate around 85%. A complicating factor in evaluating the live release rate for King County is that the Humane Society for Seattle/King County (HSSKC), a private organization, accepts owner surrenders (by appointment). HSSKC and the Seattle Animal Shelter report to Maddie’s Fund as a coalition, and their most recent available online report (2010) shows a 91% live release rate for the coalition as a whole, with HSSKC at 94% and the Seattle shelter at 85%. HSSKC separately reported a 96% live release rate for 2011. For the calendar year 2013, RASKC reported an 89% live release rate for cats and dogs. If owner-requested euthanasia and animals who died or were lost in shelter care are included with euthanasias, the live release rate was 86%. The shelter also euthanized some livestock, wildlife, and small animals, including bats for rabies testing. If all these euthanasias are counted with cats and dogs, the live release rate was 83%. In 2014, the live release rate declined to 86%, or 84% if animals who died or were lost in shelter care are counted with euthanasias. The live release rate might well be over 90% if the owner surrenders from King County that go to HSSKC were counted in RASKC statistics. HSSKC’s yearly intake is around 6,000, so it is a major player in the area. Since HSSKC serves both the city and the county, it would be helpful to have a consolidated report for all three entities that accounted for transfers among the three entities. At any rate, the Seattle metropolitan area appears to be one of the safest large metros in the nation for animals. King County is counted in the Running Totals as an 80% to 90% community.

Now that shelters in Virginia have filed their reports with the state for 2014, we can see how the top communities did compared with previous years. One thing to note is that the Virginia reports count owner-requested euthanasia in the euthanasia category. Lynchburg, Augusta County, and Nelson County are not included in this article because I have previously posted their updates for 2014. Charlottesville and Albemarle County The Charlottesville-Albemarle SPCA (CASPCA) is a private non-profit that has the contract for animal sheltering for Albemarle County and the town of Charlottesville. The combined population of the city and county is about 118,000 people, although that total does not include non-resident students who attend the University of Virginia. For 2014, CASPCA and animal control matched their 2013 live release rate of 96%. If animals who died in shelter care are counted with euthanasias, the live release rate was 94%. Fairfax County Fairfax County is in northern Virginia near Washington, DC, and has 1,082,000 human residents. The Fairfax County Animal Services Division (FCASD) is the municipal agency providing animal control and sheltering for the county. The shelter reported an 87% live release rate for 2014 (86% including animals who died at the shelter). This is better than it sounds because shelters in northern Virginia have traditionally offered end-of-life euthanasia for pets who are incurably ill, and their owner-requested euthanasia numbers are therefore higher than usual. The shelter recently abolished its former policy of having extra requirements for the adoption of pit-bull-type dogs. Fluvanna County Fluvanna County is southeast of Charlottesville, and it has 26,000 residents. A private organization, the Fluvanna SPCA, contracts with the county for animal services. The Fluvanna SPCA’s live release rate increased to 96% from 93% in 2013. The rate was 95% if animals who died in shelter care are included with euthanasias. King George County King George County is between Washington, D.C., and Richmond, and has 24,000 residents. Animal control and sheltering are provided by a county agency, King George County Animal Control (KGCAC). An enthusiastic group of volunteers known as the King George Animal Rescue League partners with KGCAC to pull animals from the shelter. KGCAC reported a 96% live release rate in 2014, up from 91% reported in 2013. The rate was 95% if animals who died in shelter care are included. Powhatan County Powhatan County, Virginia, has about 28,000 residents and is part of the Richmond metropolitan area. A municipal office, Powhatan Animal Control, handles animal control and sheltering. Powhatan’s live release rate was 94% in 2014, down slightly from 96% in 2013. The rate was 93% if animals who died in shelter care are included. Conclusions From This Data Overall, it is notable that when communities achieve No Kill they tend to stick to it. Many communities have double-digit increases in live release rates on their way to No Kill, but I don’t recall ever seeing a community have a double-digit decline in live release rates once No Kill was achieved. This is a good argument for the fact that a No Kill public shelter system adds value to a community. Residents like to have an animal shelter that is a safe haven for homeless pets, and once they have it they don’t allow it to deteriorate.

Is it a good idea for No Kill advocates to try to get states to pass laws mandating various aspects of No Kill programs? The devil is always in the details, and I think some of these efforts might be good, and others not so much. The subject is too big and complex for a single blog post to cover all the permutations, so I’m just going to talk about some general considerations with legal mandates A legal mandate is only as good as its enforcement mechanism. If the law just makes broad general pronouncements, such as, for example, “shelters must make every reasonable effort to rehome adoptable animals,” it will be hard to enforce. If the law provides that regulations be drafted to enforce a more granular level of control, then we have to persuade the rule-making agency to do a good job. Even if those hurdles are cleared, we may have problems of unfunded mandates. One trend in regulation generally is to try to move away from “command and control” and toward incentives. An example of this is the cap and trade approach for industries that release carbon to the atmosphere. How can the No Kill movement encourage laws and regulations that set up incentives for good shelter performance rather than trying to create good outcomes by outside control? One example of a good incentive is laws that require shelters to report their statistics to the state. These laws do not set up any mandatory performance standards, but they encourage better performance simply by making information about performance available to the public. These laws are especially effective if the state collects the data and makes it available in an online database, allowing for easy comparisons of shelters. Another example of a good incentive would be a state level program where a governor selects an outstanding shelter in the state to be recognized with an official proclamation, perhaps also recognizing a couple of runner-ups. The winners could be selected by a group of respected No Kill leaders advising the governor, and the criteria would be how well a shelter is doing. Perhaps consideration could be given to the conditions under which the shelter is operating by making the award be on the basis of “most improved.” If the national organizations got together behind such a program and generated a lot of incentives for the winners, and a lot of publicity, this could potentially be a very effective motivator. Awards like this can also be a way to increase community engagement, as entire communities get together to compete for an award. Both of the examples cited above – reporting and proclamations – are the type of thing that can actually get through a legislature and be signed by the governor. One advantage of the incentive approach over the performance mandate is that it is much easier to get incentives enacted and carried out. Mandatory rules can generate unintended consequences. No Kill advocates are pretty much uniformly opposed to mandatory spay-neuter, because it has the unintended effect of motivating people to avoid licensing their pets and maybe avoid taking their pets in for health care. What unintended consequences could mandatory performance standards for shelters have? By taking away a shelter’s flexibility to deal with its individual circumstances, can we actually make their job harder without making their performance better? What data, if any, do we have that command and control laws work to improve shelter performance? I have seen many claims for number of lives saved by the few shelter-performance laws that are in place, but no data to back up those claims. As a practical matter, no state legislature is going to adopt a law at this point in time requiring shelters to meet really high performance standards. The danger with encoding the lower standards that legislatures are actually likely to pass is that once these lower standards have the imprimatur of law it may be hard to change them. One way to avoid this might be to ask states to approve very tough standards for shelters, but make them goals rather than mandates. Saving homeless animals has always, in our country, been a separate function from animal control. The purpose of animal control is to protect the public from nuisance and dangerous animals. The purpose of animal sheltering is to find new homes or other humane dispositions for impounded animals. The first municipal animal shelter that was ever created (way back in 1870) was run by a private organization, and the beauty of private organizations has always been that they can spend their own money to save animals. Since animals are property under our law, it is very hard for legislators to justify laws that would require the public to spend more on treating or rehoming a homeless animal than its economic value (which, in the case of shelter animals, is usually nil). So, when we think about requiring public shelters to meet performance standards for lifesaving (going beyond animal control), the question of how that can be funded by the government arises. If we decide that legislation to compel veterinary treatment and rehoming is a good idea, how can we fund enforcement? One way is to ask citizens to pass a special funding measure (bond or tax) specifically for the purpose of improving lifesaving. As one final consideration, I think we have to ask if we need to go down the legislative route at all, given that No Kill momentum right now is so great that shelters are changing rapidly because they want to, not because they have to. We have a limited amount of money and person-power to spend promoting No Kill. Are those resources better spent in lobbying for laws that have not yet been proven to work and could have unintended consequences, or in helping and persuading more shelters to get on the bandwagon voluntarily? There are arguments on both sides. My own opinion is that some of the approaches I’ve outlined above would be no-brainers (state reporting laws and governmental proclamations), and special funding proposals are certainly worthy of consideration, while for other approaches it may be that our efforts would be better spent in other ways.

Cedaredge (population 2300) and Orchard City (3100) are located in Delta County in western Colorado. Development in the county has been primarily along two river valleys, following the Surface Creek and North Fork rivers. Much of the rest of the county outside the river valleys is mountainous and very sparsely inhabited. Cedaredge and Orchard City are in the Surface Creek valley, which is served by the Surface Creek Shelter (SCS), located in Cedaredge. Cedaredge has its own animal control, which takes in dogs only. SCS is managed by a non-profit, the Friends of Cedaredge Animal Control (FCAC). I was told by a shelter official that FCAC has a memorandum of understanding to impound the dogs picked up by Cedaredge animal control. In addition to Cedaredge dogs, SCS takes in non-feral stray cats, stray dogs, and owner-surrendered dogs and cats from the residents of Surface Creek valley, including Orchard City. SCS charges a small fee for owner surrenders and usually has a waiting list, but they make exceptions to the waiting list when needed. There are rescues in the county who do TNR for feral cats. Statistics submitted to the Colorado Department of Agriculture by FCAC for 2012 show that SCS’s intake, including strays and owner surrenders, was 313 cats and dogs. The live release rate was 95% (94% if animals who died or were lost in shelter care were counted in with euthanasias). In 2013, FCAC reported an intake of 314 animals and a live release rate of 99%. The live release rate was 97% if animals who died or were lost in shelter care are included with euthanasias. The North Fork area of Delta County has also been doing very well at animal sheltering, but their animal shelter system has been unstable. Therefore I’m not listing those communities at this time. Cedaredge was originally listed by this blog on November 16, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

I periodically get questions about how much it costs a city to transition to No Kill. Based on what I’ve seen in individual cities and counties over the last 4 years of researching No Kill shelters, I do not think there is any one-size-fits-all answer. Here are a few thoughts on the issue, though. Your mileage may vary. The reason there is no one-size-fits-all answer is that the cost depends on many things, including whether the entity running the shelter is public or private, how much the city or county is currently spending on animal control and sheltering, the amount of support in the community that already exists or can be harnessed (including donations and volunteers), the condition and location of the shelter, and the type and number of homeless animals in the community. An easy way to think of it is that communities want to end up at the same place (No Kill) but they are starting from very different places. One way to start the analysis is to compare the cost of particular, individual No Kill initiatives to what the shelter is currently doing. For example, if the amount that the shelter currently spends per cat is more than what the shelter would spend per cat on a shelter-neuter-return program, then SNR will save money. And pet-retention initiatives that reduce intake have built-in cost savings. Help desks and managed admissions are especially attractive in that regard because they cost little to implement and can often be done with volunteer help, and the reduction in intake can be substantial. This approach has the added advantage that it can be easier to get city officials to agree to a piecemeal transition than doing everything at once. One of the myths about No Kill is that it leads to shelter warehousing. Making it clear to city and county officials that reducing length-of-stay is a priority for No Kill can go a long way toward alleviating that concern. A foster program is one important way for No Kill shelters to reduce length-of-stay in the shelter. City officials should understand that it is far easier to have community engagement in the form of volunteer help and fosters when a shelter is No Kill. Few people would want to foster a litter of orphan kittens, for example, if they thought the shelter might kill the kittens later on. A cost that may be higher with No Kill is veterinary services. After all, one of the primary things that separates No Kill shelters from ordinary shelters is that No Kill treats the treatables. Sometimes treatment is simple, but sometimes it is costly. Much or all of this expense can be offset with donations, though. There are lots of people willing to help save a parvo puppy or get a wheelchair for a paraplegic animal if the shelter lets them know of the need. Public-private partnerships where the private entity pulls sick animals from the shelter and fundraises to treat them is one effective way to deal with veterinary costs. If a city or county has been underspending on animal sheltering, sometimes everyone involved will just have to face that fact. If the shelter building is in a bad location, or is old, poorly designed, or too small, then plans will need to be made to build a new shelter. Non-profits that have a contract to operate a municipal shelter seem to have an easier time with such projects. I have not run figures on this, but my impression is that non-profits that are actively working in the community are far better at fundraising than non-profits that are set up specifically to raise money for a municipal shelter. In some places, voters have approved special millages or other permanent funding for shelters. Most households these days have pets, and anyone who has a pet is happy to know that there is a caring, safe system in place in case their animal ever gets lost or if for some reason they cannot care for it any longer. They are willing to contribute for that. It is something of a false equivalency to compare a No Kill shelter to a traditional, high-kill shelter solely in terms of cost, because the No Kill shelter provides more value to the community. Even though a head-to-head comparison on costs does not give a true picture of the value of a No Kill shelter, No Kill can often win such a cost comparison. Greater efficiencies from No Kill programs, donations, volunteer work, fostering, and even voter-approved taxes can entirely offset any increased costs due to a transition to No Kill. And just because a shelter spends $500,000 more per year, say, after a transition to No Kill does not mean that the extra money is coming out of existing city funds. If the shelter receives $1,000,000 more in cash or in-kind support, then the jurisdiction will actually have a net savings from the switch to No Kill. In fact, No Kill is something of a marker for smart city government that is able to leverage the private sector to provide an important amenity to its citizens. As a recent Mayors Leadership Survey demonstrated, 5 out of 10 of the most admired cities in the United States are No Kill, and the other 5 have shelter systems that are much better than average or are transitioning to No Kill. No Kill is a sign of good governance as much as it is a sign of good sheltering.