Atlanta, Georgia, was known for years as a city with a very low live release rate. Rebecca Guinn decided to reform it. She gave up her lucrative career as an attorney and formed a non-profit called LifeLine Animal Project, which she built up until it was able to take over the animal sheltering contracts in Fulton and DeKalb counties in 2013. Together, the population of the two counties, which contain the city of Atlanta, is over 1.5 million. Here is a link to an NPR interview that was done in July 2014 with Guinn. Fulton and DeKalb have seen considerable progress since then. Lineline  has reported that its live release rate for the Fulton County shelter is just under 90%. LifeLine previously reported that the save rate in DeKalb was at 86%. It’s looking like both shelters are going to finish 2014 in the 80-90% range. Both shelters are open-admission municipal shelters that, between them, take in about 50 animals per day every day. The population of the two counties is over 1.5 million people. Fulton and DeKalb counties are counted in the Running Totals as 80%+ communities.

Out the Front Door is now on Twitter! Handle is @outthefrontdoor. The Twitter feed will have the blogs of course, but also No Kill news and events.

Jim Bouderau always liked animals, and as a teenager he worked for a veterinarian and thought about becoming a vet himself. Ultimately, though, he found a career he loved in the hospitality industry. When he moved to Ithaca, New York, in 2005, it was for the purpose of opening and managing a hotel. Among the people Bouderau met in Ithaca were board members of the SPCA of Tompkins County. The SPCA is a private, open admission shelter that serves the county and the city of Ithaca, as well as most of the other municipalities in the county. Bouderau was impressed by the work the shelter was doing, and joined the SPCA’s board of directors. In early 2011 when former director Abigail Smith left to take over as director of the Austin Animal Center, Bouderau was on the search committee to find a new director. The committee did some thinking about what they wanted in a new executive director, and decided that the one area where they had the most need going forward was connecting with major donors. The SPCA of Tompkins County had an illustrious history in No Kill dating back to 1999, when the board, impressed by the work that Rich Avanzino had done at the San Francisco SPCA, adopted a resolution to go No Kill. In 1999 and 2000 the shelter’s live release rate was 75%, which was one of the highest in the country at that time for an open admission shelter. When Nathan Winograd became director in 2001 he increased the live release rate to over 90%, and Abigail Smith continued that high save rate during her tenure. No Kill had come at a cost, however, and the SPCA was spending about twice as much per county resident as it had spent in the days before No Kill. The good news about No Kill is that any increased costs can potentially be offset by increased donations, since residents are usually happy to support a No Kill shelter. By the late 2000s, the SPCA was doing well in fundraising in terms of its annual fund and its direct-mail program, but it was lagging in major gifts. Once the search committee had identified major gifts as the biggest need for the new director to fill, they decided that they really needed to hire a local person who would have the contacts within the community for that effort. Bouderau ultimately stepped forward for the job, thinking that he would serve as director for a period of one to three years, just long enough to get the major donors program on a firm footing. That was in May of 2011, and now, more than four years later, Bouderau is still the executive director. He has achieved the goal of putting the SPCA on a solid financial foundation, and the shelter’s income now matches its expenses. He decided to stay on, though, because he “absolutely loves” the job and finds it more fulfilling than anything else he has done. Bouderau jokes that being a shelter director is similar to running a hotel because he’s still in the business of lodging. Joking aside, there is a great deal of similarity in what is needed for both jobs. Running an animal shelter, like running a business, requires skills in facility management, financial management, and human resources. Bouderau is an example of something that we frequently see in successful No Kill shelters, which is directors who have little or no experience in animal sheltering but are able to succeed because they are good managers. Bouderau’s background is in business, but we have also seen successful shelter directors with backgrounds in marketing and law. Bouderau attributes a lot of the SPCA’s success to the community of Ithaca. He notes that it is a progressive community with residents who are very receptive to forward-thinking ideas like No Kill. As one example of the support the SPCA gets from the community he points to the SPCA’s relationship with the Cornell shelter medicine program, which was one of the first such programs in the country. In 2012 the shelter formalized a relationship with Cornell in which a team of four veterinarians, including Dr. Elizabeth Berliner, the head of the shelter medicine program, provide veterinary care at much less than market rates for the SPCA. Two of the four veterinarians are interns or residents – graduate veterinarians who want to learn more about shelter medicine – and the benefit for the Cornell program is that the interns and residents get hands-on experience in a working shelter. The program allows the SPCA to save animals who require very complex care. It also provides a 24-hour on-call service for animal control officers to help them triage injured and ill animals in the field and decide if the animals can be cared for at the shelter or need to go straight to the Cornell hospital. The next big goal that Bouderau wants to tackle, now that he has the shelter on a sustainable financial basis, is to rebuild the old shelter on the SPCA’s 12-acre campus. The original shelter building is very old. In 2004 a new adoption center was completed, and that provides a bright, modern place to welcome people looking for pets. Most of the work of the shelter is still done in the old building, though, and it needs to be replaced. Tompkins County is a microcosm of what makes for a great shelter system. It has a progressive community that supports the shelter, a private non-profit with a forward-thinking board that contracts for animal control and provides open-admission sheltering, access to the latest in shelter medicine, and last, but far from least, an executive director with the right skills for the job.

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

[NOTE: The Worth Watching category lists communities whose animal shelter systems are doing substantially better than average, but have not reported a sustained (for one year or more) 90%+ live release rate. These communities are not counted in the running total in the blog’s subtitle. For more about the Worth Watching category, see the Worth Watching page link in the blog’s header.] Orange County is in a rural area of Virginia that is noted for its Civil War historical sites. The county, which is about 2 hours southwest of Washington, DC, has a population of over 33,000 people. Its county seat is the town of Orange. The Orange County Animal Shelter (OCAS) is a municipal agency that provides animal sheltering for the county (animal control is provided by a separate county agency).  The shelter takes in owner surrenders from county residents without restriction, although it does ask residents to provide records and information for surrendered pets. The Orange County Humane Society is a local rescue that works with OCAS, helping with offsite adoptions, transfers, and spay-neuter. OCAS, like other municipal shelters in Virginia, is required to report its statistics yearly to the Virginia Department of Agriculture. According to the reports it has submitted, OCAS has had a live release rate of over 80% for several years. See the links for the reports for 2008, 2009, and 2010. In 2011, the live release rate was 84% (81% with animals who died in shelter care included). In 2012, the live release rate improved to 87% (85% with animals who died in shelter care included). OCAS relies heavily on transfers to maintain its live release rate. In 2012, for example, it transferred 562 animals out of a total intake of 2210, with 369 animals going to out-of-state rescues. This is not unusual in Virginia, which is located on I-95, a major transport route to northeast cities and New England.

Southampton, New York, is a city of about 57,000 people located in east Long Island. In 2009, the city stopped funding its animal control department. The citizens rallied to help the animals and formed the Southampton Animal Shelter Foundation, also known as the Southampton Animal Shelter (SAS), a 501(c)(3) organization that took over management of the shelter. SAS has provided animal control and sheltering for the city since January 1, 2010. The shelter takes in strays and accepts owner surrenders from its jurisdiction. In a 2011 newsletter that is no longer available online, SAS listed the communities it serves as “Eastport, Speonk, Westhampton, Westhampton Beach, Quiogue, Quogue, East Quogue, Hampton Bays, Southampton, Southampton Village, Watermill, Bridgehampton, Sagaponack, Wainscott, North Sea, Noyack, Sag Harbor, Sag Harbor Village, Northampton, North Haven, Riverside and Flanders.” That is 21 communities with a total of over 40,000 people. The shelter has a Training and Behavior Department that has developed a group socialization program for its dogs with the help of noted behavioralist Aimee Sadler. The shelter also offers group and private lessons for dogs, and puppy training classes. Southampton is a member of the Center for Shelter Dogs program run by the Animal Rescue League of Boston, and uses the center’s Match-Up II system for behavior evaluation for its dogs. They offer low cost spay-neuter. The shelter supports TNR for community cats. The shelter reports a 94% live release rate on its website. The Southampton cities are counted in the Running Totals as 90%+ communities.

The city of Rockwall is the county seat of Rockwall County, which is part of the Dallas metro area. The city has about 37,000 residents. In 2011, a non-profit volunteer organization called Rockwall Pets was formed for the purpose of increasing the live release rate of the city shelter, which was at about 60%. Rockwall Pets brought the live release rate of the shelter up to well over 90%, but the city employees who managed the shelter were not completely on board with the effort. The Rockwall city council voted in August 2012 to contract out the operation of the city shelter to the Collin County Humane Society (CCHS), a non-profit organization, and retain only animal control duties. The contract price was 15% less than the amount the city had paid to run the shelter previously. CCHS accepts owner surrenders from Rockwall and the city of Heath. Rockwall Pets has posted statistics for the Rockwall shelter from 2008 through 2013. The live release rate for 2012 was 97%, with a total intake of 2086 animals. The shelter had a 70% adoption rate and 18% return-to-owner rate. In 2013, the first full year of operation under CCHS, the shelter reported a 96% live release rate. Total intake was 2189, with 14% of animals returned to their owners and 68% adopted. I am listing this community as 90% Reported because I was not able to locate or obtain a full listing of statistics online as required for the right sidebar. Rockwall Pets has moved on to other initiatives in their area. Michael Kitkoski, one of the founders of Rockwall Pets, told me that they are now focusing on the cities of Royse, Rowlett, and Dallas. Rockwall, TX, is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

Kansas City, Missouri, is a city of 464,000 people. It is located on the western border of Missouri, with the state border bisecting it from the smaller city of Kansas City, Kansas. For a variety of reasons, the kill rate at the Kansas City, Missouri, animal shelter went from 66% in 2006 down to 32% in 2011. At that point, with one in three shelter animals still dying, the city decided not to renew the contract of the organization that had been running the shelter. A group of pet advocates then got together and formed a new non-profit called Kansas City Pet Project (KCPP). The president of the board of directors of the new organization was well-known blogger Brent Toellner, who writes the KC Dog Blog. The first agenda item of the new organization was to win the contract to run the city shelter. After a struggle over financing, the contract with KCPP was finally approved by the city council in November of 2011. KCPP is an “open access” shelter that accepts animals from animal control and from the public. KCPP formally began running the Kansas City shelter on January 1, 2012, with a goal to stop the killing of healthy and treatable pets. The shelter was open on New Year’s Day, putting its plan of expanded hours into practice. The shelter also debuted its “Free Ride Home” program for returning animals to their owners in the field. One week later, they had adopted out 165 pets. The shelter implemented several initiatives to increase adoptions, including an off-site adoption center and a collaborative adopt-a-thon in 2012 where 706 animals were adopted. It reached out to volunteers, and sought out rescue help. It started a transport program to send dogs to the North Shore Animal League. It successfully raised funds for play yards for dogs. It filled out its leadership team including Teresa Johnson and Shannon Wells in the top spots. In July of 2012, KCPP’s live release rate first hit 91%. They were able to maintain that high rate, and for the year from July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2013 the live release rate was 91%. If owner-requested euthanasia and animals who died or were lost in shelter care are included in the euthanasia total, the modified live release rate was 88%. The total intake for the year from July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2013 was 7084 animals (counting only dogs and cats) as compared to 6128 in calendar year 2011. This high intake put KCPP in a very small group of shelters of that size that have achieved a 90%+ live release rate. For calendar year 2013 KCPP’s intake was 8179 cats and dogs, as compared to 6846 in calendar year 2012. Despite the significantly higher intake, KCPP increased their live release rate to 92%. The modified live release rate (counting owner-requested euthanasia and animals who died or were lost in shelter care in with euthanasias) was 88%. In a blog post on January 12, 2014, Toellner reviewed the year. Highlights of 2013 were the shelter’s offsite adoption venue which had more than 1600 adoptions, a visit from Aimee Sadler to establish a Playing for Life program at the shelter, and a mega-adoption event in October where they adopted out 228 pets in three days. For an in-depth look at what has made KCPP so successful in such a short time, check out this brochure. It was prepared for the 2013 Best Friends No More Homeless Pets conference, where Toellner was one of the featured speakers. Kansas City, Missouri, was originally listed by this blog on August 9, 2013, based on its July 2012 to June 2013 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 calendar year statistics.

Charlottesville is an independent city within Albemarle County in Virginia, located near the Shenandoah National Park. The combined population of the city and county is about 118,000 people, not counting non-resident students who attend the University of Virginia. The Charlottesville-Albemarle SPCA (CASPCA) is a private non-profit that contracts with the city and the county for animal sheltering services. The shelter takes in strays and owner surrenders. It has a pet retention program to reduce the number of owner surrenders, and requires an appointment and a fee to surrender a pet. The shelter does not guarantee acceptance of an owner surrender if the animal has a major medical or behavior issue. CASPCA posts its statistics on its website. It had a 90% live release rate in 2006 and has had a 90% or better live release rate each year since 2009. In 2011, the shelter’s live release rate was 93%. The live release rate for 2012 was 94%, with an intake of 3569 dogs and cats. If we include the categories of owner requested euthanasia (ORE) and died or lost in shelter care in with euthanasias, the shelter’s 2012 live release rate was 92%. This is the same as 2011, when the calculation including ORE and died/lost was 92%. For 2013 the shelter reported an intake of 3679 cats and dogs. This is an intake of approximately 31 per 1000 people. The live release rate was 96%. The shelter did not report any owner-requested euthanasias. If animals who died or were lost in shelter care are included with euthanasias, the live release rate was 94%. The director who first took CASPCA to a 90% or better live release rate, Susanne Kogut, resigned in June of 2012. Leslie Hervey was selected as the new executive director in the summer of 2013. Hervey was formerly the executive director of the Martinsville-Henry County SPCA in Virginia. Albemarle County, Virginia, was originally listed by this blog on April 15, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

The great majority of the communities listed in the right sidebar of this blog have attained their high live release rates by placing animals within their own communities. There are some places, though, that rely heavily on sending animals out of the state to save them. For those of you who are not familiar with transports, they generally involve sending animals from shelters in the south to rescues and shelters in the north. Colorado is a major receiving state for transports, and it takes in thousands of animals per year from other states. Transports are not easy – the trips often take 2 days (meaning that overnight accommodations must be found), a health certificate is usually required, and money must come from somewhere for gasoline, crates, etc. Transports used to be done by volunteers driving individual “legs” of 1-2 hours, which involved a lot of work in recruiting and coordinating the volunteers, but now they are often done with a large van and one driver who does the whole route. There are also private companies who will transport shelter animals for a fee. There is even a group called Pilots N Paws that uses volunteer pilots to fly animals. In most cases, the animals who are transported are on the kill list of their sending shelter, so there is no doubt that transports are literally lifesaving for the great majority of the transported animals. Many people nevertheless object to transports because they fear that transported animals will take homes away from animals in the receiving communities and result in those animals being killed. What does the evidence say on this issue? Fortunately, the state of Colorado collects detailed statistics for its animal care facilities, and since Colorado is also a state that receives many transferred animals, these statistics can tell us a lot about whether transferred animals take homes from animals in the receiving location. The Colorado reporting system has a “shelter” category that includes all shelters that receive impounded animals as well as some private organizations that have a centralized intake facility. (Rescues that do not have a centralized facility report in a separate category.) Thus, we have statistics available for public shelters in Colorado. If transports are resulting in local animals being euthanized, we should be able to see the effect in the numbers. In 2012, impounding shelters in Colorado transported in 13,726 animals —  12,642 dogs and 1084 cats. (There were probably many thousands more who were transported in by non-impounding rescues, but those transports are not germane to our inquiry since rescues generally will not euthanize for time or space). As I discussed in an earlier post, Colorado had an overall 90% live release rate for dogs for 2012. With a live release rate that high, it is unlikely that very many, if any, local dogs were killed who could have been adopted but for the transports. We know from the experience of many shelters all over the United States that the difficulty in placing the last 10% of dogs is more a matter of finding resources than finding homes — the last 10% are generally animals who need medical care or training, or perhaps hospice or sanctuary. In fact, the statistics definitively prove that, as least as far as impounding shelters are concerned, the transports of dogs into Colorado saved lives in 2012. As mentioned above, 12,642 dogs were received by impounding shelters. There were 8801 euthanasias of dogs in the entire state for 2012 by those shelters. Thus, even if we assume for the sake of argument that every single transported dog took away a home from a local dog, there were still 3841 net lives saved by the end of the year. I think it’s safe to conclude, based on these numbers, that transports of dogs into Colorado took sales away from breeders rather than taking away homes from local shelter dogs. But what about cats? There were only 1084 cats transported into Colorado in 2012. Colorado is doing far better than most states with cats, in that it had a live release rate for cats of 79% in 2012. I think we would need to know more about the cats being transported into Colorado to make a judgment. If the cats are mostly purebred, it may be that they are taking sales away from breeders rather than homes from local cats. Still, the evidence in favor of the effectiveness of transports for cats is much less than for dogs. Can we generalize from the experience in Colorado to make conclusions about transports nationwide? I think we can, because there does not appear to be anything that sets Colorado apart from the other transportation destination states that would make such a generalization invalid. There are a great many communities in the northeast that are at a 90% or more live release rate for dogs, and the northeast probably receives more transports than any other part of the country. So the same statistics that apply in Colorado probably apply to most destination communities. I think this study shows statistical support for the conclusion that there is a shortage of adoptable dogs in certain areas of the country. I think the study also shows that transporters in general are being careful not to take homes away from adoptable animals. This is shown by the fact that in 2012, transporters brought only a few cats into Colorado, and did not bring in enough dogs to push the live release rate below 90%.

Now that feral dogs have virtually disappeared in the United States and the supply of homeless dogs is approaching balance with demand, attention is increasingly turning to feral cats. Cats in general, and feral cats in particular, are now the great issue in the effort to save all healthy and treatable shelter animals. One practical problem we face at the outset with feral cats is that we do not know how many there are. We do not even have any good estimates – just guesses.1 There is a way to work around this, though. The absolute number of feral cats today is less important than the trend in their numbers over time. So how can we figure out the trend? The first step is to go where the cats are. Free-roaming cats, including feral cats, are highly concentrated in urban environments. 2 The reason is that urban environments provide far greater opportunities for scavenging and far greater concentrations of food resources and shelter than agricultural and uninhabited areas. In fact, the number of free-roaming cats per unit of ground in cities is more than 20 times the number of free-roaming cats in rural areas. 3 The second step is to look at shelter intake of cats over time. If, after correcting for variations in enforcement, the trend in cat intake is up, then we know that whatever the community is doing as to feral cats is not working. If the trend is down, then we know the community is on the right track. You might be wondering how shelter intake of cats in general can indicate the trend in feral cat populations in particular. After all, the majority of shelter intake of cats is owner surrenders and strays. And lots of shelters do not take in feral cats at all. The reason that shelter intake of cats reflects the number of feral cats is that the feral cat population is not separate from the cat population as a whole. Gary J. Patronek, one of the premier experts on population dynamics in both cats and dogs, has pointed out that there are seven common lifestyles for a cat: indoor-only, indoor-outdoor, community cat, stray, managed colony, barn cat, and feral cat.4 The key to cat population dynamics is that these categories are not hard and fast. In fact, cats frequently move from one category to another. Thus, the feral cat population will tend to rise and fall with the general cat population. And the intake of cats at the shelter is an even better indicator of the trend in the feral cat population than the number of owned cats in a community because shelter intake is limited to homeless cats, which is the category that includes feral cats. The Jacksonville, Florida, city shelter provides a good example of how shelter intake over time can track the free-roaming cat population. Florida, with its balmy weather and relative lack of mesopredators, is heaven for feral cats, so Jacksonville is second to none in the difficulty of the feral cat problem it has to solve. Yet cat intake at the city shelter began to decline when the Feral Freedom shelter-neuter-return program was started in 2008, and is now at its lowest point since accurate shelter statistics began to be kept. To sum up, all we need to do to determine whether we are making progress in reducing feral cat numbers is look at shelter intake trends in cities. We look at cities because that’s where the feral cats are, and we look at shelters because that’s where the homeless animals go. We look at trends rather than worrying about absolute numbers because trends tell us whether we are making progress or not. We don’t have to be fussy about what types of cats a shelter takes in, because all cats are part of the overall cat population that feeds the feral cat sub-population. In recent years there has been debate about whether we need to keep putting resources into further reducing shelter intake of dogs in communities where live releases of dogs are high. With cats we clearly do need to keep putting resources into spay-neuter efforts, because ideally we would like to reduce the number of feral cats to zero. The problem of feral dogs was solved long ago in most places in the United States. The problem of feral cats has been harder to solve, but the results in Jacksonville show that not only can we solve the problem, we can solve it rather quickly, without any mass roundup or mass slaughter of cats. 1. Scott R. Loss, Tom Will, and Peter P. Marra, “The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States,” Nature Communications 4, January 29, 2013, Supplementary Information: doi:10.1038/ncomms2380. 2. Terry O’Connor, Animals as Neighbors: The Past and Present of Commensal Animals (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 57-66. 3. John W. S. Bradshaw, The Behavior of the Domestic Cat, 2nd ed. (Wallingford, UK: CAB International, 2012), 140. 4. Gary J. Patronek, “Special Report: Free-Roaming and Feral Cats – Their Impact on Wildlife and Human Beings” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 212, no. 3 (January 15, 1998), 218.

Petaluma is a city of about 58,000 people in Sonoma County, California. On August 1, 2012, a non-profit named Petaluma Animal Services Foundation (PASF) took over management of the city’s municipal shelter. The city had allowed PASF to bid on the contract because it wanted to cut the cost of animal control. In an article that appeared in a Petaluma newspaper last August, a reporter noted that PASF was able to provide more effective services at less cost than the city administration, in large part because two-thirds of its budget comes from donations, fees, and grants. This funding allows PASF to pay for veterinary services. PASF takes in strays and owner surrenders from the city. They have a barn cat program and offer low-cost spay and neuter. PASF has drastically cut the average length of stay since taking over from the city, and increased the number of foster homes. PASF hired most of the city employees who had worked at the shelter before it took over, but it replaced the previous shelter director with Jeff Charter, who was director of animal control under the city administration. In November of 2012, PASF reported that it had been running at a 94% live release rate from the date of the takeover. The shelter director recently sent me their Asilomar Accords form with statistics for 2013: Petaluma 2013 Asilomar Form The report shows a live release rate for calendar year 2013 of 97%. If owner-requested euthanasias and animals who died or were lost in shelter care are included with euthanasias, the live release rate was 94%. Total intake was 1300 cats and dogs.