[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.] Logan County, in northeastern Colorado, has 23,000 people. The county seat, Sterling, has a population of 18,000 people. The Logan County Humane Society (LCHS) is a private non-profit that provides animal control and sheltering for the city and, informally, for the county. I called the shelter and was told that owner surrenders are accepted on a space available basis, with immediate intake if it’s an emergency situation. In 2012, LCHS reported an intake of 468 animals, with a live release rate of 91%. If animals who died or were lost in shelter care are included with euthanasias, the live release rate was 87%. Although LCHS reported a live release rate above 90% for 2012, I’m listing the community as Worth Watching instead of in the right sidebar, because the shelter official I spoke with told me that LCHS might have a slightly lower live release rate in 2013. LCHS started a trap-neuter-return program in 2013, and the program started with a colony of cats that had more very sick members than most. Several of those cats were euthanized. I’ll check on Logan County again after the full 2013 numbers are in and perhaps will be able to add it to the right sidebar at that time.

The news is slow this week, so today’s post is on a subject I’ve been following for a while – the dysfunctional shelter situation in Augusta, Georgia. The Augusta Animal Shelter was in the local news this week when it reported that its shelter killing rate so far in 2015 is down 15% from the same period in 2014. That sounds good, until you read the rest of the story and see that so far this year the shelter has killed 1,912 pets and adopted out only 572. Why is the Augusta shelter so bad? A grand jury report released last January found that the shelter is “understaffed and undersized” and has an inadequate building in a poor location. The report also found that the “staff is doing an incredible job with what they have to work with.” The report found that the shelter’s 70% kill rate was due, among other things, to its location being hard to find and its starting salary being $19,500, which led to a lot of staff turnover. Median household income in Augusta is low – under $35,000 in 2013. Shelter intake appears to be very high. A page on the shelter’s website says the shelter takes in over 12,000 animals each year and returns only 550 to their owners. The website has a link to statistics, but it has been down when I’ve checked. The grand jury report said intake for the year was 10,000 in 2014. Augusta’s population is about 200,000, so if intake is 10,000 per year that is 50 pets per thousand people (PPTP), which is extremely high. The shelter accepts out-of-county surrenders for a small fee, which might be part of its intake problem. Lisa Floyd, who operates an organization called CSRA Life Saver that helps the shelter, says that the problem is too many animals. There are still places, mostly in the southeast, where there is a pet overpopulation problem, and it looks like Augusta might be one of those places. In my researches it seems like shelters with PPTP of 50 or above usually have to transport animals elsewhere for adoption while trying to reduce intake, if they are to get to No Kill. A claim of “too many animals” is often just an excuse for poor performance, but in the case of the Augusta shelter it appears to be simply a factual statement. The shelter lost its part-time veterinarian in 2014, and the city approved hiring a new veterinarian. No one applied for the job for months after the position was announced, and the shelter was without a veterinarian until a hire was announced a couple of months ago. The shelter’s advisory board has also had major upheavals in the last year. Is the high kill rate and general dysfunction the fault of shelter leadership? A story last year indicated that there was a lack of trust between rescues and shelter director Sharon Broady, and that it was costing animal lives. To Broady’s credit, though, it appears that since then she has been attempting to make improvements. The Augusta shelter is not exactly an attractive venue for shelter directors, any more than it is for veterinarians. Low wages, high staff turnover, and an inadequate and isolated shelter building is not a good combination for a city that wants to support excellent leadership. In looking at successful shelters over the years, there is usually one or more things that stick out that have made the community successful. It might be a great director who is so talented that he or she can overcome all obstacles. It might be a supportive and progressive community of people who spay and neuter their pets and who come to the shelter to get them when they stray. It might be city leaders who find enough money to support an attractive, modern, convenient shelter building that’s open on evenings and weekends. It might be a rescue group of volunteers who transport animals north. It might be a non-profit that takes over and does whatever the city shelter is failing to do. Augusta has some dedicated rescue groups, but that’s about it. Augusta’s combination of a cash-starved shelter, inadequate physical plant, extremely high intake, and low-income community presents a real challenge for No Kill. The city’s advantages are that residents are concerned about the shelter, local media regularly report on the situation, and shelter staff appear open to receiving help. So what could be done? In the last few years some of the big national organizations have been able to make an impact in communities by coming in from outside with one or more of three interventions – targeted spay-neuter, transports, and community cat programs. Augusta needs all three. The Augusta shelter has an adoption rate of about 6 or 7 per thousand people as far as I can tell from the fragmentary data. That is much less than No Kill communities achieve, but given the shelter’s circumstances I’m surprised it’s that high. It may be hard to increase that rate given the poor location of the shelter and the apparent lack of money to have adoption-friendly hours. I was not able to find any information on whether the city plans to take action on the grand jury report by building a new shelter in a better location or increasing funding to the shelter so that it can extend its hours. Short of that, the only way to get a high adoption rate would appear to be the private sector taking the animals out and marketing them locally in an effective way. The shelter has offsite adoptions, which may account for their recent increase in adoptions, but their main offsite venue appears to be the local pet store. Augusta could also use some help from consultants – although it is doubtful any money for consulting would be forthcoming and there may be constraints on the director’s power to change procedures. Just looking at the shelter’s website shows some things that need to be done, from stopping out-of-jursidiction intake to making the shelter’s hours more convenient to asking for appointments for owner surrenders. I think the Augusta situation is worth looking at because jurisdictions like Augusta are increasingly what the No Kill movement is facing. A lot of the low-hanging fruit in shelter improvement has already been picked. Today, communities where the live release rate is under 50% tend to have some serious systemic problems that may not be solvable simply by lobbying local government or firing the shelter director. Those communities may require people from outside to come in and provide resources, at least to get the shelter on its feet.

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

If a person walked up to a dog on the street and intentionally hit it with a tire iron in the face, breaking its nose and causing permanent damage, that person could be charged with animal cruelty in any state in the union. Depending on the circumstances of the case, it could easily be a felony charge. Yet dog breeders – including “hobby” breeders – do equivalent acts of cruelty every day, to millions of dogs every year, with no consequences. I’m talking about dog breeders who deliberately and intentionally breed to produce severe genetic deformities, with full knowledge that the animals they are creating will live pain-filled, compromised, and often short lives. One very common example of the type of deformity I’m talking about is brachycephalia. The word brachycephalia means “short head.” Brachycephalic dogs have a shortened skull and a short, often almost non-existent muzzle. This produces a look that many people think is cute. Some of the popular brachycephalic breeds are the Pug, Pekingese, French Bulldog, English Bulldog, Shih Tzu, Lhasa Apso, and Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Brachycephalia is also a problem in the breeding of cats, although mercifully less so than in the breeding of dogs. There are so many serious health problems created by brachycephalia that I hardly know where to start. The short skull means that the eyes don’t have enough room to sit normally in their sockets. This produces the protruding look that is considered cute, but it also makes the eyes more prone to pop out of their sockets, and it makes the eyes in general more likely to be injured because they have less bone around them. It gets worse. The changes to the brachycephalic dog’s nose and airway are what really makes their lives miserable. We all know that one of the main ways a dog experiences the world is through scent. The brachycephalic dog is much less able to enjoy this sensory experience because he hardly has any muzzle. The short muzzle also gravely affects the dog’s ability to control its body temperature. Dogs control their body temperature by panting to circulate air through their mouths. In the distorted mouth of the brachycephalic dog this air circulation is greatly reduced, with the consequence that the dog easily overheats. A mutt can run after a tennis ball on a summer day, jump up and catch it, and run back to his person. It is hard to imagine a fully brachycephalic dog being able to do this simple thing. Even if he could, he would quickly get overheated and have to stop. The deformities of the skull in the brachycephalic dog mean that the airway is narrowed and compromised, with all the structures that a normal dog has in its throat squished together in a smaller space. This narrowed airway means that brachycephalic dogs often struggle to breathe, sometimes resembling people with COPD. The brachycephalic dog has to work at breathing, which is supposed to be a natural function that the dog doesn’t even have to think about. The labored breathing of the brachycephalic dog can, over time, cause the larynx to collapse, obstructing the airway and causing severe respiratory distress or death. Laryngeal collapse can happen as early as 4 months of age in brachycephalic breeds. The deformed airway causes many secondary problems beyond the primary problem of breathing. Brachycephalic dogs are prone to sleep apnea. Their attempts to get enough oxygen by gulping air may lead to vomiting and regurgitation. Brachycephalic dogs are at risk every time they have anesthesia because the narrowed and compromised airway makes it more difficult to ensure a good oxygen supply both during and after surgery. The unavoidable manipulation of the airway during intubation, as well as the stress associated with surgery, can cause serious complications. Because the muzzles of brachycephalic dogs are so short, their teeth do not have room to grow normally. That means that these dogs often have severe dental problems. But because of the dangers of anesthesia it is difficult to treat their dental problems or even to do routine dental cleaning. Brachycephalic dogs differ in the extent of their symptoms. But even dogs that have fewer symptoms such as wheezing, gasping, and heat intolerance will still experience a greatly diminished quality of life, as they by definition do not experience life the way a normal dog does. In my opinion, deliberately breeding dogs with deformities this severe constitutes animal cruelty. Today we pride ourselves on thinking of our cats and dogs as family members. Pets are like children to many people. Imagine if there was a genetics-engineering company that offered parents an opportunity to make “cuter” children at the cost of compromising their health and their lives. Everyone would be horrified, and if anyone ever actually tried to do that they would be arrested and put in jail. The idea is so absurd that it is hard to even imagine. Yet dog breeders do the equivalent thing every time they breed one brachycephalic dog to another, and no one says a word. In fact, dog breeders have been working hard to make the problem even worse. In just the last 50 years the skull of the British bulldog, for example, has been radically shortened by selective breeding. One particularly gruesome result of the continued breeding for shortened heads is the greatly increased incidence of syringomyelia in brachycephalic dogs, particularly in the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. In these dogs the back of the skull has been so shortened by deliberate breeding that there is not enough room for the brain. The brain in affected dogs is squeezed and affects the flow of cerebrospinal fluid. The syndrome is perhaps best known for the intense pain that it causes its victims. It may progress to paralysis. By some estimates the problem is present in up to half of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. It is scary to think of the pain these dogs may be suffering even when they do not have overt symptoms of the disease.  What is wrong with people who deliberately breed these dogs? Brachycephalia may be the most obvious example of deliberate animal cruelty in dog breeding, but there are many other examples. The giant dog breeds have their own problems, including a greatly reduced life span. The dog’s circulatory system did not evolve to be able to support the height and weight of the giant breeds, and so their expected life span is barely half that of a normal dog. An Irish Wolfhound’s life expectancy is about 7 years, compared to 14 years or so for small mutts. The German Shepherd Dog of today looks bizarre to most people because of the extreme angulation in its rear legs, which makes the dogs unable to stand normally. Many breeds have such extreme hair growth that they require constant grooming to be able to live a normal life. Ironically, the breeding of deformed dogs is more due to hobby “show” breeders than it is to commercial breeders. Show breeders will tell you how different they are from commercial breeders, arguing that commercial breeders just care about making money whereas they care about “improving the breed.” What really happens is this. Hobby breeders are in the dog show “sport” for the purpose of winning trophies and recognition. They breed dogs that they think will appeal to dog show judges. Most dog show judges seem to pay little attention to health, and instead they reward extremes of what they call “type,” which is what most of us would call “deviation from what a normal dog looks like.” These deviations are encouraged by the written standards for breeds. This leads to a vicious circle where, in order to win the coveted trophies, dog breeders produce dogs that deviate further and further from the norm in an effort to catch the eye of the judge. For example, the breed standard for the Akita calls for “much substance and heavy bone.” The result of this standard is that at any dog show you can see Akitas who have so much “substance” that they don’t trot, they trundle. We need to start prosecuting the deliberate breeding of deformed dogs for the crime that it is, particularly in the case of clear-cut and obvious genetic deformities like brachycephalia. Brachycephalic dogs are not “cute.” They are handicapped by their deformity and they suffer — sometimes unimaginably so in the case of those who have syringomyelia. We cannot prevent all deformities and birth defects, but we can certainly stop people from deliberately creating deformities. I don’t know whether hobby breeders really believe that they are “improving” breeds or whether they are so blinded by the gleam from their trophies that they can’t see what’s in front of their face. But whatever their motives, they need to be forced to stop. We need to take the decision out of their hands. The kind of animal cruelty they practice should not be allowed in a civilized country.

Here is a bar graph showing the increase in the human population living in No Kill communities in the 10-year period from 2003 through 2012: Here is a graph of an “S” curve: As you can see, growth in the population of people living in No Kill communities closely matches the progression of an “S” curve up until about the -1 point. If the growth of the No Kill population continues along the “S” curve, then the next 10 to 15 years should see phenomenal growth of No Kill, to the point where the great majority of people will be living in No Kill communities. Pretty cool, huh? Thanks go to Chris Anderson for the lovely bar graph. He prepared it for his talk at the recent Michigan No Kill conference, based on data from this blog. You may be wondering why the graph does not contain 2013 data, and the reason is that I have not yet had time to add that data to my giant spreadsheet of over 100 shelters and coalitions representing No Kill communities. But when the data for 2013 are added, they will show another big jump over 2012. The 2012 numbers do not count Fairfax County, Kansas City, the Portland metro area, or the Seattle metro area, which by themselves would be enough to take the next big leap up the “S” curve. Good times.

Lamar is a city of 7800 people located in southeastern Colorado. Lamar has its own animal control and a municipal shelter, the Lamar Animal Shelter (LAS). The Lamar animal control site states: “Since late 2008, early 2009, the Lamar Animal Shelter and the Code Enforcement Officers have striven to avoid euthanizing animals which come into the shelter.“ The Second Chance Animal Rescue Foundation (SCARF) is also located in Lamar. SCARF has no physical shelter, but houses animals in foster homes. A volunteer with SCARF told me that they rescue animals from a six-county area in southeastern Colorado. Both LAS and SCARF take in owner surrenders from Lamar on a space-available basis, and SCARF networks with other rescues for owner surrenders. LAS only takes in dogs, but SCARF takes in both dogs and cats. SCARF has a trap-neuter-return program for feral cats and two big spay-neuter clinics each year. Statistics from the Colorado Department of Agriculture show that LAS had an intake of 329 dogs in 2012, with a live release rate of 99.7%. Two dogs died or were lost in shelter care, and when they are included with euthanasias the live release rate for LAS was 99.0%. SCARF took in 385 cats and dogs, with a 100% live release rate. The Lamar Animal Sanctuary Team (LAST) also reports to the state. They took in 79 strays and owner surrenders in 2012, with a 100% live release rate. In 2013, LAS reported an intake of 343 animals with a 99% live release rate. No animals died in shelter care. SCARF reported an intake of 518 animals with a live release rate of 100% and no animals dying in shelter care. LAST took in 87 animals and had a 100% live release rate. Their modified live release rate, counting the one animal who died in shelter care, was 98%. Lamar was originally listed by this blog on November 14, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

The reaction to my August 2nd blog post about the Association of Shelter Veterinarians (ASV) draft position statement on “The Use of ‘No-Kill’ Terminology” has unsurprisingly centered on what many people, myself included, feel is a hijacking of the concept of “capacity for care.” The draft position paper says “euthanasia of healthy and treatable companion animals is sometimes utilized in order to maintain a shelter’s capacity for humane care.” To those of us who care about shelter lifesaving, the concept of capacity for care is not an excuse for killing – instead, it means that animal shelters should take action to ensure that they are a “shelter” to the animals they take in, not just a way-station on the trip to the landfill. In the old days, traditional animal shelters took the view that they were simply passive recipients of whatever animals came in the door, and that they had no choice but to kill when they ran out of time or space. That concept developed back in the bad times when we really did have a pet overpopulation problem in the United States. In the 1970s, animal shelters took in 5 times as many animals per capita as they do now, and there were large numbers of homeless dogs and cats in the environment who never came into the shelters at all. The tragedy of pet overpopulation overwhelmed animal shelters, and created a culture of passivity and killing in the face of the onslaught of homeless animals. Fortunately, there were leaders in the 1970s like Phyllis Wright, who figured out that the way to fix the problem was to fix the pets. She and others started a massive spay-neuter campaign. The turning point came when private veterinarians signed on and began recommending spay-neuter to their clients in the early 1970s. The number of animals coming into animal shelters cratered. In the 1990s when veterinarians began doing pediatric spay-neuter and volunteering their time for TNR, shelter intake plummeted again. By the year 2000, the great majority of communities in the United States had almost no feral or truly stray dogs, and in many communities the numbers of feral cats were stable or declining. It was a different world. This different world was what allowed No Kill to take off as a movement, starting in 1989 with Ed Duvin’s publication of his ground-breaking essay “In the Name of Mercy,” and with Richard Avanzino setting in motion his plan for making San Francisco No Kill. Since then, shelters nationwide have gone from killing some 90% of intake circa 1975 to killing 40% or less today. With shortages of dogs today in many areas, and the new Million Cat Challenge paradigms for community cats, there is no reason why that 40% cannot shrink to the 10-20% range in the next 5 years. We can, within the next few years, be a country where all healthy and treatable shelter animals are saved. This is not a crazy, visionary idea. It is something that has been happening, and is happening, and anyone who does not see it simply hasn’t been paying attention. Every credible national organization, including Maddie’s Fund, Best Friends, the ASPCA, and the HSUS, would agree with what I’ve said here about what has happened up until now. So, what does all this have to do with the draft ASV statement on No Kill terminology? Notice that veterinarians had a huge role to play in getting from the 90% average shelter kill rate of the 1970s to the 40% rate today. It was private veterinarians who guaranteed the spectacular success of the spay-neuter campaign of the 1970s and 1980s, by beginning to recommend routine spaying and neutering to their clients. It was veterinarians who perfected pediatric spaying and neutering and began to recommend it in the 1990s. It was veterinarians who volunteered their time for TNR efforts, or did TNR at cost, beginning in the 1990s. It was veterinarians who started the specialty of shelter medicine in 1999, and who created the ASV and won acceptance for shelter medicine as a specialty in an amazingly short time. It is veterinarians who have been critical in the remaking of the animal shelter, transforming it from the concrete-block death warehouse next to the town dump to the “summer camp” for dogs and cats that is a bright and welcoming community center of today. It was veterinarians who created the most innovative lifesaving effort of the last few years, the Million Cat Challenge. And finally, it was veterinarians, specifically shelter veterinarians who are members of the ASV, who perfected “capacity for care” programs that allow shelters to measure and control intake so that killing of healthy and treatable animals is unnecessary. For all these reasons, I was stunned when I saw the ASV draft on No Kill terminology a few days ago. I felt like I had been yanked back into the 1970s, when the only thing shelter workers could do was work hard on spay-neuter and hope that the future would be better. I felt that there must be some mistake – that the draft was just a product of carelessness and that the drafters could not possibly have really intended to say what they had said. Not the ASV. Not the group of veterinarians, more than all others, who are leading the charge for lifesaving! Surely they could not have meant to take the term “capacity for care,” which stands for a shelter’s power to control its destiny by managing its intake, and twist that life-affirming term back into the mold of the old, hopeless, “we are helpless victims of circumstance who have to kill for time and space.” I have heard from people who do not believe that this draft was just a careless mistake. They think that there is a faction within the ASV that still believes that shelters are helpless victims when it comes to their intake, and that shelters cannot take effective steps to manage intake and length of stay. In other words, that there is a deliberate effort to co-opt and warp the term “capacity for care” and use it as an excuse for killing. The ASV is allowing comment on this document until August 15th. A person from the ASV committee replied to my August 2nd blog post, so they are on notice of the issues. If the draft was just a horrible, careless mistake, then they have had that pointed out to them. Now we will have to wait to see what they do. ASV – please do not ruin the reputation for caring about lifesaving that so many of your members have painstakingly built up by their life’s work. Please do not undermine the phenomenally successful Million Cat Challenge by co-opting one of the terms that is central to its program – capacity for care – and turning it into an excuse for killing rather than a program for life. Please do not throw a wrench into the work of saving shelter animals by offering an excuse for shelters that still take a passive approach. Tear up that draft, and write one that reflects what your best and most creative members are doing. We will all be waiting and hoping that you hear us. NOTE: Readers, please review the blog’s Comments Policy (in the “Contact” tab) before submitting comments. I appreciate and welcome comments, but will not approve comments that do not comply with the policy.

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.

Larimer County is located along the northern border of Colorado, and has a population of 300,000 people. The county is growing rapidly — its population was only 251,000 in 2000. It contains several cities and towns, the largest of which is Fort Collins (population 149,000). The Larimer Humane Society is located in Loveland, Colorado. LHS describes its contractual responsibilities as follows: “Larimer Humane Society is [] home to the county’s only Animal Protection & Control unit. Through contractual agreements, Larimer Humane Society provides full-service animal control for Fort Collins, Loveland, and unincorporated areas of Larimer County, as well as stray-animal sheltering for Wellington, Windsor, Timnath and Berthoud.” LHS accepts owner surrenders and asks for, but does not require, a small surrender fee. The shelter has a humane education program, including school and community presentations, critter camps, and job shadowing. LHS has a large volunteer program. Volunteers logged over 43,000 hours in fiscal year 2013-2014, including over 21,000 hours in foster care. Volunteers are involved in virtually every aspect of shelter operations. The shelter reports to the state of Colorado. In 2013, it had a live release rate of 86%, with an intake of 6401 animals. Intake was down from 2012, when LHS took in 7143 animals (the reportable animals are dogs, cats, small mammals, reptiles, and pet birds; the shelter also takes in a small number of farm animals who are not reported to the state). The shelter’s live release rate for 2013 was also down somewhat from 2012, when it was 89%. The live release rate for 2013 does not change if animals who died in shelter care are counted with euthanasias. Larimer County is counted in the Running Totals as an 80-90% community.

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

New York City is the largest city in the United States, with an estimated 2013 population of over 8,400,000. The municipal shelter in New York is Animal Care & Control (ACC), which takes in about 30,000 animals per year. ACC has three shelters and two receiving stations, one in each of the five boroughs. The director of New York City’s Animal Care & Control recently announced that the city had an 81% live release rate in 2014. New York City has an unusual – possibly unique – approach to increasing the shelter’s live release rate. Instead of a single non-profit, or group of non-profits, that work with the shelter as we see in most large cities with high live release rates, New York has a large consortium of rescues that pull animals from the shelter. A non-profit, the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals, is an umbrella group that acts as a liaison between the city and the rescues and also provides an interface to manage the transfer of animals. Jane Hoffman, an attorney, has been the President and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Mayor’s Alliance since 2003. Prospects for further improvement in 2015 are looking hopeful. The city has announced an $8 million capital-funding grant that will be used to build an adoption center at Animal Care & Control’s Manhattan location, remodel the Brooklyn shelter to help cut down on disease transmission, and buy more adoption vans. New York City is counted in the Running Totals as an 80% to 90% community.

It is becoming more and more obvious that supply and demand for shelter dogs in the United States is coming into balance. For example, the entire state of Colorado had a live release rate for dogs of 92% for 2013, and that was with over 17,000 dogs imported from kill shelters in other states. Dog transports have become big business, with dogs being moved from areas where they are not getting adopted to areas where they go out the door quickly. Generally speaking, New England and parts of the northeast, upper midwest, and Pacific northwest now have shortages of shelter dogs. With the spectacular progress that No Kill is making in places like Jacksonville, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, and other cities and counties in the southeast, the sending shelters may not be needing to send dogs for much longer. If these trends continue – and it certainly seems like they will – we will have a shortage of shelter dogs for people wanting to adopt. What happens then? If the usual laws of supply and demand apply, commercial breeders will step up the number of dogs they breed to take advantage of the shelters who no longer have enough dogs to challenge them for market share. (Note: I’m talking about commercial, for-profit breeders here, not show breeders. Show dogs have their own set of problems, but most show breeders take reasonably good care of their breeder dogs and puppies and many of them do an outstanding job, including helping with rescue.) So is there anything wrong with commercial breeders increasing their output? After all, the United States was built on commerce. I think commercial breeding is bad, though, for several reasons. First, dogs are not widgets. Commercial breeding has long been associated with puppy mills, where breeder dogs (who often have heritable health problems) are kept in terrible conditions and puppies are poorly socialized. The puppies are shipped, sometimes for long distances, to pet stores where they are kept in less than ideal conditions, which makes them more vulnerable to illness and trauma. They are then sold by people who may make little or no effort to match puppy temperament to the temperament of the purchaser. The puppies will likely be sold intact. Then, after the sale, there will be little or no follow-up to make sure the puppy is settling in with no problems. No Kill shelters offer better veterinary care, more attention to housing and enrichment, spaying and neutering before placement, more care at placement, and better follow up than pet stores. They provide a lifetime safety net for the animals they place. So from the point of view of both the dog and the owner, a No Kill shelter is a far better place for acquisition of a dog than a pet store. Another reason that shelters losing market share to breeders would be a bad thing is that No Kill shelters thrive on community engagement. The more people in the community who are involved with the shelter, the stronger the shelter will be. If people get their dogs from pet stores, they will be less likely to be familiar with and involved with the shelter, and community engagement will suffer. And if commercial breeders increase their market share due to a shortage of dogs in shelters, then the breeder dogs who spend their lives producing puppies will continue to suffer. The negative publicity about puppy mills has hurt the industry badly, and cut their market. But there is probably a limit to how much can be accomplished by telling people about the horrors of puppy mills. After all, people have heard a lot about the horrors of factory farms, and yet they continue to eat meat. Not everyone is going to resist buying a puppy at a pet store, even if they know on some level that they are supporting a cruel business. Although the puppy mill industry has been its own worst enemy in the past, recently some leaders of the industry have been indicating a desire to clean up their image. I wonder if they are planning to do so by simply taking what they are doing out of the public eye. The thing that has hurt the commercial dog breeding business in the past more than anything else is the photographs of miserable, matted, cherry-eyed, terrified dogs stuffed into cages. A simple way for the industry to fix this without having to actually change their ways would be to consolidate and move their operations into big warehouses like the ones currently used for laying hens. They could have a few model buildings to take the press through and simply not allow access to the rest. That way they could keep their operations completely out of the public view. No more photos made public of wretched, mistreated dogs living their lives in tiny cages. Keeping the dogs out of the public eye would not only make the public more willing to buy from pet stores, it would also help to ward off legislation to regulate puppy mills. There would be no ongoing proof of cruelty, and fewer people pushing for regulation. The ideal thing would be for No Kill to find some way to co-opt the industry – to make sure there is a big enough supply of shelter dogs for community No Kill shelters to be able to maximize their market share. The most obvious way to do this would be to start importing homeless dogs from overseas. This would not be a permanent solution, because foreign countries are beginning to use TNR for street dogs, which will eventually drop their populations to sustainable levels. But until that happens, foreign countries would be a good source of supply for shelter dogs. We would be helping the shelter system in the United States while saving huge numbers of street dogs overseas. Another way to tackle the problem would be for volunteers to breed litters which would then be donated to their local shelter for placement. This would have many advantages. The volunteers could provide great homes for the parents and intensive socialization of the puppies. The volunteers would have no incentive to inbreed, or to breed brachycephalic dogs. Only dogs with good health and good temperament would be bred. The volunteers could adjust the type and size of dogs bred to the local demand. The puppies would have all recommended veterinary care and be spayed or neutered before they were adopted. Shelter workers who have a lot of experience in matching dogs to adopters could make sure that every placement has a good chance for success, and could follow up to catch any problems early. People who work in dog rescue and sheltering may think this is a completely crazy idea, because everyone has (rightly) always been concerned with decreasing breeding, not increasing it. But something similar is already being done in some contexts, such as service dogs. Dog breeding does not always have to stem from monetary or selfish reasons. And imagine how much it would help shelters with maintaining and increasing market share and community engagement if they always had healthy puppies available for adoption. People will get dogs from somewhere, and it might as well be shelters. The usual objection to shelters bringing dogs in from outside, whether the dogs are adults or puppies, is that shelters should be placing all of the healthy and treatable dogs in the community before importing dogs. I have heard from shelter directors, though, who found that shelter traffic goes up when the shelter has a variety of dogs to choose from, which helps all the dogs get adopted. Other people think that shelters should not only place all the healthy and treatable dogs, but also all the sanctuary and hospice dogs before bringing in dogs from outside the community. For example, I have heard people object to transports of dogs into Colorado even though Colorado has a 92% live release rate for dogs. We can do transports at the same time we do hospice and sanctuary, though, because the two goals are not mutually exclusive. Dogs transported in are going to the regular market. Sanctuary and hospice dogs require special facilities that are not part of normal shelter marketing and must be separate programs. For now, our current transport system is working well, and as far as I can tell we are not quite to the point where there is more demand than supply nationwide for shelter dogs. But that time is coming, and it would be a good thing for No Kill to begin to think about what we will do when that day arrives. My suggestion would be to start now with establishing lines of supply with foreign countries. Some rescues have been doing that and have been criticized for it, but perhaps we should be supporting those endeavors instead. It also might be a good idea for a shelter in an area of established dog shortage, such as New England, to try a pilot program of volunteer breeding just to test the feasibility of the approach.