OUT THE FRONT DOOR

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.

One factor that’s turning out to be very important for No Kill is the simple matter of whether shelters have to report their results to their state government. Sunlight is a disinfectant, and the mere fact of having to report data each year has a positive effect because it reminds shelters that they are accountable to the public. These days no shelter wants to report that it kills 60%, 70%, 80% or more of its intake. This post discusses state reporting requirements briefly and outlines how and why No Kill advocates should make use of this opportunity. Some states have requirements that shelters must report data, usually by submitting it to the state. Right now we have the following states that have databases of shelter data that are available to the public, and that range from somewhat useful to very useful. Here they are, arranged in approximate order of usefulness: Colorado (public access by request) Virginia (posted online) Michigan (posted online) New Jersey (public access by request) Florida (made available to the public, with no penalties for failure to comply) North Carolina (posted online) Illinois (public access by request) There are a few other states that have some degree of reporting that falls short of being useful to the average person. For example, New Hampshire has a private consortium of shelters that will make aggregate data available to some people on request, and California posts data on rabies parameters. State databases are proving crucial to the No Kill movement. Of the communities listed in the right sidebar, fully 114 of the 165 communities were identified through the state databases of Colorado, Michigan, New Jersey, and Virginia. No Kill advocates who live in reporting states use the databases to compare communities and identify local shelters that are doing well and ones that need to improve. No Kill advocates who do not live in reporting states can also use the lists to show their local officials that No Kill can work. Davyd Smith, a spokesperson for No Kill Colorado,  explained the importance of Colorado’s list as follows: “Individual stories allow us to understand how important it is to care about each individual animal. Broad statistics help us measure what is happening in communities and regions. Colorado is lucky to have mandatory reporting via PACFA (Pet Animal Control Facilities Act). The yearly statistics are extremely useful in trending the state in general, as well as individual organizations and communities. Without the Colorado statistics, we could not see if the state is doing well, nor could we have found individual shelters we needed to reach out to, and in some cases, track to see they were improving. These statewide statistics shown by individual organization, and community, are invaluable tools for No Kill advocates.” State databases have an additional effect beyond helping No Kill advocates gather data. I don’t think it’s any accident that Colorado, which has the best and most comprehensive reporting requirement, is also the closest thing we have to a No Kill state. The entire state of Colorado had an 89% live release rate for 2013, just a hair’s breadth away from No Kill status. And that was with almost 20,000 cats and dogs transferred in from out of state in 2013, the great majority of whom would have been killed if they had remained in their sending states. Michigan also does very well overall, and Virginia has a higher number of No Kill shelters than one would expect for a southeastern state. So what is the point of this post other than to give a shout-out to state databases? The point is that any state could do what Colorado, Virginia, Michigan and others are doing. One of the duties that states have (and partially delegate to local government along with police and fire protection), is to protect the public from health threats and nuisances caused by animals. That’s why states and municipalities have leash laws and requirements for rabies vaccinations. Since public animal shelters serve public health and safety purposes, it is completely valid for states to require public shelters, and private organizations that run public shelters, to report their statistics to the state. This opens up a major opportunity in states that do not have reporting requirements for shelters. No Kill advocates can lobby the state to impose reporting requirements on animal shelters on public health and safety grounds, and point to Colorado’s PACFA as a very successful example of the benefits. PACFA had a sunset provision, and it recently passed the sunset effectiveness test with flying colors and was renewed. This provides advocates with a strong argument to support the value of reporting. There are lots of initiatives that No Kill advocates try that do not have much chance of success. A state reporting requirement should be a much easier sell. The beauty of state reporting requirements is that they place very little burden on shelters (virtually all shelters have software that can generate the data needed for state reports at the end of the year literally in minutes) and they serve important public purposes of monitoring the workload of shelters and how they are handling that workload. It’s time for the No Kill movement to think strategically and work to get state reporting requirements in place in all 50 states.

A report out of Waco, Texas, states that the city shelter’s live release rate is currently “as high as” 85%, up from 25% or less in previous years. Waco is a city of 125,000 people that in 2012 had a shelter intake of 10,000. That’s about 80 pets per thousand people, which is a gigantic number. The 2013 intake was 6700, which is 54 pets per thousand people – still an enormous number. (Average shelter intake in the United States is thought to be 15 to 30 pets per thousand people.) There are a lot of moving parts to this story and not a lot of information, but if a turnaround is in fact happening in Waco then it’s very encouraging. The city has been consulting with Target Zero Institute (TZI) since December 2012. I have been skeptical about TZI because Waco adopted mandatory spay-neuter legislation (don’t know if TZI pushed for that or not) and their “pyramid” for action seems to me to underplay adoption. But if they can produce good results in Waco, including that big drop in intake, then kudos to them. The jury is still out, but this is a very interesting situation. The report from Waco follows a recent report from Huntsville, Alabama, another city that is consulting with TZI, of a very successful adoption event. See the October 23rd News Bit for a brief report on Huntsville. It’s still too early to know whether Waco and Huntsville are on a sustainable right track, but one thing that strikes me about the cities that TZI is consulting with is that none of them are easy. If a consultant wanted an easy win, the thing to do would be to consult with, or even take a position as director of, a non-profit contract shelter with a good endowment in a small, progressive community that already has an above-average live release rate. Then the consultant or director could push the live release rate up over 90% and dine out on that the rest of his life. What TZI has done is pretty much the opposite. They are wading into places like Baton Rouge and Indianapolis that have been the graveyards of previous No Kill attempts. Indianapolis is a horror story right now, and not  a place that anyone would go looking for resume items. Best Friends is trying to do something similar with their efforts in Utah and in Los Angeles, where they have a boots-on-the-ground contingent. Austin Pets Alive has helped to work a near-miracle in San Antonio. Bonney Brown and Diane Blankenburg are running a consulting service, Humane Network. All this activity with people actually jumping in and helping specific communities with the nuts and bolts is encouraging. Being a consultant or a community partner, where it’s your actions and advice that are on the line, is a risky proposition because you’re opening yourself up for possible failure. Not to mention that it can be a thankless job because you may need to challenge the orthodoxy. In No Kill in the past we’ve had quite a bit of general information that various people have put out that isn’t specific to any particular community. That’s great, but now we seem to be entering a new phase where it’s not enough to stand on the sidelines – where No Kill leaders get really involved and it’s not one-size-fits-all. I don’t know whether TZI is going to succeed or fail, but at least they are getting in there in some pretty tough communities and trying.

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

Top of the news this week is LifeLine Animal Project of Atlanta. Two years ago LifeLine, a non-profit formed by Rebecca Guinn in 2002, took over the contracts for the two county shelters that serve Atlanta. Currently the live release rates at both shelters are about 85%. LifeLine has just announced a new “I’m In” campaign to help carry the city to a 90% live release rate by 2016. If the goal is met for the entire year of 2016, then 6 months from now the two LifeLine shelters will be at 90% or above, and we will have another major city in the No Kill ranks. The centerpiece of the new campaign is to give Atlanta residents a way to participate in meeting the goal, by social networking as well as by direct support to the shelter through volunteering, fostering, adopting, etc. What a great way to involve the community and allow people who are not directly involved with the shelter to be part of this historic accomplishment! Rebecca Guinn, founder of LifeLine, is one of the speakers at the upcoming Best Friends National Conference in Atlanta, July 16-19. The amazing Williamson County Regional Animal Shelter in Texas has received the 2015 Paul Jolly Compassion Award from Petco Foundation. When a shelter is successful at saving healthy and treatable animals, it is because of the efforts of lots of individuals who rarely seek or get any recognition. Without the great network of rescuers, volunteers, and fosters that exists in our country, even the most gifted shelter director would not be able to succeed. A woman named Carol Parks, who lived on Orcas Island in Washington, was a rescuer who took a great interest in the Wasco shelter in California. She helped to coordinate rescues, and saved hundreds if not thousands of animals from Wasco. A couple of weeks ago Parks died from cancer. Yesterday many of the volunteers, rescuers, and shelter employees who had worked with her participated in a massive rescue of animals from the Wasco shelter, in her memory. Over 50 at-risk cats and dogs were pulled from the badly overcrowded shelter. What a great tribute to a rescuer. Thanks to Mark Penn for letting me know about this event. The Wasco Facebook page has many of the happy stories. The goal of the Million Cat Challenge is to save 1 million cats over a 5-year period. At the rate that results are pouring in, they may have to raise their goal. The Challenge was just launched a little more than 6 months ago, and the ticker is already up to over 240,000 cats saved. The map of participating organizations is getting really crowded. Lost Dogs of Wisconsin is running an in-depth series of articles on microchips. Part 1 is on the “900” microchips. Part 2 is on searching the database. A grand jury has found insufficient evidence to charge the Texas veterinarian who allegedly killed a cat with a bow and arrow. The ALDF has requested records on the case. After the decision was announced, Alley Cat Allies held workshops in Texas on humane cat care and anti-cruelty laws, followed by vigils. In transport news, 26 dogs and cats were flown from Oklahoma to Colorado. Charleston Animal Society in South Carolina is flying 38 dogs to Everett, Washington. The numbers add up. The Boston Globe reports that shelters in Massachusetts, including the Massachusetts SPCA and the Animal Rescue League of Boston, have seen substantial drops in cat intake since 2010. The shelters attribute the drop to spay and neuter efforts, and mention funding by PetSmart Charities and the state as supporting those efforts. Cat Cafe news: In Philadelphia. In Washington, DC. In San Francisco. And Montreal is opening North America’s first vegan cat cafe. The Best Friends Kitten Nursery in Salt Lake City, which is part of the organization’s No Kill Utah effort, has helped almost 600 kittens since its mid-March opening. A Wall Street Journal article reports that some rescues are curtailing pulls from New York City’s Animal Care Centers (formerly Animal Care and Control). Since New York City has made progress toward No Kill largely though the efforts of its coalition of rescues, this is not good news. The rescues argue that they are receiving sick animals that they cannot afford to rehabilitate. The shelter argues that it has preventive medicine protocols in place but that it receives many animals who have not had regular veterinary care and who come into the shelter with disease burdens.

Montrose is a city of 19,000 people located near the western border of Colorado. It is the county seat of Montrose County, which has a population of 41,000 people. The city has municipal agencies that provide animal control and sheltering. The animal shelter serves both the city and the county. The shelter takes in strays and owner surrenders, with owner surrenders subject to a waiting list. A shelter representative I spoke with told me that the wait period for owner surrenders currently is about one month. All animals, including cats and dogs under 6 months, are spayed or neutered before they leave the shelter. In 2011, the shelter’s annual report showed an 87% live release rate (that figure includes owner-requested euthanasia). The 2011 live release rate was 85% if animals who died in shelter care are included. The euthanasias include 116 feral cats. In 2012, the county’s report to the state of Colorado showed that the live release rate improved to 93%, with an intake of 1270 animals. The live release rate including animals who died or were lost in shelter care was 92%. The shelter’s 2013 report to the state of Colorado showed an intake of 1151 animals. The live release rate was 90%. If animals who died or were lost in shelter care are counted with euthanasias, the live release rate was 89%. Montrose County was originally listed by this blog on November 1, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

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.

Jacksonville is a city of 837,000 people on the northeast coast of Florida.  It is the largest city in Florida and the 12th largest city in the United States. The city is located in Duval County, which has a population of about 865,000. The governments of the city and county were consolidated in 1968. The Jacksonville metro area has over 1.3 million people, which is the 4th largest metro area in Florida after Miami, Tampa-St. Petersburg, and Orlando. The Jacksonville Animal Care and Protective Services Division (ACPSD) is a city-run department that handles animal control and sheltering for the city and Duval County. The shelter accepts owner surrenders with no noted restrictions except for a small fee. It does not perform owner-requested euthanasia. ACPSD works closely with two large non-profits in the city. The Jacksonville Humane Society (JHS) takes in some strays and adoptable owner surrenders and pulls animals from ACPSD. First Coast No More Homeless Pets (FCNMHP) offers low-cost spay-neuter, vaccinations, and veterinary care, and does over 30,000 spay-neuter surgeries per year.  FCNMHP collaborates with ACPSD and Best Friends Animal Society in a program called Feral Freedom  that  has made Trap-Neuter-Return the default solution for feral cats in Jacksonville. In 2014 the city of Jacksonville and Duval County became one of the largest No Kill jurisdictions, with a live release rate for ACPSD of 92%. If animals who died or were lost in shelter care are counted as euthanasias, the modified live release rate was 90% for 2014. Combined shelter statistics for ACPSD and JHS have been provided by JHS, but are not in the format I use for calculations. JHS’s live release rate was even higher than ACPSD’s, though. Total intake for ACPSD and JHS for the year was 17,099, which is about 20 animals per 1000 people. That intake number does not include the feral cats who go through the Feral Freedom program. At the 2014 Best Friends national conference, the Jacksonville coalition presented a playbook detailing how they got to No Kill. For years they have had a heavy reliance on spay-neuter programs, including their model feral cat program, to bring down intake. The coalition is also doing a lot of adoptions – ACPSD and JHS did over 10,000 adoptions in 2014. That is 12 adoptions per 1000 people. ACPSD’s live release rate was 35% or less from the year 2000 up until Scott Trebatoski was hired as director in late 2008. The live release rate climbed to 50% in 2009, his first full year as director, then went to 74% in 2012 and 85% in 2013. Trebatoski left ACPSD in March 2014 to become director of the Hillsborough County (Tampa) shelter, and was replaced by Nikki Harris. Harris previously worked for the Nebraska Humane Society and FCNMHP before moving to ACPSD as shelter manager. Jacksonville-Duval County is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

Ventura County is located in southern California, northwest of Los Angeles. The population was 823,000 at the 2010 census. Its median household income is above the national average. Ventura County Animal Services (VCAS) has two intake shelters, and in 2014 they achieved a 91% live release rate with an intake of 9000 animals, according to a recent report from VCAS. This followed orders from the Ventura County Board of Supervisors in 2012 that VCAS become No Kill. Changes that VCAS made after the 2012 directive included starting foster and volunteer programs, seeking out rescues to work with, adding a veterinarian who was on board with treating the treatables, and play groups and pack walks for dogs. Tara Diller was hired as director in February 2014. Diller stresses taking animals out into the community rather than waiting for people to come in to adopt. A non-profit called Paw Works, founded in January 2014, has been helping with fosters, adoption events, and transports. In their first year they rescued over 770 homeless animals in Ventura County. They have a group of volunteer pilots, Air Paws, that do transports, and a barn cat program. Ventura County is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

One of the biggest controversies in animal sheltering today is the question of whether public animal shelters can adopt their way out of killing. Yesterday I posted consolidated statistics for Colorado animal shelters for 2012. As I will explain in today’s post, I think the Colorado data provides very strong evidence that shelters can adopt their way out of killing. One caveat — the Colorado data is based on self-reporting by the shelters in the state. I did not see any red flags in the data and it correlates very well with what I heard in my extensive interviews with shelter officials in the state, but I cannot promise that the data is flawless. First some background. For years now the animal shelter reform movement has had a deep and sometimes bitter division between what I will call the supply-side faction and the demand-side faction. The supply-side faction thinks that we have a pet overpopulation problem and that we will never be able to find enough adoptive homes for shelter animals until we reduce the supply through spay-neuter programs. The demand-side faction believes that there are currently enough homes to save virtually all shelter animals, and that shelters should use marketing and community engagement techniques to increase market share among those who acquire pets. There is no easy compromise between these two factions because they represent two different world views about shelter animals and the general public. The supply siders think that most people want to adopt young, healthy animals and that they will never adopt the pit bulls and older cats in shelters, no matter how much the shelter promotes them. The demand siders think that although spay-neuter programs are a good thing, they take years to work and will never completely solve the problem, whereas marketing techniques can save virtually all shelter animals right now. Where you stand on this question inevitably affects your beliefs as to shelter policy. The supply-side faction does not see a need to change the way that traditional, high-kill animal shelters operate because they think the problem originates outside the shelter with members of the “irresponsible public” who fail to spay and neuter their pets. The demand-side faction believes that it is essential to change shelter operations from the ground up to emphasize marketing and community outreach. Each side in this battle cites statistics. The supply-side faction often cites Peter Marsh, who has written a treatise called “Replacing Myth With Math.” Marsh argues that statistics show that euthanasia rates track animal shelter intakes rather than adoptions, and that adoption rates in California over a 25-year period from 1970 to 1995 stayed about the same while euthanasia and intake rates first peaked and then declined. Marsh concludes that the data means that we will make more progress in ending animal homelessness by reducing intake rather than by trying to increase adoptions. Conversely, the demand-side faction cites the ever-growing number of communities that are saving 90% or more of their shelter animals by changing their shelters and using marketing and community outreach. The supply-side faction argues that 90% save rates either are not sustainable or are not generalizable. How can we settle this question? It’s very simple. The central mantra of the supply-side faction is that the only way to reduce euthanasia is to reduce intake. Therefore, if there is a representative sample of communities that have achieved and sustained a high save rate without reducing intake, then the supply-side argument is effectively countered. Yesterday I posted a blog about the state of Colorado’s shelter statistics for the year 2012. The total intake of cats and dogs for the year was 159,183, and the 2012 estimate for the state’s population was 5.2 million people, so the rate of intake for dogs and cats in 2012 in Colorado was 31 animals per 1000 people. Colorado is a destination state for animal transports, but even if you subtract out-of-state incoming transfers from the intake numbers, the intake per 1000 people was 28 in 2012. HSUS estimates that average intake of shelter animals for communities in the United States is 30 per 1000 people. Another commonly cited estimate for average intake is 15 per 1000 people. Depending on which number you use — 30 or 15 — Colorado is either at the high end of average intake or considerably over average intake. Colorado is a typical state in other important ways as well. The state ranks near the middle of the pack for human population, with a population of 5.2 million people. It has lots of tiny, isolated rural towns, but it also has a very large metro area in Denver. The median annual household income for Colorado is about $58,000 per household, compared with about $51,000 for the entire United States. Even the location is average, since it is near the middle of the country. A supply sider would predict that because Colorado has high intake, it would be impossible for Colorado to achieve and sustain a high save rate without reducing intake. As we saw yesterday, though, Colorado has in fact reported an 85.5% save rate sustained for the entire year in 2012. Colorado’s save rate is much higher than that for the United States as a whole, which is only about 50%. Colorado’s adoption rate for cats and dogs was 52% of all intake and 64% of unreclaimed intake (59% of stray dogs were returned to their owners and 22% of cats were returned to owners or colonies). Unless there is some huge flaw in the data collected by the state, Colorado in 2012 proved that you do not have to have low intake in order to have a high save rate. The Colorado statistics run counter to another claim often made by supply siders, which is that there has never been a community in the United States that was able to sustain an adoption rate higher than 10 shelter animals per 1000 people. Colorado’s population is 5.2 million. In 2012, Colorado shelters reported adoptions of 82,605 dogs and cats. This is a rate of 16 shelter animal adoptions per 1000 population, and it was sustained over an entire year. What about the data that Peter Marsh cites, that show flat adoption rates and euthanasias tracking intake rather than outflow? Most of Marsh’s data is old, and his more recent data does not come from communities like Austin, Reno, Charlottesville, and the state of Colorado that have high live release rates and high intake. In short, Marsh looked at old-fashioned, traditional shelters that did not have modern marketing and community engagement programs, and incorrectly concluded from that data that because he had not seen any successful marketing programs, attempts to increase adoptions would be ineffectual. In addition to the Colorado statewide data, we also have the data from well over 200 individual communities throughout the United States showing that communities can achieve and maintain 90% and higher live release rates. The supply-side faction has argued that these 200+ communities represent only a few percent of the United States population, that they have favorable demographics, or that they are pushing intake off onto other communities. None of those arguments can be made about the entire state of Colorado. In particular, the fact that an entire state has achieved an 85% live release rate refutes the argument that high live release rates can only be achieved by pushing intake to other communities. Colorado is a well-known destination state for transports from other states. Far from pushing intake off onto its neighbors, it is helping its neighbors by taking in thousands of animals per year from other states. I feel that the data we have so far from Colorado and many individual communities is sufficient to show that communities can adopt (and reclaim) their way out of killing. Although spay-neuter programs are valuable, communities can save 90% or more of their shelter animals right now by reforming their shelters, without waiting for everyone to spay and neuter their pets.