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.

Did you know that there was a whole group of people back in the 1980s and 1990s who were the creators of No Kill? These were the people who developed No Kill, proved that it could work, knitted it into a movement, and delivered it to the world. And they did all this without any thought of credit or personal glory. The best known of the group of people who were active in the 1980s and 1990s is Richard Avanzino. He took over as shelter director at the San Francisco SPCA in the 1970s and kept that position until the end of 1998 (when he was succeeded by Ed Sayres). Avanzino was a creative leader, and on his watch the San Francisco SPCA developed the programs and philosophy of No Kill. Today, of course, he is the head of Maddie’s Fund and still going strong. Rich Avanzino is often called the founder of No Kill. He himself would say that it is the American people who deserve the credit for No Kill, because they are the ones who have opened their hearts to shelter animals. Avanzino collected extraordinary people around him at San Francisco. Two of the most creative were Lynn Spivak and Pam Rockwell, both of whom are now retired. Spivak was the marketing and public outreach genius at the San Francisco SPCA. She helped to create an atmosphere where everyone, including the volunteers, came up with ideas for lifesaving, and the attitude was “let’s give it a try.” Her department was where the famous San Francisco programs were developed. Due to her efforts there was always something fun happening at the SPCA, and in consequence the shelter was always in the paper and on people’s minds. Rockwell was head of the Ethical Studies division. She was an Ivy League attorney and she redefined what a shelter’s job was in the community, not just for cats and dogs but for all animals. She put the ethical beliefs of the San Francisco crew on a sound legal and philosophical basis and helped work out the proper response for each new complex issue that came up. Lynda Foro is another person who could be called the founder of No Kill. Before she started her activism, there was no No Kill movement. Starting in the mid-1990s, she held the first No Kill conferences and she issued No Kill directories. She created a network of people where none had existed before. People who wanted to stop shelter killing and who had been working in isolation suddenly discovered that there were other people just like them. Foro is retired, and has never sought any credit for her work. She’s another person who was all about the animals. Ed Duvin has often been called the founder of the No Kill movement. His 1989 article “In The Name of Mercy” created a firestorm in the animal sheltering world. Duvin analyzed the current state of animal sheltering in light of the animal rights movement that had been underway since 1975. His critique of the animal shelter industry was devastating. He pointed out that we did not even know how many shelters there were in the United States at that time (we still don’t) much less how many animals they were killing (still true), and that sheltering had no effective national guiding body (still true). He tore down the excuse that killing was necessary to prevent suffering, arguing that shelters that did not even use the most basic management techniques had no ground on which to make that claim. He made several practical observations about how shelters could do better. Reading this document today it seems like a blueprint for the No Kill movement. And yet Duvin did not demonize shelter workers — instead, he said “[w]e reach out to our friends in the shelter community with respect . . . .” All of these people and more were crucial to the origin of No Kill in the 1990s. No Kill is a product of many great leaders, but ultimately, as Rich Avanzino says, No Kill is the work of the American people. Today we have a new generation of younger activists who are carrying on the work. I hope that they will always be as smart, effective, and modest as their progenitors.

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.

The Cache Humane Society is located in the Cache Valley, an area of northern Utah and southeast Idaho that has over 100,000 residents. The shelter’s website states that it is open admission and is the only shelter serving Cache Valley. In 2014 Cache Humane Society became one of 50 (now 52) participants in the No Kill Utah program (NKUT). NKUT was launched by Best Friends in 2014. The shelter reports that it has been at a live release rate of over 90% in each of the last three months and is over 90% for the year so far. Director Roland Bringhurst says he has been pursuing the No Kill goal since he took over two years ago. The problem area has been cats, and the shelter has started TNR and barn cat programs to bring up their live release rate. There were several more stories this week about new animal shelter buildings. This really seems to be a trend. Some of the venues for new shelters are Broward County, Florida; the Animal Shelter of the Wood River Valley (which says it is the first No Kill shelter in Idaho); The Tree House Humane Society in Chicago (their planned facility sounds wonderful); Denton, Texas (their new shelter helped them hit a 90% live release rate); Aiken County, South Carolina (they are now able to keep the animals healthy); Johnson City, Tennessee (their new shelter is more than four times bigger than the old one and has a donated electronic sign that will feature adoptable animals); and Haywood County, North Carolina (they had an 80% live release rate last year and hope to do even better). Maddie’s Pet Adoption Days on May 30 and 31 were an enormous success, with almost 5300 dogs and cats adopted from over 100 locations by 89 participating organizations. Maddie’s reports that in many locations people were lined up before the doors opened. The Sacramento County animal shelter has opened up a catfe. It’s official – the town of Calistoga, California, has formalized a deal for animal sheltering services from the Petaluma Animal Services Foundation (PASF), which runs the No Kill shelter in Petaluma. Dubuque County, Iowa, has also approved its proposed deal with Whispurring Hope Rescue to take over most animal control duties in the county and adopt out animals. Oftentimes companion animals who are used in research are not given much thought because the public never knows about them.  A new law was passed in Nevada that protects animals that survive the laboratory in good enough condition to be rehabbed and adopted out. Before the law was passed, such animals were often killed when their usefulness to the laboratory ended. The Nevada Humane Society will be taking in the animals and rehabbing them and finding them homes. NHS director Kevin Ryan says 96% of them are Beagles. The Animal Foundation, a non-profit, recently won the contract to continue running the shelter for Clark County, Nevada, over a strong competing bid made by No Kill Las Vegas (NKLV). The Animal Foundation has now put forward their plan to go No Kill. The bad news is that it’s a five-year plan. The good news is that they are going to be working on a TNR program with Best Friends. NKLV leader Bryce Henderson said that the plan is a giant step in the right direction. NKLV has 1600 members and their ability to put forward a credible bid for such a large contact (the shelter took in about 34,000 dogs and cats in 2014) was impressive. San Antonio Pets Alive! has taken in 700 animals since April, an unusually high volume due to the recent flooding in Texas. SAPA adopted out 6,000 pets last year.

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.

We hear a lot about police officers shooting family pets with little or no provocation. In a recent case in Round Rock, Texas, a police officer answering a call at a private home was bitten in the leg – twice – by an excitable Aussie that lunged at him when the owner’s child opened the door. Instead of shooting, the officer backed up and tried to calm the dog. Fortunately the owner got to the door quickly and collared the dog. The only consequence of the incident is that the dog will have to do a 10-day home quarantine. The officer, Randall Frederick, received a well-deserved medal for the way he handled the situation. Police officers in the town received mandatory training in how to handle dog situations after several complaints. (Round Rock is a No Kill community, with animal sheltering provided by the Williamson County Regional Animal Shelter.) The Clear the Shelters event on August 15th, which was sponsored by NBC and Telemundo, found homes for more than 19,000 pets. The Richmond SPCA, one of the many participating shelters, had only 3 dogs left at the end of the event. County shelters in two counties in Michigan – Berrien and Van Buren – are permanently ending the use of gas chambers. In Berrien, it took a resolution of the county commissioners to force an end to the practice. In Van Buren the current director says she has never used the chamber, and now it has been dismantled and sold for scrap. In a short interview, Tawny Hammond, the new Chief Animal Services Officer for the city of Austin, talks about her short list of goals. She wants to increase adoptions by fine-tuning social media based on her experience in Fairfax County, Virginia, solve the problem of dogs not getting enough attention by an all-hands-on-deck effort to walk dogs and recruit more volunteer dog walkers, and “stay flexible.” Discover has an interesting article on the explosion in recent years of research on dog cognition and how dogs and humans co-evolved. The article discusses a new book which suggest that dogs might have been the secret weapon that allowed humans to replace Neanderthals in the evolutionary battle for survival. It also describes the rise of “citizen science,” which involves ordinary people providing information about their dogs. Scientists can then use the information to create large data sets on various topics of research about dogs. In other dog-research news, this journal article that appeared in PeerJ reports on a brain imaging study that found that dogs, like humans and monkeys, have an area of the brain dedicated to facial recognition. The facial recognition area in dogs responds to both human and dog faces. The authors posit that this brain development may be what allows dogs to interpret social cues from humans so well. Belinda Lewis, who runs the shelter in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is resigning early next year. This might be a good opportunity for someone who feels that they have what it takes to turn a shelter around. Some progress has reportedly been made in recent years in Fort Wayne but there is much left to do. The Gainesville newspaper has a nice feature on the progress made by Alachua County Animal Services after joining the Million Cat Challenge. Alachua County is home turf for Dr. Julie Levy of the University of Florida, one of the founders of the Million Cat Challenge. Gainesville has had several organizations working hard for years to bring up its live release rate, and with help from the Million Cat Challenge it may finally reach its goal of stopping the killing of healthy and treatable animals. The ambitious renovation project for the Waco city shelter recently got a boost from McLennan County, which gave the city two pieces of land adjacent to the shelter grounds. The renovation is expected to cost $2.6 million, and the project will go up for bid shortly. The city hopes to award the contract in October. According to Wiley Stem, who has been one of the driving forces behind Waco’s No Kill effort, the shelter’s live release rate is now around 85%. LifeLine’s Fulton County shelter in Atlanta, which is closing in on a 90% live release rate, received a $40,000 donation from an Atlanta company, Anisa International, to build a meet-and-greet area and more outdoor play space. The county shelter was built long before LifeLine took over the contract, and is showing its age. As you no doubt know, this August marks the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Brent Toellner of Kansas City Pet Project has posted his trip diary as a volunteer in Louisiana taking care of dogs evacuated following Katrina. Toellner will be writing more about Katrina this week.

I’ve interviewed lots of No Kill shelter directors over the last few years, and many of them have told me about the mottoes they use to guide their organizations. Some of those mottoes, at first glance, can seem rather anodyne, but on closer inspection they reveal important truths about successful animal sheltering. One of my favorite mottoes is the one Richard Avanzino and his team lived by when they were running the San Francisco SPCA: “Do a good job, tell people about it, and ask for their help.” When I first heard this I thought “what could be more obvious?” But on closer inspection, this motto turns out to have a very pertinent meaning for No Kill. Notice the placement of “do a good job.” It’s first, not last. In other words, before a shelter director can go to the community and ask for help, the director has to do a good job. I’ve often heard people say things like “we could have a neonatal kitten program if only we had the money,” or “we could have a giant adoptathon if only we had the volunteers,” or “we could keep animals healthy if we had a new shelter building.” In other words, they are saying that they could do a good job if only someone outside of their organization would first supply them with the resources they need. As Avanzino’s motto says, that’s backward. The fact is that no one wants to donate to or volunteer with an organization that is not proving that it has value. An organization that wants community support has to show that it can do a good job first, before it asks for money or volunteers or other resources. When Avanzino started working for the San Francisco SPCA in April of 1976, one of the first things that happened was that the city said it was going to cancel the contract that provided over half of the SPCA’s funding. Avanzino persuaded the city to continue with the contract, but the SPCA was still in dire financial shape. And it was doing a lousy job of animal sheltering. Avanzino did not go to the public and say “please give us money so we can do a better job.” Instead, in his first six months with the SPCA he started a low-income spay-neuter clinic, extended shelter hours to seven days a week from three, stopped accepting feral cats for euthanasia, started vaccinating animals on intake, painted the shelter, junked the SPCA’s decompression chamber, and made many other positive changes. Only then did he go to the public, tell them what the SPCA was doing to save lives, and ask for their help. The rest is history. Another notable thing about Avanzino’s motto was that it challenged the idea that was ingrained in the traditional shelter industry that the public did not care about homeless pets. The core of the San Francisco SPCA No Kill ethos was that the American people loved their pets, thought of them as family members, and would come to their rescue when they needed it the most. All the shelter had to do was to provide a framework to make it possible for the public to help. Some might ask how shelter workers are supposed to do a good job before they get the resources needed to do a good job. It seems like saying they should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. That’s where another of my favorite mottoes comes in – “solutions, not excuses,” which is the motto of Teresa Johnson, director of Kansas City Pet Project (KCPP). This is another motto that seems somewhat obvious at first glance, but when you look at it more closely it gets at one of the core issues that shelters encounter. Every shelter director faces problems. The key when confronted with a problem is not to use the problem as an excuse. Almost every shelter director in the United States has faced a shortage of resources. The difference between successful and unsuccessful directors is how they react. Johnson put her motto into action in the early days of KCPP’s existence, when she faced the problem that their shelter building was in an out-of-the-way location with little visibility. They needed a new shelter in a better location, but the city had no interest at the time in building a new shelter. Johnson solved the problem by setting up an offsite adoption venue that she outfitted with donated equipment. This was only one of many innovations she made by looking for solutions, not excuses. Now, when KCPP asks the public for help, they have a track record that makes the public want to support them. Another motto that expresses this same goal-oriented outlook is attributed to Caroline Earle White, who founded the first animal shelter in the United States in Philadelphia in 1870. White was one of the three great leaders of the post-Civil-War humane movement. One of her colleagues said of her that she “regarded defeat as but one of the steps to accomplishment.” White carried out that motto in her work. When she was barred by her gender from taking any active role with the first SPCA she founded, she founded a second one for women only. She faced a threat from medical school researchers who wanted to take dogs from her shelter for experimentation, but she outmaneuvered them. She had to deal with hostility and ridicule from reporters who thought that concern for “worthless curs” was silly. It took decades, but they gradually changed their views and their reporting. White did not allow any of these challenges or setbacks to throw her off course. We hear a lot about how important leadership is to No Kill, and that’s certainly true, right down to the mottoes. So don’t make the mistake I did in brushing off these words of wisdom as obvious or unimportant. They can be keys to success.

Have you noticed that No Kill communities tend to occur in clusters? Take Austin, which achieved a 90%+ live release rate in 2011. Williamson County just to the north achieved No Kill around that same time, and in the years since then we’ve had the nearby towns of Georgetown, Pflugerville, and Taylor all going No Kill. And San Antonio, a big city about an hour away from Austin, has gone No Kill along with its nearby town of Kirby. Then there’s Jacksonville, which has helped other towns and counties in the First Coast region. Charlottesville, Virginia, has seen an explosion of No Kill neighbors, including Lynchburg just to the south, which in turn has been helping its neighbors. The shelter serving Duluth, Minnesota, made Superior, Wisconsin, a No Kill city. On the west coast, San Francisco has helped Stockton to dramatically improve its live release rate. The Nevada Humane Society in Washoe County has made nearby Carson City into a No Kill community. Brother Wolf in Asheville is reaching out to other communities. And in what may be the most dramatic example of all, South Carolina shelters are embarking on an ambitious plan to make the entire state No Kill by setting up five hubs that will offer No Kill help throughout the state. The assistance that No Kill communities offer their neighbors takes many different forms. Dr. Ellen Jefferson helped San Antonio with the creation of San Antonio Pets Alive!, which was modeled on Austin Pets Alive! The San Francisco SPCA pulls at-risk animals from the Stockton shelter and finds homes for them. Jacksonville includes its neighbors in its gigantic mega-adoption events. Personnel from Charlottesville and Jacksonville have become successful shelter directors in Lynchburg and Tampa, respectively. Other factors may be at work too in spreading No Kill. When a city goes No Kill, government officials in nearby communities will take notice. It’s much easier to commit to an idea that has already been proven successful by your neighbor than it is to be the first one to try it. It’s natural to trust a neighbor more than someone from hundreds of miles away. If a nearby neighbor has gone No Kill, it tends to take away the excuses that climate, terrain, or community demographics make No Kill too difficult or impractical. Defeatism is replaced with the idea that “if they can do it, we can do it too.” And in purely practical terms, boots-on-the-ground help is much easier from one neighbor to another since travel is not a problem. Mentors can help with one major problem that shelter directors face in trying to go No Kill, and that is taking the plunge. Animal shelters are fast-paced, working organizations. They are like a police department or a hospital in that they have to function every day. A director cannot just shut the shelter down for a couple of weeks to retool. A traditional shelter director may be afraid to institute managed admission for fear of creating chaos, or reluctant to try a community cat program for fear it will take too much time or money, or cause complaints. An experienced No Kill director from a neighboring city who is there with step-by-step guidance and encouragement can make all the difference in getting those programs underway. Most traditional shelter directors these days seem to be interested in shelter reform, but they may be reluctant to take advice from No Kill advocates who do not work or volunteer at the shelter and have little hands-on shelter experience. Shelter directors may resist engaging with local No Kill advocates because they have heard of cases where shelter directors have been unfairly attacked by advocates. If a traditional shelter director gets to know a neighboring No Kill director as a person, they can build trust that can lead the traditional shelter director to a more sympathetic consideration of new ideas. Even shelter directors who do not have any nearby No Kill neighbors can get help, but they may have to take the initiative in finding it. National conferences provide a great way to network. There are more and more shelter consultants, and they are becoming more specialized and effective. Consultants may work in teams that can include a building specialist, a behaviorist, a community cat expert, etc. Most consulting organizations have access to a wide variety of specialists who can be called on as needed. Animal shelter federations may be an under-used opportunity for No Kill mentoring. These federations are usually at the state level. Although historically the federations have been conservative, things are changing. Virginia is an example of a state federation that actively offers help to its members. Since animal control is in most respects a state function, with delegation to the local level, the state federation is a natural place to look for regional mentoring. There are no doubt many more stories of No Kill shelters helping their neighbors than we know about. It’s an exciting trend that holds great hope for the future.

Keweenaw, Houghton, and Baraga counties are located in a mostly rural area in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Together, they form a region known as Copper Country, named for the copper mines it used to have. The Copper Country Humane Society (CCHS) is a private non-profit that provides animal sheltering services for non-feral dogs and cats for the three counties and for the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community. The shelter describes its program as follows: “Our successful adoption program matches homeless animals with responsible people seeking pets.  The nominal adoption fee helps defray some of the costs of the initial vaccination, deworming and spaying/neutering of adopted dogs and cats.  CCHS helps over 900 animals annually and ninety percent of our dogs and cats are adopted or claimed every year.  There is NO time limit on our animals looking for homes, CCHS cares for them for as long as they need us.  CCHS cares for about 80 animals each day at our shelter.” In 2010, the shelter reported to the Michigan Department of Agriculture that it had a 93% live release rate for its intake of almost 900 animals (scroll down to Copper Country in the link). The shelter relied mostly on adoptions and returning pets to their owners, with very few transfers. In 2011, with an intake of 939 animals, the shelter reported a substantially higher live release rate — a near-perfect 99%. In 2012 the CCHS report was not included in the state reports. In 2013, the shelter had an intake of 769 cats and dogs. The live release rate was 99%. All animals who were placed by adoption were sterilized. CCHS did not euthanize any dogs, and euthanized 9 cats. CCHS won the Michigan Pet Fund alliance 2014 award in the “small shelter” category for “outstanding open admission shelter with the best save rate.” The award was based on CCHS’s performance in 2013. Copper Country, MI, was originally listed by this blog on May 5, 2013. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

If you’ve been in No Kill for very long, you’ve noticed it — the great majority of communities that have achieved sustainable No Kill have done so with a lot of help from the private sector. From Jacksonville to Austin to Kansas City (MO) to Atlanta to Salt Lake City to Charlottesville to Reno, and in a lot of places in between, private 501(c)(3) organizations are creating and sustaining No Kill. We want to create No Kill in all communities, so it’s important to know why local governments are so bad at creating No Kill on their own. Here are five handicaps that local governments have when they run their shelters themselves. All of these problems are far less likely to affect a private 501(c)(3) organization that is running the municipal shelter by contract or partnering with the municipal shelter. Lack of flexibility in hiring. Governments need to be fair and impartial in hiring, and in order to achieve this they develop lists of criteria that candidates should meet for each position. These criteria tend to value experience in the subject matter very heavily. A list of criteria for shelter manager, for example, might include x number of years of experience working in a supervisory level at an animal shelter. Some of the best No Kill leaders have been people who took over shelters with no previous experience in the field. Richard Avanzino, for example, the father of No Kill and the legendary director of the San Francisco SPCA, had never worked in a shelter before he was hired as the president of the SPCA. The San Francisco SPCA, as a private organization, was free to take a chance on Avanzino. A large city would not have that flexibility. It’s a good thing that governments have hiring criteria because the criteria help prevent nepotism and good-ole-boy networks. Hiring criteria are a very bad thing for No Kill, though. Lack of flexibility in firing. Similarly, governments establish procedures that must be completed before an employee can be fired. Successful No Kill directors tend to surround themselves with hard-working people who have can-do attitudes and share a passionate commitment to the goal of No Kill. when directors are reforming a kill shelter they often have to replace a sizable portion of the previous work force. That can be very difficult to accomplish in a government-run shelter. If a private organization is running the shelter, or partnering with the shelter, it is likely to have far more flexibility in firing people. Lack of ability to fundraise. Government shelters often eschew fundraising. They may have a private organization that raises funds for them, but this type of fundraising in usually ineffectual. People like to donate to the organization that’s doing the work, not an organization that’s raising funds for the organization doing the work. Getting to No Kill requires funds for things like veterinary care, offsite adoption venues, and modern buildings. That means substantial amounts of money must come from somewhere, and private sector organizations that are running a public shelter have a much easier job with this fundraising than municipal-run shelters. Too many layers of management. I have volunteered at a county shelter where every deviation from established policy, no matter how small, had to be approved by county leadership. And approval was not just a matter of picking up the phone — it took weeks or even months. Multiple layers of management was one of the problems with the Dallas city shelter that was cited in the recent BCG report on the shelter. Layers of government bureaucracy can make it difficult or impossible for the director of a city-run shelter to do things like establishing an adoption venue, hiring a rescue coordinator, hold adoption specials, use social media, or network with other organizations. Conflicting missions. The primary reason for the existence of local government in our constitutional system is to protect the health and safety of citizens, and domestic pets are not citizens.  Cities and counties tend to see their primary duties in relation to domestic pets as animal control and enforcing animal-related laws and ordinances. Saving the lives of pets is distinctly lower on the list of priorities. A private organization that runs the municipal shelter by contract or partners with the municipal shelter is free to use private funds for lifesaving measures that local governments see as beyond the scope of their duties. What’s the take-away from all this? When advocates are trying to reform a city or county shelter, they need to think about how they are going to deal with these five barriers. In some progressive towns and smaller cities, the local government may provide enough resources, hire a good director, and give that director free rein. Everywhere else, the private sector is probably going to have to have some pretty extensive boots-on-the-ground involvement in order for No Kill to succeed and be sustainable. That involvement usually comes in the form of a 501(c)(3) organization winning a contract to run the municipal shelter, or entering into a partnership with the shelter to pull all healthy and treatable animals that the municipal shelter can’t save.

It has been more than 20 years now since the concept of a No Kill community was created by Rich Avanzino in San Francisco. Today many cities and counties are No Kill. We know how to do No Kill – that is, we know what processes and models we need to use – but in most communities the implementation of those processes and models confronts us with problems. As with most great endeavors, the devil is in the details. For example, we know that return-to-owner rates can be increased if animal control officers are provided with the time and equipment needed to try to find a stray animal’s home in the field at the time the animal is picked up. It is a much better outcome for everyone if the officer can take the animal home rather than to the shelter. But in many cases there are barriers in the way. The local jurisdiction may have non-waivable fees for allowing an animal to run loose, or for allowing an animal to be at large without proof of identification or rabies vaccination. If the city or county runs animal control they may be reluctant to accept the extra expense of providing animal control officers with the gear needed for effectively returning animals in the field, or the time to do so. Shelter procedures may need to be re-written and approved by city officials. There are many other types of state and local laws and ordinances that can make No Kill difficult. Pit bull bans are more often abrogated than created these days, but they still exist, as do landlord and insurance rules that discriminate against certain breeds. Mandatory spay-neuter rules tied to pet licensing can result in people not licensing their pets. Many communities have rules or policies that make trap-neuter-return and return-to-field programs for cats difficult or impossible. Getting to No Kill in a particular place may be substantially impeded by such rules and practices. A related issue is whether the shelter director has the flexibility needed to create No Kill. Does the director have the power to make decisions on policy and operations for animal control and sheltering? For example, many times a No Kill transition means that some workers will not be able to adapt to the new regime and will have to be replaced. Or the shelter, since its goal is to save a higher percentage of animals, may need to develop a more nuanced approach to temperament evaluation. If the shelter is run under contract by a non-profit, the director probably will have considerable leeway. If the director is a city or county employee, then personnel decisions, budgetary choices, and setting policy may happen at a higher level of city government, where the ultimate decision-maker is not solely focused on No Kill.  If personnel and policy decisions are controlled by the government hierarchy, above the level of the shelter director, it can greatly hinder getting to No Kill. Talent is a huge issue for No Kill. One of the reasons why we have seen such a spate of large cities going No Kill in recent years is that large cities tend to be where the talent is. Great marketers, fundraisers, and managers are less likely to be found in a remote rural county than in cities like New York, Austin, or Atlanta. A rural county may be hard-pressed to find a really competent person to run the shelter. It may be even harder to find people who are competent to develop operational, budget, fundraising, and marketing plans. Implementing effective volunteer and foster programs, and getting the best performance from shelter employees, requires many different skills. It’s easy to say “start a volunteer program.” It’s a lot harder to actually do it. The director has to figure out how to recruit and train the volunteers, how to motivate them to keep coming back, what they will and won’t be allowed to do, how to keep them safe from bites and zoonoses, what the considerations are for legal liability, what tracking of volunteers will be done, how to evaluate volunteers to make sure they are being used most effectively and prevented from doing any harm, what accommodations can be set aside for them in the shelter, and so on. Shelter intake is another issue that can stand in the way of No Kill. In most cases, the lower a shelter’s intake is in relation to the number of people in the community, the easier it is to get to No Kill. This is partly because more people equals more potential homes, but intake per capita is also a measure of how much capacity the community has to care for its pets. Wealthier, more educated communities tend to have a better track record of looking after their pets. People in those communities have fenced yards for their pets, and if they have to move they can find another home where they can keep their pets. In Boulder, Colorado, which is a wealthy, progressive, city, some 90% of stray dogs are reclaimed by their owners. There is a world of difference between that and the 10% to 20% return-to-owner rate that is more typical. When you see high shelter intake relative to the human population and a low reclaim rate, you are probably in a place where the residents don’t have the resources to keep their pets off the street and safely at home, or the resources to look for them when they disappear. Money is tremendously important to every facet of No Kill. We tend to think of money as most needed in paying veterinary costs to treat the treatables, but money is also crucial for pet retention programs and for hiring employees to run volunteer, foster, social media, and rescue-placement programs. Money can also make the difference in whether a shelter can afford an offsite adoption center or a low-cost spay-neuter clinic. Governments rarely pay the full cost of No Kill, which means that the private sector must make up the difference. In order for private fundraising to be effective, people in the community must have money to donate. If a high percentage of the local population is struggling to make the rent payment each month or buy food, the No Kill effort will probably struggle too. The shelter building is another thing that makes No Kill harder or easier. If the shelter is one of the old-style, ugly, concrete-block buildings located near the landfill or the railroad tracks, in a bad part of town, with no thought given to disease control, then it will be harder to attract adopters and volunteers and harder to keep the animals healthy. Finally, one of the most important factors in implementing No Kill is whether there are other humane organizations in town that have the shelter’s back. Is there a large humane society that pulls lots of animals from the shelter, including the toughest cases, or is the shelter going it alone? In some places the local humane society actually makes things harder for the public shelter by vacuuming up donation money, taking in all the small, cute, healthy owner surrenders, and bringing in lots of highly adoptable dogs and cats from other areas without at the same time committing to making sure that all the healthy and treatable dogs and cats in the city are safe. Setting out a list of programs that will help a community get to No Kill is easy. Actually getting there, though, is hard work in most places. In quite a few places it is very hard work. We need to educate people who are new to No Kill and who want to help make it happen about what it really requires. Sometimes people new to No Kill have an over-simplified idea of what it entails. I know I did at one time. If people understand what is required they will be much better prepared to help the effort. As we go forward we need to have training resources for shelter directors that get down to a very granular level of detail of implementation. The good news is that more and more such resources are becoming available through conferences and professional consulting services. The HSUS and Best Friends conferences both offer great opportunities for aspiring No Kill shelter directors to learn from the presenters and to network with each other. The American Pets Alive! conference is devoted to providing nuts-and-bolts instruction on getting to No Kill. We have several excellent people who offer No Kill consulting services. With all these resources, even shelter directors who are not superstars can be effective and can lead their organizations to No Kill.