OUT THE FRONT DOOR

First, a housekeeping note – if your organization does not already have my blog on your press release distribution list, please feel free to add it. My e-mail is administrator@outthefrontdoor.com. And now to the news. Brother Wolf, the innovative non-profit that has worked with the county shelter in Asheville, North Carolina, to go No Kill, has announced a 5-year plan to build a large sanctuary that will eventually house 600 dogs and 600 cats on 82.5 acres. The purpose of the sanctuary is to rehabilitate animals who need more time and care than the existing shelters can easily provide. The $4.9 million sanctuary will have a veterinary clinic on site. The plans include a learning center and guest cabins for visitors. Brother Wolf’s founder and president, Denise Bitz, decided to leave her career as a nurse and open Brother Wolf after a visit to Best Friends in 2010, so she is familiar with the life-changing experiences that a sanctuary can provide. Paul Berry, a former CEO of Best Friends, is now the executive director of Brother Wolf. There are several upcoming conferences. The SPARCS International Conference on Dog Behavior is being held in Phoenix on June 19-21. The presenters include Michael Hennessy, who will speak on reducing stress in shelter dogs. Best Friends National Conference is being held July 16-19 in Atlanta. The 12th annual ASPCA Cornell Maddie’s Shelter Medicine Conference is being held on July 31-August 2 in Ithaca. Pets who are overdue on their rabies vaccines and come in contact with a rabid animal can safely receive booster vaccination rather than quarantine or euthanasia, according to a study published in JAVMA. This finding will be included in the upcoming edition of the definitive rabies public health guide later this year, which should result in it becoming standard practice. A government office in New Mexico teamed up with a rescue to set up a cat library. The way it works is that an employee who needs a break during the day can “check out” a cat for a short period of fun and relaxation. The program has resulted in 100 adoptions in three years. Speaking of libraries, reading to shy shelter animals helps them come out of their shells. Big news from Houston this week. The city shelter, BARC, had a ribbon-cutting celebration for the opening of Phase I of its $6.1 million adoption center. The city has also brought Emancipet, an Austin based spay-neuter organization, to Houston. Emancipet has a 48′ mobile clinic that can provide 35 reduced-cost or free spay-neuter surgeries per day. Emancipet has started a fundraising effort to build three permanent clinics in Houston by 2017. The ASPCA has pledged $1 million to the effort. A proposed bill in New York State would provide $200,000 in annual funding for TNR programs. The bill is being opposed by a coalition that includes conservation groups. The Just One Day adoption event was held this past Thursday, and several shelters reported good results. The Muncie shelter held a very successful 24-hour event. Here is an interesting blog from a veterinarian who thinks that veterinarians should refuse to participate in shelter killing of healthy or treatable animals. She makes an analogy to the moral stand that doctors have taken against participating in the execution of human prisoners. The discussion in the comments is also interesting, and remarkably civilized on this contentious topic. If you are not keeping an eye on the Maddie’s Institute blog, you are missing out on some great free guidance for using social media. The most recent article discusses frequency of posting to Facebook. Miami-Dade County Animal Services has a 28′ by 8′ van called the Hope Express dedicated to mobile adoptions. It is self-contained, requiring no electrical or water hookups, and is “easy” to set up and break down. it has 24 animal compartments that can be increased to 56 with dividers to accommodate various sizes of pets. Since its launch last summer it has been the centerpiece of events at many types of venues including parks, malls, and downtown Miami. The sides of the van lift up to provide shade and to allow people to view the animals in their compartments. May 17-23 was Dog Bite Prevention Week. Julie Hecht has an interesting post on current thinking about dog aggression – that it is more often situational and learned rather than generalized and innate. HSUS has a webinar on July 1 on how to change adoption policies to remove barriers to adoption and attract potential adopters.

Big dogs are a challenge for many animal shelters. In my conversations with shelter directors, whether the shelter is large or small, urban or rural, public or private, No Kill or still striving for No Kill, one thing I hear a lot is that large dogs are the toughest group to get out the door alive. Why is that? I hear several reasons. One is that people will more readily adopt what Rich Avanzino calls the “cutes and cuddlies.” A different way of saying this is that there is a disproportionate number of big dogs coming into shelters relative to the demand for them. Another issue with big dogs is that the stakes are a lot higher in temperament testing with a large dog than a tiny one. And finally, most pits and pit mixes (so called) are medium or large dogs, and there is still a lot of prejudice against blocky-headed, muscular, short-coated dogs. Several shelters that I’ve followed on the blog as they transitioned to No Kill seemed to hit a wall, or at least a slowdown, when they reached an 80-85% live release rate for dogs. In some cases this slowdown has resulted in local advocates becoming frustrated with the shelter, and the relationship between advocates and the shelter has deteriorated. Even shelters that are saving over 90% of dogs may be sharply criticized by local advocates due to the shelter’s performance in placing large dogs. Many times when a shelter makes a decision to euthanize a large dog, the deciding factor is temperament. The concern with large dogs is especially acute because of their ability to inflict more damage. In the old days 20 years ago or more, when shelters were saving only a small percentage of their animals, the temperament of shelter dogs was not a big issue because any dog with an even slightly questionable temperament was simply killed. As we have saved a higher and higher percentage of shelter dogs, the issue of temperament evaluation is looming ever larger. Any time you have a group of shelter directors together, one of the most popular topics of discussion will likely be how to decide if a dog is safe to adopt out. Dr. Emily Weiss is a behavior expert who has written extensively about dog temperament evaluation in the shelter environment. Dr. Weiss is associated with the SAFER test, which is, to say the least, not popular among many No Kill advocates. SAFER as it was originally developed was just intended to be one tool in assessments. A few days ago the ASPCA announced that it would no longer certify people for SAFER use. My impression in reading the announcement is that ASPCA officials are frustrated with people not using the assessment consistently in the way it was intended. Beyond the SAFER controversy, Dr. Weiss has written many thoughtful blog posts on issues of temperament testing for shelter dogs. She recently wrote a blog post that summed up the current state of behavior evaluations for shelter dogs. In the blog, titled “Taking Risks,” she notes that even among experts “there is little agreement as to where to draw the line” between a dog that is safe to adopt out and one that is not. As she says, the stakes in making these decisions are very high – err on one side and an adoptable dog loses its life. Err on the other side and a dog that is a danger to people or other animals is adopted out into the community. There is no easy answer to this dilemma, because dog behavior will never be straightforward to predict and because the circumstances that dogs face are so variable. The situation is not hopeless, though, and people continue to press forward with new ways to get at the problem. In Dr. Weiss’s most recent blog post she mentioned an experiment done at the county shelter in Fairfax County, Virginia, which gathered some very interesting data. The experiment was overseen by Kristen Auerbach, who is now at Austin. In this program, shelter dogs with issues including fear aggression, kennel stress, barrier reactivity, and resource guarding were placed in selected foster homes. The outcomes were great, with many of the dogs showing different behaviors outside of the shelter. Over 90% of these problem dogs were able to be adopted out successfully and safely. A similar program was in effect at the Austin city shelter when Auerbach arrived earlier this year, and she hopes to collect data from that program as well and to publicize it to a wider audience. Studies like this are important because they quantify what happens with dogs under standardized conditions. The data collected by Auerbach also has implications for the importance of properly designed shelter buildings. How much of the temperament problems we see in dogs is simply due to the unnatural conditions of the typical shelter? If the fearful and stressed dogs could be given their own, homelike quiet space within the shelter and if the barrier-reactive dogs could be housed without the type of barrier that causes the reaction, perhaps those problems could be successfully dealt with inside the shelter. And of course a good shelter design facilitates activities for dogs who need to burn off energy and gain social skills, as with Aimee Sadler’s Playing for Life program. No Kill is only a little more than 20 years old at this point, and we are still learning. The issue of safe placement of dogs who show problematic behavior in the shelter, particularly large dogs, is difficult, but a lot of talented people are working on the issue and progress is being made.

A wonderful story that gets little attention is what happened in 1998 in Otsego County, Michigan. That year, a group of citizens got together and decided that they wanted to stop the killing at their county shelter. They did so in a big way, achieving a live release rate of over 90% in 1999 and every year since then for which we have statistics. The Otsego County shelter was one of the first No Kill shelters in the United States. This article is a nice reminiscence by the current Otsego County shelter director about the people who made the community No Kill. The Salina Animal Shelter in Salina, Kansas, has announced that it has achieved a 90% live release rate. The Petco Foundation has provided a grant to help the shelter upgrade its facilities and sustain its live release rate. The Stockton, California shelter, which is under new management, announced a free adoption event for pits and pit mixes to try to reduce the numbers at the shelter. Twenty-four hours later, 13 of the dogs had been adopted or rescued. Hillsborough County, Florida (where Tampa is located) has had a mystery drop of up to 20% in cat intake at the city/county shelter. Both stray impounds and owner surrenders have dropped. The shelter has a community cat program, but director Scott Trebatoski does not think that program has been in effect long enough to account for the change. He speculates that maybe there has been a change in attitude as to how people deal with cats in their neighborhoods. Perhaps people who hear about the community cat program are deciding to do-it-themselves by getting neighborhood cats spayed and neutered. It will be interesting to see if the drop persists through kitten season. A great story about the power of one. Lisa McCormick of Belleville, Illinois, adopted a couple of cats from an Illinois pound 15 years ago. The pound did not adopt out many animals, and it had buckets of collars sitting on top of its gas chamber. McCormick was inspired to start a rescue, and since 2002 her rescue, Partners for Pets, has re-homed over 12,000 dogs and cats. The rescue has acquired a site for a new shelter and will be moving soon. And a great story about what a No Kill group can do to create the change they want to see. Operation Pets Alive of Montgomery County, Texas, just north of the Houston metro area, is partnering with the county shelter to help it move toward No Kill. Operation Pets Alive programs include transports, offsite adoption events, fostering, and targeted spay-neuter. One of the No Kill flagship shelters, the Nevada Humane Society, is increasing its efforts to serve its area. There are neighborhoods in every city that have few resources for pets, just as there are neighborhoods that have few resources for people to buy healthy food. In such neighborhoods it can be hard for the providers of free and low-cost spay-neutering and pet health services to reach the people who need that help. Recently some shelters have started programs to reach out to these neighborhoods on a person-to-person basis, and NHS is one of them. The shelter’s director, Kevin Ryan, has announced that this work will be furthered by the shelter’s selection as a Pets For Life mentor in the HSUS program. Lost Dogs of America has a very helpful blog on how to trace an animal’s owner from its microchip even when the contact information is out of date or the chip was never registered. A former shelter dog is doing search and rescue in Nepal. Dubuque County, Iowa, is discussing a deal with a private non-profit No Kill, Whispurring Hope Rescue, to take over most animal control duties in the county and adopt out animals. A new documentary, Dog by Dog, follows the money trail in the puppy mill business. Sometimes transporters have to refuse to work with a shelter. It doesn’t happen very often, and it is hard for rescuers to walk away from a shelter, but it keeps transports safe. One of Best Friends’ week-long workshops on how to start and run a sanctuary is coming up June 7-13. Best Friends has been putting on these workshops since 1999. Peter Wolf has a cautionary tale about what can happen when you try to fool Mother Nature. Here is a helpful blog post about getting access to journal articles about canine science. Dogs Playing for Life hosted a very successful event for shelter staff and volunteers from six shelters in Phoenix, Oregon, last week. The director of one of the shelters said play time had a “fully transformational” effect on one German Shepherd who had previously leaped at her gate and barked when approached. One of the host shelters, the Jackson County Animal Shelter, is currently at an 85% live release rate and is aiming for 95%.

Benzie County is in western Michigan, along the shore of Lake Michigan. It is a rural county with lots of parks and trails, and has a population of about 16,000 people. The county has the distinction of being the smallest in Michigan in land area, and it has a correspondingly small animal shelter. Benzie County Animal Control provides both animal control and sheltering services for the county. It accepts owner surrenders for a small fee. A non-profit, the Animal Welfare League of Benzie County, has spay-neuter and education programs and provides medical care for injured animals. In 2009, the shelter took in 538 animals and had an 80% live release rate. In 2010, it took in 381 animals and improved to a live release rate of 93%.  In 2011, the live release rate was 92% with an intake of 428 cats and dogs. Intake was 359 in 2012, with a live release rate of 92%.

Hamilton County is located in the middle of Indiana, north of Indianapolis. It has a population of about 275,000 people, and is one of the most rapidly growing counties in the United States. The Humane Society for Hamilton County (HSHC) is a private organization that contracts to provide animal sheltering services for the county. The contract includes animal sheltering services for the municipalities of Fishers (population 77,000), Carmel (79,000), Noblesville (52,000), and Westfield (30,000 ). The shelter takes in owner surrenders from residents of its service area. It asks owners to call first. There is no charge for surrenders from the shelter’s jurisdiction, but residents of the municipalities in the county that do not contract with HSHC must pay a fee for surrenders. HSHC posted partial statistics for 2011 in a newsletter that is no longer online. Those statistics showed an intake of 3461 animals in 2011, with 501 animals already on hand. 145 of those animals died in shelter care or were euthanized during the year, and the shelter placed 3700 animals. The live release rate was 96% for the year calculated as the inverse of 145 divided by 3461. I could not locate full 2012 statistics posted online, but HSHC reports a 90.3% live release rate for 2012, calculated as live releases divided by total intake. They report that total intake for 2012 was 3220. HSHC’s website documents their programs for pit-bull adoptions, spay-neuter assistance, and pet retention, as well as foster and volunteer outreach. Trap-Neuter-Return for feral cats is provided by an independent low-cost spay-neuter clinic located next to the shelter. Hamilton County is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

[NOTE: The Worth Watching category lists communities whose animal shelter systems are doing substantially better than average, but have not reported a sustained (for one year or more) 90%+ live release rate. These communities are not counted in the running total in the blog’s subtitle. For more about the Worth Watching category, see the Worth Watching page link in the blog’s header.] Savannah is a small town of about 7,000 people located in a rural area in the western part of Tennessee. It is the county seat of Hardin County, which has a population of about 46,000 people. Animal control and sheltering for Savannah has been provided by Savannah Animal Services, a municipal department run by the town. An article in the Jackson Sun that is no longer available online reported that from November 1, 2011 to November 1, 2012 the shelter took in 657 animals and euthanized 29 of them. The live release rate calculated on this limited data is 96%. I spoke to the shelter’s director, Charlie Nickle, about the shelter’s history. Nickle told me that when he was appointed director of the shelter about four years ago he immediately began working to improve the live release rate because he believed that the pets who came into the shelter had a right to live. Nickle said that the shelter accepts owner surrenders from people who live in the city, and the only conditions are a photo ID to prove residence and a $10 fee. Nickle said that in the past they were not able to adopt out many animals locally and their primary means of placing animals was by transport to approved rescues all over the United States. In 2012 the shelter moved into a new building which is much more conducive to adoptions, and the shelter had 10 local adoptions in its first week. Nickle said that they do not have a TNR program because there are no feral cat colonies in the city, and all the cats they take in are domesticated. I’ve placed this shelter in the Worth Watching category instead of listing it in the right sidebar because Hardin County has purchased the new shelter building and equipment in order to unify operations with the city of Savannah. Nickle has stated that the euthanasia rate may rise with the influx of animals from the county.

On September 8th, San Antonio’s Animal Care Services (ACS) announced that it had met the No Kill standard of a 90% live release rate (LRR). Sounds great – but the news report, and another report, said that the shelter is defining the national standard for No Kill as 90% of healthy and treatable animals. That’s wrong – the generally accepted No Kill standard is 90% of all intake. I’ve never heard of No Kill being defined as saving 90% of healthy-treatables. My perusal of the stats posted on the ACS website did not indicate that they will be at 90% or better for their latest fiscal year, which ends at the end of September – instead it looks more like the LRR for the year, calculated by the standard Asilomar method, will be closer to 85%. I’m a big fan of the San Antonio effort – they are working really hard and the 85% or so that they have achieved so far is a fabulous accomplishment under the circumstances they are dealing with. They want to do even better. They are transparent, posting their full statistics online, and I do not think they were intentionally trying to deceive anyone. In fact, San Antonio would be on my short list of amazing American cities working to improve shelter lifesaving. But I don’t think they should be saying that saving 90% of healthy-treatables is “No Kill,” because that isn’t a generally accepted definition of No Kill. And the LRR for any individual month should not be used as a basis to claim No Kill, in my opinion, since LRR can vary a lot from month to month during the year. So ACS – keep up your wonderful work, but please wait to claim No Kill status until you have chalked up an LRR of 90% or above based on total intake, for an entire year. I’m sure that will be soon. The six public shelters in Los Angeles take in about 55,000 animals per year. For fiscal year 2014-2015, the “save rate” was 78.5%. For dogs the number was 88.4%, which is encouraging, but for cats it was only 68.7%. Best Friends announced last July that they had run the numbers from 2014 and decided that the best way to increase lifesaving for cats would be to open a second kitten nursery. Best Friend’s existing kitten nursery in Los Angeles is currently caring for about 2150 kittens per year, but they want to add another 4400 kittens each year to the effort. If that plan is successful, it should make a huge difference in the Los Angeles live release rate. The Humane Society of Silicon Valley, which won the Shorty Award earlier this year in the Best Social Good category for its “Eddie the Terrible” marketing campaign, is back with another bizarrely hilarious proposal. This time they are looking for fosters for ringworm kittens. I posted a couple of weeks ago that two of the four counties in Michigan that still used a gas chamber to kill shelter animals had stopped the practice. Now one of the two remaining counties, Cass County, has announced that it will stop using its gas chamber by January 1, 2016, if not sooner. The remaining Michigan county that still uses a gas chamber, Branch County, had its shelter damaged by a fire last May, but unfortunately the gas chamber was not damaged. County officials may bar the use of the chamber once the shelter is repaired and reopened. Meanwhile Sandy City, Utah, will stop the use of its gas chamber beginning next year. The leaders of the city of Waco and McLennan County had a “state of the city and county” dinner recently. The major achievement mentioned by the Waco mayor was how the city has increased the live release rate at the public shelter since taking it over two years ago. There has been a trend in the past year or two for cities and counties to realize that having a No Kill public shelter is an important asset. Kudos to the Waco mayor for understanding the value of what Waco has achieved and how much it says about the city. Another city that realizes the value of No Kill is Atlanta. This story quotes the chairperson of the board of LifeLine, the non-profit contractor that has revolutionized Atlanta’s shelters, on the importance of a lifesaving shelter in attracting new people to Atlanta. LifeLine has recruited over 100 rescue partners since taking over the contracts in 2013 for the two shelters that serve Atlanta. The American Bird Conservancy strikes again, as a participant in a stealth plan to try to destroy TNR in Washington, DC. The nation’s capital has come a long way toward No Kill in recent years, and TNR has been a big part of it. Now the city’s Department of the Environment is asking the city to adopt its proposed Wildlife Action Plan, which, on pages 145-146, asks that government-sanctioned TNR programs in the district be re-examined. Instead of returning the cats to their territory after sterilization, the plan suggests that they be taken in by shelters (this is code for saying that the cats should be killed, since most of them are feral and not adoptable) and that the government should support the “cats indoors” program. I hope the city doesn’t fall for this. Adams Morgan, a neighborhood in DC, was the site of a groundbreaking TNR project in 1990 that led to the formation of Alley Cat Allies. The TNR project gradually reduced the number of feral cats and now there are none where the original colony was. I’m sure that Alley Cat Allies and other groups will present the overwhelming evidence in favor of TNR as not only the most humane but the most effective and least costly method of feral cat control. The Washington Humane Society, which currently does TNR, was blindsided by the plan (they were not consulted) and they are arguing against it. There is something a little absurd in the idea of the District trying to make itself into a replica of how nature was in the time before people poured concrete over everything. If the bird people really want to protect the birds, they would be better off using their energy to promote “smart growth” for new construction in the District rather than persecuting cats. There are several other important cat-related stories this week: The New Yorker has a video on TNR that does a good job of showing how much work and care goes into TNR. Unfortunately the video cites the cat predation numbers from the infamous 2013 Smithsonian study without comment on how unlikely those numbers are on their face, but that is a flaw in an otherwise good video. The Texas State Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners has found that veterinarian Kristen Lindsey (whose name you may recall from a controversy over an allegation that she had killed a cat with a bow and arrow) committed an unspecified violation. More details will be announced in October. HSUS has two “Rethinking the Cat” symposiums coming up, on September 18 in Indianapolis and September 24 in Madison, Wisconsin. A recent study posted on PlosOne points out that there are lots of people who are feeding feral cats but not taking them in for TNR. Dr. Emily Weiss connects the dots by asking if we should be seeking ways to recruit these people, not necessarily to do TNR themselves, but to take responsibility to contact organizations that do TNR. Asheville’s city council has unanimously approved Brother Wolf’s bid for permission to open a cat cafe in the “heart of downtown.” Don’t miss this blog by Dr. Kate Hurley on what makes a “good and worthwhile life” in animal welfare. A few more news bits in what has been a busy week: A rescue group that started helping the Smyth County Animal Shelter in Virginia last year reports that it has decreased the shelter’s euthanasia rate from 89% to 14%. The Elizabethton/Carter County shelter in Tennessee has a new director with big plans to increase its live release rate. El Paso, Texas, may be the worst city in the United States for shelter animals. Here is a thoughtful article about some of the problems in Dallas with free-roaming dogs. “Urgent” pages have saved a lot of lives, but they can also create a lot of counterproductive drama. This post on the Maddie’s Fund blog describes one shelter director’s innovations for running a more effective Urgent page. This article about the new Virginia law on animal shelters gives more attention to PETA’s views than to the proponents of the law, but it gives an idea of the battle currently being waged. Hillary Clinton, pet parent to two mixed-breed dogs, had a great response to a question about puppy mills, saying that they are terrible places for animals and we need to do more about them. Hand2Paw, a Philadelphia non-profit, helps young people who have aged out of foster care at age 18 with no place to go by providing volunteer and intern experience working with homeless animals at local shelters. Some of the young people have been hired as shelter workers. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg animal shelter has successfully implemented a managed admission plan. The plan, which includes helping owners to retain their pets, has reduced admissions by a startling 30%. The shelter reports that the community has embraced the new plan.

During the 12 years that she worked with J.P. Morgan she was also volunteering for animal welfare issues. For many years she was president of the board of a large private humane society and helped shepherd it through a rapid growth phase and the building of a new shelter. In 2009, when the Great Recession hit and the financial world was thrown into chaos, Teresa’s position with J.P. Morgan was one of the casualties. Rather than look around for another job in finance, Teresa decided to use the opportunity to do what she really wanted to do, which was help animals. She took a job as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at a local organization called Animal Haven. She was there for two years, during which time Animal Haven merged with a spay-neuter clinic and became the Great Plains SPCA. Then in 2011 Teresa’s career took yet another turn. The public shelter in Kansas City, which was run by the city through a contractor, was high-kill. Local animal welfare activists had worked for years to change that, and with their help the city shelter had increased its live release rate from 34% in 2006 to 68% in 2011. In early 2011, a scandal involving allegations of poor animal care by the contractor running the shelter led the city to terminate the contract. The city put out a request for bids for a new contractor, but it got no responses. This was a crisis for the future of Kansas City pets because it threatened the momentum for change at the shelter. A small group of No Kill advocates reacted by deciding to take matters into their own hands. With little lead time, the group filed incorporation papers for a new non-profit, the Kansas City Pet Project (KCPP), planning to bid on the contract to run the shelter themselves. Two of the four incorporators were Brent Toellner and Michelle Davis, who had been active in animal welfare issues in Kansas City for years. Today Brent is president of the corporation and Michelle is vice-president. The Articles of Incorporation of KCPP stated: “We are an open admission shelter focused on optimal lifesaving and creating a No Kill Community in the Kansas City Metro.” Early in November of 2011, after negotiations over financing, the city council approved KCPP’s bid on the shelter contract. The start date was January 1, 2012. The small group of people who had taken this audacious step had less than two months to prepare to run an open admission city shelter that at that time was taking in about 6,000 animals per year. KCPP hired Kim Staton as Executive Director and Teresa as COO. Teresa spent the month of December 2011 hiring people to work at the shelter. The city had run the shelter using a combination of animal control officers, employees of the previous contractor, and a handful of permanent employees. Animal control was moving to another building and the previous contract agreement with the city was expiring, so Teresa was able to hire a team of new people. She went for a non-traditional work force. In fact, the new hires were so non-traditional that Teresa was the only one who had ever actually worked in an animal shelter. Although the first day of the new contract was the New Years Day holiday, KCPP decided to have their grand opening that day as a symbol that it would not be business as usual with them. It was a huge success, with crowds of people visiting. Opening for most holidays is now a tradition for the shelter, which is open every day of the year except for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Then, to complicate things, Kim Staton left KCPP after four months on the job. Teresa became interim director and eventually was selected as the new Executive Director. It was a challenging transition period with an organization that was still getting its feet on the ground. As Teresa says: “I don’t think we really realized what we were in for.” They were spectacularly successful, though, reaching a 90% live release rate within six months of their start date. One of Teresa’s first priorities was to establish an offsite adoption venue. The city shelter was housed in a 40-year-old building near the landfill, behind two sports stadiums, in an area with no visibility to potential adopters. Teresa went big, finding a large, central space  in Zona Rosa, a high-end retail center that is across town from the shelter’s location. She found a donor who paid the first year’s lease. She negotiated with a local supplier to get the center outfitted. When all was said and done, she had a premier retail space to feature the shelter’s pets at a minimal cost. The Zona Rosa site recently had its 3-year anniversary, with over 5,000 adoptions to its credit. KCPP has also opened a second large offsite adoption venue in a Petco store. Teresa improved the main shelter building by making it less institutional and more welcoming. They got rid of the bulletproof glass in the lobby, and volunteers landscaped the property. Once inside the shelter, prospective adopters experience an open, dialogue-based approach to matching them with a compatible pet. Teresa wants to give people lots of reasons to come to the shelter, so they have adoption specials and fee-waived events. There has been discussion with the city about replacing the old shelter but nothing definitive has been done yet. KCPP’s contract is administered by Animal Control. There is no ordinance preventing cats from being free-roaming, but Animal Control will pick up stray or feral cats when they get a complaint. These nuisance complaints have caused some problems between the city and feral cat colony caregivers. KCPP is trying to work with Animal Control and the city to get them to embrace TNR, but in the meantime all the feral cats that Animal Control brings to the shelter have to be relocated. They never euthanize a cat for being feral. One of the most amazing things in the amazing story of KCPP is that they have been able to maintain a high live release rate even as their intake has climbed each year. Last year their intake was almost 9500 dogs and cats. In spite of having to place so many more animals, they have continued to have a 92-93% live release rate each year. The high intake means that Teresa and her team must concentrate on keeping animals moving. In addition to their adoption efforts they have two full-time foster coordinators and a rescue transport placement coordinator. Their total payroll is about 90 people, up from 20 on the day they started. When KCPP took over the city shelter they inherited a tiny veterinary clinic that, at about 400 square feet, did not have anywhere near the capacity needed for a large No Kill shelter. With financial assistance from Petco Foundation and the community, they opened a modern veterinary clinic on the shelter property a few weeks ago. This allows KCPP to treat the injured and ill animals brought in by Animal Control in-house rather than having to outsource veterinary care. The situation in Kansas City is similar to the situation in Atlanta in some respects. In each case a non-profit formed by No Kill advocates took over the city shelter and dramatically increased shelter lifesaving, without the benefit of the type of local coalition we have seen in cities like Austin, Jacksonville, and Richmond. In both Kansas City and Atlanta shelter managers are also dealing with badly outdated buildings in out-of-the-way locations. In Kansas City the shelter has had to deal with the additional problem of intake that has grown rapidly. Teresa enjoys the challenges and the fast pace of the work. The KCPP team’s motto is “solutions not excuses.” An example of this motto in action was their approach to saving parvo puppies before the new veterinary clinic was opened. They converted a narrow old locker room into a parvo ward and saved 90% of puppies with parvo. KCPP is now winding up its fourth full year of running the city shelter. Congratulations to Teresa and the entire KCPP team for taking a big risk and making an outstanding success of it.

The right sidebar of this blog has a list of communities that are saving 90% or more of their animal shelter intake. In order to be listed, the shelter that takes in strays for the community and the organizations that take in owner surrenders (if different from the shelter) must as a whole be saving at least 90% of their intake, and they must have maintained that rate for at least one year.* Today, I added the 200th community to the right sidebar (and the 201st). Taken together, these communities have over 7 million residents. When I first started researching shelters in early 2011, there were about a dozen communities in the United States that had been identified as saving 90% or more of their intake. Several communities hit the 90% mark in 2011, and by January 1, 2012, I had listed 26 communities. By January 1, 2013, the number of identified 90% or better communities was approaching 100. And now, with more than two months still to go in 2013, the number has exceeded 200. And that’s not all. I’m currently researching more than a dozen cities and counties that are candidates for listing as sustained 90% communities, and additional ones pop up all the time. Then there are the many communities, including several large cities and counties, that have just recently achieved 90% or have live release rates in the 80th to 89th percentile and are improving (many of these communities are listed in the Worth Watching tab and category). One thing to note is that the year a community is identified and listed by the blog is not necessarily the first year that the community attained 90%. There appears to have been at least one community that achieved and sustained the 90% rate back in the 1990s, and by 2010 there were many more 90%+ shelters than anyone knew about (since there is no national registry for shelter statistics). Most of the communities I’ve listed have attained 90% since 2010, though. The pace of change is rapid and it’s accelerating. People across the country are realizing that their own animal shelter could be saving 90% or more and they are organizing to make that happen. There are conferences and seminars all over the country where successful shelter directors tell packed audiences how they can reform their local shelter. I can’t wait to see what 2014 brings. I’d like to thank all the people who have sent me tips and suggestions for communities to research. Keep in mind that the whole community has to be at a 90% or better live release rate in order to be listed. I don’t list individual private organizations that do not take in strays, even if they are saving 90% or more of their intake, because without the strays they don’t represent the entire community. A community doesn’t qualify for a listing unless all the intake organizations in the community, taken together, are at or above 90%. *Although the general rule for the blog is that a community that has saved 90% or more of shelter animals for at least a year qualifies for a listing in the right sidebar, there are a couple of exceptions. I won’t knowingly list a community that has a shelter that uses a gas chamber, and I won’t knowingly list a community that has a breed-specific ban (communities with breed-specific restrictions are evaluated on a case-by-case basis).

Arlington County, in northern Virginia, is just across the river from the District of Columbia and is a highly urbanized community of 221,000 people. The Animal Welfare League of Arlington (AWLA) is a private organization that contracts with Arlington County to provide animal control and sheltering services. The shelter’s website states that the shelter accepts owner surrenders. The shelter asks people who have to surrender their pet to schedule an appointment, bring in the pet’s medical records, and fill out a pet personality profile. There are pet retention services available. The shelter has a suite of services that it offers the community, including low-cost spay-neuter, safekeeping, and a TNR program. It offers no-interest loans to low-income people for emergency pet care. Another innovative program offered by the shelter is its “Baby-Ready Pets” program, originally developed by the Providence Animal Rescue League and the Rhode Island SPCA. It is a two-hour workshop offered to expectant parents to help them “prepare their home and their pets for the arrival of the new baby and to make sure that it is a safe and (relatively) stress-free experience for all.” The shelter offers humane education and birthday parties at the shelter. AWLA posts its fiscal year statistics on its website. In the fiscal year ending in June 2011, the shelter had an 89% live release rate. In the fiscal year that ended in June of 2012, the shelter had a 92% live release rate. The shelter reported 278 owner-requested euthanasias for the 2011-2012 fiscal year, and 5 animals who died in shelter care. If those deaths are counted in with euthanasias, the live release rate was 78%. I spoke to shelter director Neil Trent about the number of owner-requested euthanasias, and he stated that the shelter requires that an animal brought in by an owner for euthanasia must meet the shelter’s standards for euthanasia. He remarked that the shelter, located as it is on the edge of a large urban area, receives requests for owner-requested euthanasia from beyond its jurisdiction. In fiscal year 2012-2013, AWLA had an intake of 1618 animals, not counting owner-requested euthanasia requests. The live release rate was 92%. The shelter performed 232 owner-requested euthanasias and had 13 animals who died or were lost in shelter care. If those animals are counted in with euthanasias, the live release rate was 80%. Arlington, Virginia, was originally listed by this blog on April 18, 2013, based on its 2011-2012 fiscal year statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2012-2013 fiscal year statistics.

Brother Wolf is a large, non-profit rescue organization in Asheville, North Carolina, that helps the city shelter and is working to make the city No Kill. I reported a few days ago in News Bits about an innovative idea to increase pet retention that has been put forward by Denise Bitz, the founder of Brother Wolf. The idea is for volunteers to go door-to-door and ask people how they are doing with their pets. If someone reports a problem, the volunteers can work with the person to keep the animal in the home. A recent story from Asheville shows how well this idea can work in practice. Not long ago Asheville animal control cited an Asheville homeowner for keeping his eight dogs in poor conditions. In the great majority of jurisdictions in the United States this would probably have ended up with animal control confiscating the dogs and, since many of them are elderly, killing them. There might even have been a story in the local paper about hoarding or abuse, because the man’s home had an unkempt yard strewn with junk and overgrown with weeds. But this story has a much happier ending, because Brother Wolf volunteers stepped in to save the day by cleaning up the property and building proper facilities for the dogs. (See the “neighbors helping neighbors” video in this link.) They recruited businesses to help, including trash, construction, and landscaping companies. These people contributed the equivalent of thousands of dollars worth of work and supplies to the effort. A veterinarian volunteered to check out the dogs, and found them to be well fed and in good health. The owner had been taking good care of his dogs, he had just not been able to keep up with the property. Once the property was fixed up it was a nice home for the dogs. National No Kill organizations that have conferences — if you have not discovered Denise Bitz already, please take note and consider inviting her to your conferences (hint, hint). She seems to be one of those rare people who can not only apply the ideas that others have come up with, but also come up with some pretty good ideas herself. There are many innovative leaders in the No Kill movement who do not get as much recognition as they deserve, including Makena Yarbrough (Lynchburg), Rebecca Guinn (Atlanta), Robin Starr (Richmond), and Cheryl Schneider (Williamson County, TX).

A little more than a year ago an event happened that promised to be a turning point for efforts to reduce shelter killing of cats. That event was the release of a draft whitepaper in California. The stakeholders who drafted the whitepaper included HSUS, the ASPCA, Maddie’s Fund, and Dr. Kate Hurley, director of the Koret Shelter Medicine Program at UC Davis. The whitepaper made lots of recommendations, but some of the most revolutionary ones applied to cats. For details on the recommendations, see this post from September 2013. Since the whitepaper was issued, the concept of shelter-neuter-return has become a particularly important part of the mix. Dr. Julie Levy, professor of shelter medicine at the University of Florida Maddie’s shelter medicine program, has been an effective spokesperson for shelter-neuter-return. In the short time since the whitepaper came out, the situation for cats has changed from dire to hopeful. Communities are adopting the new ideas for cats so fast that I can’t keep up with reporting them. Just a few days ago, the Columbus, Ohio, city shelter reported that its new cat program, which has been in effect for less than two months, has reduced the killing of admitted cats by 58%. Columbus is the 15th largest city in the United States and the metro area has over 2.3 million people, so this is a big deal. The proposals made for cats in the whitepaper and with shelter-neuter-return are radical, and represent a major break from the way things have always been done. So why have those proposals met with such wide interest in the traditional shelter world and been implemented in so many places? Those of us in the No Kill movement have seen so much resistance to change in the past from the traditional shelter establishment that it’s surprising to see this rapid adoption of radical new techniques. I think there are several reasons that this change has happened so fast and is working so well. One reason is that the big national organizations like HSUS, the ASPCA, and Maddie’s Fund signed on to the new ideas. The traditional shelter establishment has been accustomed to look to these organizations for leadership. The ASPCA was founded in the 1800s, and HSUS has been counseling shelters for decades. Maddie’s Fund is a more recent organization and is specifically dedicated to No Kill, but it has earned the respect of the traditional shelter establishment with its emphasis on practical solutions. The traditional shelter establishment is willing to accept recommendations from these organizations that they trust where they might not from other sources. A second reason that these new proposals have been adopted so quickly is that the recommendations for cats were brilliant, brand-new ideas that were presented in detail and backed up with data. The efforts of many people went into this, but certainly Dr. Kate Hurley, Dr. Julie Levy, and Jennifer Fearing have had a lot to do with it. Dr. Hurley has been promoting these new ideas in an extremely effective way, with compelling presentations showing why the old ways of handling cats are futile and why the new ways can change those outcomes. Dr. Levy’s presentations cite communities that have implemented the new procedures and describe how they have worked. Jennifer Fearing was very instrumental in pulling everything together and getting buy-in. The new cat recommendations are not vague exhortations such as “have a foster program” or “increase adoptions” or “take killing off the table.” Dr. Hurley’s presentations are full of data, which gives them tremendous credibility and impact. Dr. Levy’s presentations show exactly how particular communities got from point A to point B. A third reason that the new proposals have been so popular is that there is no pressure to adopt all of them at one time. Shelters are free to experiment and do what they think their community will accept and what will work in their individual circumstances. The Columbus shelter, for example, implemented the part having to do with not accepting owner-surrendered cats unless the shelter has room. Other shelters might choose to start with shelter-neuter-return of strays. The new programs are additive, so shelters do not have to feel that they would have the burden of changing everything at once. A fourth reason that the new cat proposals have been spreading so fast is that they have been shown to work in large, demographically challenged communities. A criticism that No Kill has faced in the past is the accusation that it can work only in limited circumstances such as small communities, or communities with better than average financial support or education levels. I have not done a formal analysis of the effect of education levels, wealth, and political values on No Kill success, but I have an impression from my researches that No Kill is more common in (although by no means restricted to) communities that are wealthy, educated, liberal, and perhaps have a higher proportion of young people and conservation-minded people. What some people call “crunchy granola” communities, like Portland, Seattle, Charlottesville, Austin, etc. The new cat programs, by contrast, do not seem to suffer from that limitation. One of Dr. Levy’s examples is Jacksonville, which is a big city in the deep south that does not fit the traditional picture of a No Kill community. Another promising thing about the new cat proposals has been that people from the No Kill movement and the traditional shelter establishment have for the most part had a civil discussion about the problematic elements of the proposals. Francis Battista recently wrote an excellent, thoughtful blog about this process, in which he discussed some of the potential issues with the new proposals and how those problems can be addressed. Unfortunately, not everyone in the No Kill movement has been so pragmatic about it, but on the whole the discussion has been goal-oriented rather than inflammatory. What can we learn from the success of the new cat proposals? One conclusion may be that the time has arrived for cooperation between No Kill and the large national organizations like HSUS and the ASPCA. The whitepaper and shelter-neuter-return proposals represent a highly effective collaboration between the more progressive elements of No Kill and the younger and more progressive elements of the traditional shelter establishment. The positive and rapid reaction to the cat proposals shows how powerful that coalition can be. Another thing that the cat proposals make clear is that No Kill is not a static set of programs, but instead is a dynamic process that will grow and change as we learn. Shelter-neuter-return is a brand new approach. Managed admissions is a recent breakthrough. “No Kill” has become an umbrella term that refers to a large group of many different people who are working in a variety of different ways toward the goal of saving shelter animals. The more people we have on board and the more freedom they have to think creatively and put forward new ideas, the better off we will be.