OUT THE FRONT DOOR

Longmont, Colorado, is a city of 86,000 people located north of Denver in Boulder and Weld counties. The Longmont Humane Society (LHS) serves as the municipal shelter for strays who are taken in by Longmont Animal Control or found within the city limits of several nearby towns, including Frederick (population 9000). LHS split off from the Humane Society of Boulder Valley (HSBV) several years ago. According to a representative of HSBV, Boulder County Animal Control takes strays to Longmont that are picked up in the unincorporated area of the county near Longmont, whereas the rest of the strays in the county go to HSBV. According to the representative, Longmont and HSBV both receive strays from the nearby town of Erie (population 6000). LHS accepts owner surrenders from its service area during business hours, with no restrictions other than a small fee. It also accepts owner surrenders from outside its service area, including out of state, if space is available. LHS reported live release rates of 82% in 2010 and 89% in 2011 (calculated by comparing euthanasias to total intake). In December of 2011 the shelter announced the appointment of Liz Smokowski as executive director. Ms. Smokowski has a master’s degree in business administration. In the shelter’s latest annual report, it stated that in 2012, Smokowski’s first full year as director, the shelter increased its live release rate to 94% and decreased its cost per animal by 10%, with an intake of 3901 animals. The report states that over 850 active volunteers supplied 60,895 hours of service in 2012. LHS also submitted a report on 2012 statistics to the state of Colorado, and this report shows a 94% live release rate as well.

Rio Blanco County is located in the northwestern part of Colorado on the Utah border. The 2010 census counted 6700 county residents, including the towns of Rangely (population 2400) and Meeker (2500). The County has two animals shelters, one serving Rangely and the other serving Meeker. Both shelters also accept animals picked up by the sheriff in unincorporated areas of the county. The Rangely Animal Shelter (RAS) is a municipal agency that handles animal control and sheltering for Rangely. Animals are vaccinated, neutered, and microchipped before being adopted. The RAS manager told me that they have a small, waivable fee for owner surrenders and will either take them in immediately or help the owner place the pet. They have a TNR program that has neutered about 200 cats, and they have adopted out 60-70 kittens born to feral mothers. The statistics submitted to the state by RAS for 2012 show a live release rate of 99%. The live release rate does not change if the one animal who died in shelter care in 2012 is included with euthanasias. The Meeker Animal Shelter (MAS) is also a municipal agency that provides animal control as well as sheltering. I spoke to the animal control officer, who told me that although MAS does not impound cats, she will respond to calls about sick or injured cats and take them to a local veterinarian. MAS accepts owner surrenders subject, at times, to a monitored waiting list. A rescue in Meeker called the Cat Coalition does TNR in the area. MAS took in 107 dogs in 2012 and had a 99% live release rate.

2016 UPDATE: Director Ron Edwards has posted statistics going back to 2005 on the Ames Animal Shelter’s website. The live release rate for fiscal year 2014/2015 was 96% for cats and dogs. Ames is a city of about 60,000 people located in the center of Iowa. It is an education and technology powerhouse for a city its size. Animal control and sheltering are provided by the municipal Ames Animal Shelter. The shelter takes in both strays and owner surrenders. The shelter describes itself this way: “The Ames Animal Shelter is a safe[,] humane place for the care of homeless, unwanted, lost, injured and many other animals, while owners are sought. At the Ames Animal Shelter we promise to love and care for the pets brought to us to the best of our abilities; we promise to make them as comfortable as possible in a difficult situation; we will work responsibly to maintain our 90%+ reclaim and adoption rate!” The shelter lists its statistics for 2010 on its website. The statistics show an intake of almost 800 animals in 2010, with 400 adopted, 307 returned to owner, 8 transferred, and 76 euthanized, for a live release rate of 90%. I could not find statistics for 2011 or 2012, but the shelter stated in a 2012 newsletter that its goal was to “maintain” its “90% or higher reclaim and adoption rate.” I am listing this community as 90% Reported because I was not able to locate or obtain a full listing of statistics online as required for the right sidebar. Ames, Iowa, is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

I started my first blog keeping track of high-performing public shelters back in July of 2011. At that time most people thought there were about 2 dozen or so No Kill shelters, and they were almost all small towns. No Kill at that time certainly seemed to qualify as an outsider movement. Fast forward to today, and here’s a list of big cities/metro areas that are at or above a 90% save rate and have sustained it for at least a year: Seattle metro area, Portland metro area, Fairfax County VA, Austin, Denver, and the entire state of New Hampshire. Here’s a list of big cities/metro areas that recently hit 90% or have 80%+ live release rates: New York City, Washington DC, Richmond VA, San Francisco, Jacksonville, and the entire state of Colorado. This is just off the top of my head and I may have left some out. In addition, we have very active programs in San Antonio and Los Angeles (a Best Friends effort) that are making great progress. Here’s the funny thing, though. All these big cities did not just wake up in the last three years and say “hey, let’s go No Kill.” Instead they have all been working for many years, and in some cases decades, to get where they are today. In some cases they were directly influenced by the No Kill program that was developed in San Francisco by Rich Avanzino and his staff back in the 1980s and 1990s. Robin Starr, for example, flew to San Francisco from Richmond in the late 1990s to consult with Avanzino about how to bring the program to Richmond. And the movement in New York City was patterned after Avanzino’s program, although they have altered it to fit the circumstances of New York. In other places on the list above, the people who instituted shelter reform seem to have been affected only indirectly, if at all, by the San Francisco program. New Hampshire developed its own program back in the 1990s, which included at least one shelter director independently coming up with some of the programs being used in San Francisco. The doyen of one of the biggest cities on the 90% list dislikes the term “no kill” because he believes it unfairly labels shelter workers as killers. He has used a cooperative approach to help form a coalition that, working over decades, has brought his city to a live release rate of over 90%. Over the years since the San Francisco Adoption Pact was signed in 1994, there has been a lot of progress made in how to save lives. One of the most exciting developments has been the new directions in community cat management. Based on work that has been done by Alley Cat Allies since its founding in 1990, and also carried on by Dr. Kate Hurley, Dr. Julie Levy, and Maddie’s Fund, we are on the verge of being able to end shelter killing of cats. The new programs for cats were included in a draft California whitepaper issued last year that was signed by both the ASPCA and HSUS. This whitepaper also endorsed managed admission techniques. There are additional exciting developments going on at the national level. I was told by one HSUS director that they are pleased with their new program of highly targeted spay-neuter, in which people go door to door in city neighborhoods where a lot of backyard breeding is occurring. ASPCA is trying to improve transports, using knowledge from transport businesses to develop more efficient ways to move animals around the country. All this is great news, and it illustrates the fact that No Kill has quickly become a big, heterogeneous movement. Its success certainly seems to indicate that No Kill has either already moved from outsider to insider status, or will soon. It may be time for the leaders of the movement to think about whether and how this development should change the tactics of the movement and how the movement presents itself. The biggest question may be whether it is time to move from confrontation to cooperation. That’s an oversimplification of course, because in some cities and towns it may be that confrontation is still the only policy that will succeed (yes Memphis and Tallahassee, I’m thinking of you). But there are many situations in which the No Kill movement could perhaps move forward faster by thinking of how it can work with people rather than confronting them. For example, many traditional shelter workers strongly object to the idea that there is no pet overpopulation problem. To those people, accepting that there is no pet overpopulation problem will inevitably mean that spay-neuter programs will be given up or de-emphasized. I can understand how people who have been doing humane work for decades would find this to be a frightening prospect. This seems to me like one area where the No Kill movement could forgo some terminology and instead reinforce the fact that it still strongly believes in the importance of spay-neuter, especially in areas of high intake. Another thing that really offends traditional shelter workers is when No Kill advocates say that No Kill can happen overnight, and all you have to do to get to No Kill is stop the killing. In fact, No Kill can happen overnight, but maybe not everywhere. It can happen overnight in a small community that has favorable demographics and where the shelter is already at a live release rate of 75% or so. But if the shelter takes in 30,000 animals per year and is in a city with low median income and has a live release rate of 25% or so, then it’s hard to imagine how the shelter could transition to 90% overnight. And as far as saying that all you have to do is stop the killing, that’s not a helpful statement. Getting to No Kill is a lot of work, because people aren’t going to appear out of thin air to adopt, foster, etc., just because a shelter has announced it’s going No Kill. I think we could easily re-work the terminology we use to be more accurate and less inflammatory — for example, we could say that a No Kill transition can happen quickly in most places, and that what we need to do is take killing off the table as a solution. It may seem like a subtle distinction in wording, but it changes the meaning from an accusatory demand to putting the emphasis on the process. There is a substantial list of additional complaints that traditional shelter officials and workers have against No Kill, including their opinions that managed intake leads to animals being abandoned, that lowering adoption prices leads to hoarding and abuse, that TNR and SNR are inhumane, etc. A national program of data collection and analysis could help lay these fears to rest. Even if traditional shelter workers refused to accept the results of such data collection, the collection and presentation of the data would show that No Kill is willing to take criticism seriously. And who knows, we might find some things we need to fix. Another issue that No Kill needs to address is the lack of a national steering organization. At the current time we have various organizations, but they are either single-person efforts, or local, or they have a limited purpose. These small organizations have contributed a great deal to No Kill. In order to be taken seriously as an insider movement, though, No Kill should have a national organization that brings its leaders together. There are many people to choose from for a potential board for such a guiding body, including Rich Avanzino, Becky Robinson, Bonney Brown, Nathan Winograd, Jane Hoffman, Dr. Hurley, Dr. Ellen Jefferson, and Brent Toellner. At some point, such an organization might develop certification standards for No Kill shelters. Perhaps the transition to insider status is best represented by what happened in Kansas City, Missouri, where local activists formed their own non-profit, Kansas City Pet Project (KCPP) and bid on the contract to run the city shelter. They won the contract and started work on January 1, 2012. KCPP’s shelter is fully open admission, and it’s big — they had an intake of 8179 animals in 2013. They hit 90% within 6 months of their starting date, and have stayed at or above 90% since then. It’s a struggle for them, because intake has gone up now that they are no kill, but they are making it work. Now that No Kill has proven itself, it will be possible in more and more cities for No Kill advocates to form non-profits and bid on contracts. It’s not a crazy idea anymore, and No Kill advocates can use examples from many places to show city leaders that contracting out animal shelters makes sense on many levels. As insiders, we have to show that we can produce the results we promised. One way to do that is to move from picketing and protesting to taking the reins and running successful public shelters.

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.

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.

Garfield County has a large landmass that stretches from west of Denver to the western border of Colorado. It has a population of over 56,000 people. The county seat is Glenwood Springs, which has a population of about 10,000. Colorado Animal Rescue (CAS) is a non-profit that has animal sheltering contracts with the county and Glenwood Springs. (The city of Rifle is located in Garfield County, but it has its own animal shelter that reports separately.) CAS takes in strays and owner surrenders, but has a waiting list for owner surrenders and charges a fee. CAS reported a 96% live release rate to Maddie’s Fund in 2010, with an intake of 931 animals (scroll down in the link). In 2011, the shelter reported a live release rate of 97% with an intake of 992. The shelter did not report any owner-requested euthanasias, and the live release rate with animals who died or were lost in shelter care included with euthanasias was 96%. CAS also reports its statistics each year to the state of Colorado. In 2012, it reported an intake of 1098 animals. The live release rate was 97%. Garfield County and Glenwood Springs are two of a group of communities in the area west of Denver that report to Maddie’s Fund and the Asilomar Accords as part of the Northwestern Colorado Coalition. Other members of the coalition are Summit, Pitkin, and Eagle counties and the cities of Aspen and Rifle. The coalition reported an overall 97% live release rate in 2010 and 98% in 2011 (see pages 1-2 in the links).

The city of Brookfield is a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that has about 38,000 human residents. It is the location of the Elmbrook Humane Society (EHS), which provides animal control and sheltering services for the city of Brookfield and accepts owner surrenders. EHS also provides animal control and sheltering for several nearby communities, including the villages of Lannon, Chenequa, Elm Grove (population 6000) and Natosha, and the towns of Brookfield (population 6000) and Delafield (population 7000). The shelter takes in owner surrenders from outside its area when it can, and pulls animals from other animal control facilities, including Milwaukee. In total, the shelter takes in about 2500 domestic and wild animals per year. The shelter has posted graphs on its website to summarize statistical outcomes for 2011, 2012, and 2013 for dogs and cats. The live release rate for 2011 was 89%. For 2012 EHS reported a 98% live release. For 2013, the live release rate was 97%. The shelter does not report any owner-requested euthanasias. For each year the live release rate is about 1% lower if animals who died in shelter care are included with euthanasias. Total intake in 2013 was 1867 dogs and cats, which is 33 animals per 1000 residents in the EHS service area. Brookfield, Wisconsin, was originally listed by this blog on April 20, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

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

[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.] Santa Paula is a city of about 30,000 people located in Ventura County northwest of Los Angeles, California. In March of 2012, a non-profit called the Santa Paula Animal Rescue Center was formed for the purpose of saving the city’s stray and surrendered pets. The shelter accepts strays and owner surrenders from city residents, with a small fee to relinquish an animal. The shelter states on its website that it does not kill any “healthy adoptable animal . . . due to lack of space or time spent at the shelter.” I was not able to find statistics for the shelter’s first year in operation either on the shelter’s website or in publicly available news reports. Therefore, I am listing the shelter as “Worth Watching” rather than a 90%+ community.