OUT THE FRONT DOOR

Lynchburg is an independent city of about 76,000 people in Virginia, located southwest of Charlottesville and east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Lynchburg Humane Society (LHS), is a non-profit that has a contract with the city of Lynchburg for animal services. LHS requires an appointment for owner surrenders and charges a small fee, but states that it will make exceptions for people who need to surrender a pet immediately or cannot pay the fee. The shelter reported a 90% live release rate for the year 2011. LHS did not do quite as well in 2012, when it had an 87% live release rate. For 2013, LHS was back over 90%, reporting a live release rate of 92% for the year, with an intake of 1537 animals. The city of Lynchburg animal control euthanized 25 animals, and the live release rate for the community as a whole in 2013 was 90%. LHS has been struggling with a relatively high number of shelter deaths. They attribute this in large part to their badly outdated shelter building, which has made it difficult to control infectious diseases. If animals who died in shelter care are counted in with euthanasias, the modified live release rate for 2013 drops to 83%. There is hope on the horizon, though, because LHS has almost completed its fundraising for a new building, which they expect will be completed this fall. In 2013 LHS transferred only 15 animals, a relatively small number. This is a good sign because it means the shelter is finding permanent homes for animals rather than transporting them to other states or to rescues. LHS is thus freeing up capacity for transporters and rescues by taking care of its animals within the community. Many shelters have blogs, but the LHS blog is particularly worth following because it occasionally has posts that analyze its programs from a statistical or outcomes point of view. Three posts that are worth reading for their statistical analyses are linked here: Owners Are Helping Us Save Lives By Waiting TNR Opinion – It Is Time We Fix The Problem Can You Wait Please? It Means Life To Us!

Powhatan County, Virginia, has about 28,000 residents and is part of the Richmond metropolitan area. Animal control and sheltering are handled by the county through a municipal office, Powhatan Animal Control, that has four employees and a small shelter. The shelter takes in strays and owner surrenders. The web site for the shelter does not mention any restrictions on owner surrenders. The animal control officers do not impound cats except for owner surrenders and injured stray cats — cats are considered free roaming. In 2010, the county shelter took in 594 animals and had a live release rate of 83%. The live release rate rose to 96% in 2011, and remained at 96% in 2012 and 2013. Intake has been steadily falling, going from 595 animals in 2010 to 505 animals in 2011, to 437 in 2012 and 413 in 2013. The Virginia state database from which these statistics are taken does not break out owner-requested euthanasias. If the category of “died in facility” is added to euthanasias, the shelter had a 95% live release rate in both 2012 and 2013. The shelter’s high live release rate is due in part to its participation in adoption events with Metro Richmond Pet Savers. It also transfers many of its animals to rescues, including FLAG and BARK. The shelter typically transfers over 200 animals per year to rescues. Powhatan County, Virginia, was originally listed by this blog on May 2, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

Washoe County in Nevada (population 421,000), includes the cities of Reno (population 225,000) and Sparks (90,000). The three jurisdictions have a public-private partnership for animal control and sheltering. The municipal Washoe County Regional Animal Services (WCRAS) handles animal control for all three jurisdictions. WCRAS is known for its very successful return-to-owner program, which re-homes a high percentage of animals in the field and actively seeks to find the owners of impounded animals. The great majority of animals not returned to their owners are transferred to the private, non-profit Nevada Humane Society (NHS) for placement. NHS also handles intake of owner surrenders from Washoe County residents. The shelter requires an appointment and a small fee. NHS has posted the partnership’s summary statistics for 2012 on its website (scroll down the page in the previous link to “Statistics” in the left sidebar), consisting of intake and euthanasia figures. The coalition euthanized 8% of intake in 2012 according to these figures. WCRAS and NHS have provided separate full statistical reports for 2011, allowing a calculation of their live release rates separately for that year. WCRAS had a 94% live release rate (click on “Maddie’s Fund Report 2011″ for the full statistics), counting transferred animals as live releases. NHS also reported a 94% live release rate for 2011, based on transfers and owner surrenders. If owner requested euthanasia and died/lost in shelter care are included in euthanasias, each organization had a 92% live release rate in 2011. I was not able to find a full statistical report online combining WCRAS and NHS numbers for 2011, but we can approximate a kill rate by adding the number of animals surrendered to NHS by owners to the number impounded by WCRAS, and comparing that to the total animals euthanized by both agencies. This yields an approximate 8% kill rate for the community as a whole in 2011. (The kill rate for 2011 by this method is 10% if the categories of owner requested euthanasia and died/lost in shelter care are counted in with euthanasias.) A Best Friends blog from July 2011 provides a look at how the NHS director, Bonney Brown, transformed the shelter after she took over in 2007. The blog describes how Brown has succeeded in reducing intake through pet retention programs and has increased adoptions through creative marketing.

Seagoville is a suburb of Dallas, Texas, and has about 15,000 inhabitants. The Seagoville Animal Shelter, a municipal shelter, handles animal control and sheltering for the city. The shelter published its statistics for 2011 online, reporting a 97% live release rate. The shelter’s intake for 2011 was 568 cats and dogs. Most of the animals — 327 — left the shelter through adoption. The shelter transferred 192 cats and dogs to rescues and returned 47 to their owners. Twelve dogs and 3 cats were euthanized, and those euthanasias were for reportedly for illness, injury, or aggression. The shelter director e-mailed me the statistics for 2012, and they show a 98% live release rate with an intake of 798 dogs and cats. There were 537 adoptions, 76 returned to owner, 124 sent to rescue, and TNR for 19 feral cats. There were no owner-requested euthanasias reported. The number of animals who died or were lost in shelter care was 12, and with that number included as part of euthanasias, the live release rate was 97%. This video describes how Seagoville was able to achieve its high live release rate. In addition to taking in strays, the Seagoville shelter counsels owners to try to prevent surrender. The shelter accepts owner surrenders only if there is no alternative placement available. Seagoville, TX, is counting in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

By now you have probably heard about “cat cafes,” which are the latest rage in the cat world. Cat cafes are coffee shops with cats. To keep public health officials happy they are often divided into two rooms, one where you buy coffee and pastries and the other where you can mingle with the cats. In some places, depending on local regulations, the cafes can have the food and drinks and cats all in one space by serving only drinks and packaged snacks. There is usually a small cover charge. This article describes one person’s experience with the cat cafe in Washington, DC, which is called Crumbs and Whiskers. Cat cafes generally select outgoing cats who are not stressed by interactions with people, and they have one or more areas where cats can retreat to get away from the patrons if they are not feeling social. The cafe may rotate cats so they don’t get burned out by too much human contact. The cat cafe concept originated in Asia, and reportedly goes back to Taiwan in 1998, which had a cat cafe called the Cat Flower Garden. Cat cafes really took off in Japan starting about 10 years ago. Most apartments in Tokyo do not allow pets, and the idea behind the Japanese cafes was to allow apartment-dwelling young professionals to have some time with cats without actually owning them. Neko no Mise (“Cat Shop”), which opened in Tokyo in 2005, was reportedly the first cat cafe in Japan. Today Tokyo has so many cat cafes that there are guides to the most notable ones. Cat cafes have spread to London, Lithuania, Singapore, and Budapest, among many other places. The cat cafe phenomenon did not reach the United States until last year, but when it finally got here it was an instant hit. The first permanent cat cafe in the United States, Cat Town Cafe in Oakland, opened on October 25, 2014. It was followed by Planet Tails in Naples, the Denver Cat Company , and Meow Parlour in New York City, which all opened in December 2014. Since then we have had so many cat cafes springing up that it is hard to keep track. Recently established or planned cat cafe locations include Sacramento, Chicago, San Jose, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Asheville, San Diego, and Lincoln, Nebraska.  Montreal gets credit for the first vegan cat cafe in North America. Not all cat cafes are permanent – some are temporary pop-ups, likes ones that opened in New York City (way back in April of 2014) and Los Angeles. The idea behind the pop-up cat cafe, as with any pop-up restaurant, is that it can showcase the concept without the type of investment needed for a permanent establishment. Los Angeles also had a Pup-Up Cafe. Cat cafes in the United States are designed to promote adoptions, and the kitty residents are generally from local shelters or rescues. Cat cafes are similar to offsite adoption venues in that they bring adoptable animals to places where the people are, but they serve a somewhat different function. Offsite adoption venues tend to attract people who have already decided to adopt or are thinking about possibly adopting, whereas cat cafes appeal to everyone who likes cats. The cafes can raise the profile of the shelter and help with fundraising and volunteer recruitment. Even people who never visit the cafe will hear about it and the shelter. The way the cat cafe phenomenon has taken hold and spread is little short of amazing. It is less than a year since the first permanent cat cafe opened in the U.S., and already it seems like there is a new one every week. We may soon catch up with Japan, which reportedly has about 100 cat cafes.

TNR for dogs? It may sound crazy, but hear me out. We have a few cities, particularly in the southern part of the United States, where large numbers of stray dogs apparently continue to be a problem. I have heard this from credible people who support No Kill — it isn’t just the No Kill deniers who make this claim. In some of these cities live release rates are going up, but local people question whether there is really progress toward a No Kill community since large numbers of stray dogs are not being picked up. We have other areas of the country where there are dog shortages, and dogs are brought in from outside for adoption. I believe that based on the numbers nationwide we are very close to an overall balance in dog population and that, if we had a great transport network combined with every jurisdiction maxing out its adoption rates, we could have No Kill this year for dogs. But we are not there yet. One way to tackle the problem of isolated excesses of stray dogs in some of the large cities is classic spay-neuter programs aimed at owned dogs. If 30% or more of the owned females in a city are not sterilized and if the local human population is open to the spay-neuter message, then this approach can have great results. If sterilization rates of owned pets are up around the typical 85% average for the United States, though, or if sterilization rates are lower but people resist sterilizing their pets, then we cannot expect huge reductions in strays with this method. Some cities resort to trying to catch and kill all the strays. This is a bad method not only because it is morally wrong, but because it is ineffective. Cities tried for 100 years before 1970 to control stray dog populations by means of catch and kill, and it was a complete failure. Stray dog populations continued to rise until the 1970s, when mass spay-neuter became possible. So what to do? In many cases, stray dogs who live outdoors have a reasonably good life. Alan Beck’s 1970 study of stray dogs in Baltimore found that being hit by a car was the biggest danger for homeless dogs (other than shelter killing), but only a small minority of the total dog population was killed by cars each year. He concluded that, surprisingly, stray dogs were able to find adequate food, water, and shelter and they did not ordinarily suffer from hunger or exposure. Many of them were fed by people living in their neighborhood, and their presence was tolerated. This sounds a lot like what we now know about community cats. And the preferred solution for community cats these days is TNR or SNR, not catch and kill. What about simply finding homes for all the stray dogs? I recently spoke to a dedicated No Kill advocate in one southern city who estimated that there were 150,000 stray dogs in his city. That would be 88 dogs per 1000 people, which is an astronomical number and far beyond the ability of even the best No Kill shelter to place within the community. Even if the number of stray dogs was only 1/3 of what this advocate estimates, it would still require an adoption-per-thousand-people rate of 29 dogs, which is well beyond the best rates I know of. And that does not even count dogs who are already going into the shelter. Colorado, which has over a 90% live release rate for dogs, adopted out only 10.5 dogs per 1000 people in 2013. Recently the leaders of the shelter establishment in the United States have come together behind a set of ideas that are embodied in the Million Cat Challenge. Those ideas include the concept that rather than kill a healthy community cat, the cat should be sterilized and returned to where it was found. Feral cats should be sterilized and returned to a supported colony. Why couldn’t we do the same thing for dogs? TNR for dogs is not a completely unheard-of idea. India passed a law in 2001 forbidding the killing of street dogs. There are differences of opinion about what has happened since then in terms of nuisance factors and the growth of the dog population, with some people feeling that the dogs are a serious nuisance and a danger to human health (especially from rabies, which is a big problem in India, and dog bites) while others believe that the dogs serve useful functions. The government of India has reacted by instituting a TNR program for street dogs. Other countries are using or considering TNR for stray dogs as well. Dogs are different from cats in that community cats are less intrusive than stray dogs, because they tend to be nocturnal and more cautious around people. Another difference is that there is a substantial feral population in cats whereas there are very few truly feral dogs, at least in urban and suburban areas. It does not appear as though either of those differences would be fatal to a TNR program for dogs. Beck theorized that the reason that street dogs lived more openly than cats was because people were more accepting of their presence. I think one reason people don’t like the idea of TNR for dogs is that we see dogs as being more dependent on people for their happiness than cats. People hate the idea of a dog living in the street without a person of its own, and think such a dog must be miserable. Beck’s study indicated that is not the case. Certainly, if the choice was living without a human attachment or being killed, I think the great majority of dogs would choose to live. Moreover, a TNR program for stray dogs could very quickly reduce the number of strays, probably far more quickly than TNR for cats. Dogs do not have the reproductive capacity that cats have, and something like 75% of puppies born to free-roaming mothers do not survive. And, dogs are easier to locate and capture. Before a city considers a dog TNR program, it would need to make an effort to answer the following questions: 1. What is the sterilization rate for owned dogs? If it is not at least 70% of females, then an all-hands-on-deck traditional spay-neuter campaign for owned pets may be the best approach, unless the local human population is resistant to that message. 2. What is the number of stray dogs that are not being impounded? If the number of stray dogs that are not being impounded plus the number of unreclaimed stray dogs that are impounded plus the number of owner surrendered dogs substantially exceeds 10 or more per 1000 people, then the shelter may have difficulty adopting its way out of killing with local adoptions. 3. How many dogs could be responsibly transported to other areas of the country where there is a dog shortage and transports would not take homes away from local dogs? Are there sufficient resources to make those transports safely? If spay-neuter of owned pets is already high or the human population is resistant to pet sterilization, if the number of stray dogs is high, and if responsible transport cannot bring the number of dogs needing adoption down under 10 per 1000 people, then TNR is about the only thing left. A dog TNR project would be a novel and innovative idea for one of the big national organizations to take on. If the program succeeded, it could, in combination with the Million Cat Challenge initiatives, be a quick way to make even the most intransigent southern cities truly No Kill.

Cats are commensal animals. This fact has some very important implications for trap-neuter-return (TNR) and for the battle to save cats from bird conservationists. The mesocarnivores who live in a commensal or mutual relationship with humans generally combine scavenging with predation in order to survive. Their populations differ from populations of wild animals in several respects, including higher numbers, smaller territories, opportunistic feeding, and a tolerance of human presence. The literature about the domestic cat in the United States contains very little information on the implications of commensalism. Most studies on control of feral cat populations and cat predation seem to assume the commensal nature of the cat without really addressing its implications. This is a mistake, because management of commensal species is, or should be, completely different from management of populations of wild animals who seek to avoid contact with humans. The commensalism of the domestic cat presents us with both problems and opportunities in controlling their numbers. There is so little that has been written specifically about commensalism in domestic cats that I had difficulty finding anything that was available to the general public on the issue. I finally found an excellent book by an English professor of archeology, Terry O’Connor, that deals with the subject of commensalism in general and has a section on cats. The book is called “Animals as Neighbors: The Past and Present of Commensal Species.” Although the book does not connect the dots between the commensalism of the cat and control techniques such as TNR and Return-to-Field (RTF), it does provide a broad general background on commensalism itself – how it developed over human history and where the various types of commensal animals fit into the scheme. As O’Connor notes, feral cats “rely on our built environment and garbage for protection and food.” In other words, feral cats thrive in environments where there are a lot of vacant, unused structures and accessible trash. This has been confirmed by ecological studies that were done in Baltimore and Brooklyn in the 1980s. So what does this mean for our feral cat programs? First and most obviously, feral cat overpopulation is primarily an issue of the urban environment, specifically the blighted urban environment. Although feral cats can certainly exist in the wild by hunting, that does not appear to be their preferred habitat. In the wild, food becomes much more of a limiting factor for cats. Therefore, if we solve the problem of feral populations in the cities, we will have solved the great bulk of the overall problem. There are many people who argue that TNR is not the answer to the feral cat problem because we cannot possibly do TNR on enough feral cats to make a difference. Yes we can. We just need to concentrate on the areas where conditions exist that can maintain a large feral population, which means blighted urban environments. We do not need to do TNR on every feral cat in every jurisdiction in the United States to solve the problem, because in places where empty buildings and garbage are not available feral cat populations are likely to be self-limiting. Second, we might want to see if we can coordinate TNR with programs to reduce urban blight. This will not only attack the problem at the roots, but it re-directs the public’s attention away from the feral cat “problem” and to the conditions from which the problem originates – the availability of empty structures and garbage. As an added benefit, attacking urban blight will reduce the rat population too. Simply removing cats from an urban area where they are thriving will likely result in a large increase in the rat population, since the same conditions favor both species. Coordinating blight-reduction measures with TNR could mean that colony caregiving must begin to include managed shelter as well as managed food sources. Third, we need to confront bird conservationists with the implications of commensalism. As O’Connor discusses at length, birds are commensal species too. Some of the most successful commensal birds are pigeons, sparrows, and crows. Bird conservationists, oddly enough, are not interested in saving pigeons, sparrows, and crows from cat predation. In fact, they appear to hate the successful commensal birds as much as they hate cats. This is strong evidence that bird conservationists are more concerned about their view of “nature” than about animal welfare. Crows are among the most intelligent animals on the planet, yet bird conservationists tend to see them solely as pests. The idea that the life of an individual animal has value seems very foreign to the thinking of the typical bird conservationist. Not all types of birds are commensal, and some live in the wild far from humans. These are often the rare species that bird conservationists love – not for themselves as individuals, of course, but because they represent that ideal, pristine version of nature that conservationists value. As far as I can tell, there have been few if any studies on feral cat presence in remote, wild regions of the United States like the swamps of Louisiana. I suspect that is because there are few feral cats in areas that are truly remote from human habitation. (The exception is on some oceanic islands where cats have been introduced and then the humans left, but that is a whole different story.) So bird conservationists are barking up the wrong tree, so to speak, when they blame feral cats in the United States for killing the type of birds they care about. Since feral cats live primarily as scavengers in human settlements, the birds they kill are very likely to be the commensal species that bird conservationists hate anyway. Feral cat supporters need to press bird conservationists to be more specific about just what birds cats are killing. Are they killing bluebirds and goldfinches, or pigeons and sparrows? Is there decisive evidence that, in the United States, cats are a significant predator of rare bird species? And if such evidence is lacking, then they need to, in the immortal words of Trey Gowdy: “Shut up talking about things that you don’t know anything about.” No Kill advocates, unlike bird conservationists, care about the lives of all animals, including starlings, pigeons, and crows. That is why we advocate for TNR, because managed cat colonies reduce whatever bird predation may exist (since managed colonies are provided with food) while also preserving the lives of the cats. Feral cat advocates have some very strong arguments available to us in favor of TNR. We need to start pushing back harder on the bad science that bird conservationists have been rolling out to support their “kill cats” agenda. We need to stop trying to address their inadequate studies one by one and develop our own comprehensive picture of the relationship between cats and birds. One of the components of our picture should be that cats and birds co-exist extremely well in the suburbs (see my blog post about cats in the suburbs). Another should be that cats in urban areas, to the extent that they are preying on birds at all, are likely preying on commensal bird species that are not endangered and that many people regard as pests. Another part of the picture should be that the cat, since it is a commensal animal, is a highly unlikely predator of the rare bird species that live in areas remote from human habitation. And the final piece of the puzzle is that since cats are commensal, TNR can work to control populations where control is needed most. Bird conservationists have for the most part been getting a free ride with their simplistic claim that “cats kill birds, therefore cats are bad for bird populations.” They have even had the cheek to ask the taxpayers to fund their “kill cats” programs. Feral cat advocates have been slow to push back on the science because we, for the most part, are not scientists. That needs to change. As Bob Dylan said: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Dear Friends — Thank you for all your support of and interest in the blog over the years. I hope all of you will visit and “like” the blog’s new Facebook page: link. The Facebook page will have all the blog posts, as well as some of the most interesting news stories I run across and updates on individual communities. Happy reading! — Susan

According to a 2005 mayor’s task force report for the city of Houston and Harris County, animal shelters in the area killed 80,000 animals in 2004. The 2005 report gave total intake for the city and county’s 5 shelters as almost 120,000 animals in 2004. These numbers do not account for inter-shelter transfers, and the coverage area of the shelters may not coincide exactly with the boundaries of Harris County. And we do not know how much has changed since 2004, or exactly what was included in the 2004 intake numbers. But if the 2004 intake numbers still hold true today (as many local advocates claim), then with the county’s human population of 4.1 million there is shelter intake of about 29 per 1000 people. This is near the top of the estimated average range of 15 to 30 for shelter intake expressed as pets per thousand people (PPTP). There are communities in the United States with intake of 30 PPTP or above that manage to save all their healthy and treatable animals, but none that I know of that are as big as Houston and Harris County. The size of  the city is important because larger, more densely populated urban areas tend to have proportionally fewer housing units that allow pets, and therefore their adoption potential per thousand people is lower. The largest community I’m aware of that manages to maintain a high live release rate at a high PPTP is Washoe County, Nevada, which has a population of about 420,000 people and PPTP of 36. “No Kill” large cities generally have substantially lower PPTP than 30. Austin, for example, with shelter intake of about 17,000 last time I checked, and population of about 900,000, has a PPTP of about 20. Fairfax County, Virginia, in 2013 had a PPTP of 3.5. The Portland metro area has a PPTP of about 15. Atlanta is about 10. Even San Antonio appears to have had intake of only 23 PPTP recently. The state of Colorado, which was at a live release rate of 89% in 2013, had intake of 32 PPTP. The Colorado figure is not comparable to the large cities cited, however, since it includes intake from some private rescues as well as many small towns. In addition to the high shelter intake, there may be another factor at work in Houston, and that is the permanent stray population. The Houston shelters admit that they are not able to take in all the homeless animals in the city. When there are a lot of homeless animals in a city that are not being picked up and impounded, they compete with shelter animals for homes. If someone has three or four neighborhood cats hanging around, that person may be just as likely – or more likely – to take in one of those cats as to go to the shelter to adopt. If a rescue takes in a pregnant stray dog from the street and finds homes for her and her five puppies, that will be six less potential adopters at the city shelter. Thus, when we are trying to figure out how many animals a shelter in a particular city can adopt out, we must include the number of permanently homeless strays in with shelter intake, since all those animals are part of the pool of animals that potential adopters have available. How bad is Houston’s stray problem, and can it really be bad enough to seriously hamper the city’s effort to improve its live release rate? In the 1970s there was a nationwide pet overpopulation crisis, with shelter intake on average estimated as being some 5 times higher than it is today, plus a large number of dogs and cats in the environment who were never taken into shelters. A survey of mayors in 1974 showed that animal control issues were the number one complaint of citizens. Public health officials were concerned with the zoonosis threat from the large numbers of strays. Animal advocates reacted with a huge grassroots effort to get people to sterilize their cats and dogs. The effort was very successful, and animal shelter intake plummeted from an estimated 26 million nationwide in 1970 to 7 million in the year 2000. The number of animals killed in shelters during that time period dropped from roughly 23 million to 5 million. But there are still some places that never managed to fix their pet overpopulation problem. One of the people who is central to San Antonio’s No Kill effort told me that he had heard an estimate of 150,000 stray dogs in the city. Based on the number of dead dogs picked up by animal control in San Antonio my guess would be closer to 50,000 stray dogs, but whether it is 50,000 or 150,000, the city is not going to be a safe haven for all animals until it solves its stray problem. The estimate that you usually hear for Houston is that it has from 600,000 to 1.2 million stray dogs. At least one effort is ongoing to better quantify the number of strays. Sometimes estimates of strays are wildly overblown, and that may well be the case in Houston. The estimated numbers are not outside the bounds of possibility, though. In the early 1970s a respected scientist, Alan Beck, did an ecological survey of the free-roaming dog population in the city of Baltimore. He estimated a stray dog population of as many as 1,690 free-roaming dogs per square mile in one neighborhood and an average of up to 750 per square mile for the city as a whole, including wealthier neighborhoods with few strays. Houston has 600 square miles of land area according to the US census bureau. If Houston did have 1.2 million stray dogs that would be 2,000 strays per square mile. The lower end of the estimate of stray dogs in Houston of 600,000 would be about 1,000 per square mile. It may be that Houston’s lack of a zoning code (it is unique in this regard) and its geography, with four major bayous and their tributaries running through the city, have produced an environment that will support a large number of stray dogs. I suspect that the true number of stray dogs in Houston is less than 1.2 million, and perhaps even less than 600,000, but the higher number does not appear to be completely impossible given what was found in Baltimore in the 1970s. More importantly, the fact that the 1.2 million estimate may be overblown should not cause us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. All indications are that Houston does have a serious problem with a permanent homeless dog population. We cannot simply say that because the 1.2 million number may be overblown, therefore there is no stray crisis and the shelters are just making up an excuse to kill. On the contrary, whether the number of stray dogs is 1,200,000 or 600,000 or even less, it is still a serious problem that cannot be ignored in the city’s effort to reduce its kill rate. Look at it this way – even if the number of non-impounded stray dogs is only 120,000, that number is enough to crush the city’s animal sheltering system. If all of those stray dogs were impounded in one year, the PPTP for the county would be 59. No community I’m aware of has achieved a 90%+ live release rate with a PPTP of 50 or higher, except in a few cases of small communities that exported a large percentage of their shelter intake to other jurisdictions. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t see how any shelter director on earth, no matter how talented, could achieve No Kill in a jurisdiction the size of Harris County at an intake rate of 59 PPTP per year. At least not without transferring tens of thousands of animals out of the jurisdiction each year. So what can be done? In cities where owned dogs have a high sterilization rate the number of feral and permanently stray dogs declines almost to zero. It appears that the reproduction rate for stray dogs (unlike community cats) is not high enough to sustain a high stray population, given the hazards of cars and shelter killing, without input from unsterilized owned dogs. In cities with high rates of sterilization of owned dogs, almost all of the “stray” dogs that come into the shelter are not permanently homeless street dogs, but instead are lost or recently abandoned dogs. In Boulder, Colorado, for example, some 90% of stray dogs are returned to their owners. Houston’s apparently high population of permanently homeless street dogs may be an indication that unsterilized owned dogs are seeding the population of strays. In other words, Houston may be one of the few cities in the United States that has never fully dealt with the pet population crisis of the 1970s. It may be that the reason the number of stray dogs in Houston today is reported to rival or exceed the number of stray dogs in Baltimore in the 1970s is that Houston is still back in the 1970s in terms of spay-neuter rates for owned pets. Houston has recently made an agreement with Emancipet in an effort to get a large sterilization program going. This is a great step in the right direction, but the question is whether it will be enough. In the short term, until the stray problem is conquered, the city may need to redouble its efforts to transfer dogs out of the city to places that have a more manageable PPTP number. Houston already has a transfer program to send dogs to Colorado, and maybe they need to seek out other transfer partners as well. As for cats, BARC has joined the Million Cat Challenge, and if BARC fully implements the program that will go a long way toward reducing the rate of cat killing. There are four other shelters in the area, though, that do not appear to be implementing the Million Cat Challenge program. Only a few years ago the southern part of the United States was the place where No Kill hopes went to die. In the last five years we’ve had large jurisdictions like Austin (and nearby Williamson County), Atlanta, Jacksonville, and Tampa either getting to a 90%+ live release rate or making major progress. With Houston (and perhaps other cities in the south), however, we seem to still have the lingering problem of large numbers of strays, apparently being seeded by the owned-pet population. It’s a problem that needs to be fixed, both figuratively and literally, before Houston can truly be No Kill. And it is a problem that the entire community needs to tackle, not just the city, and not just the shelters. The shelters need to take responsibility to do the best they can, including full participation in the Million Cat Challenge and seeking out more opportunities for transfers, but the shelters are going to keep being overwhelmed as long as their intake is so high.

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.

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.

Newport County in Rhode Island (population 83,000) lies along Narragansett Bay, and there are several islands in the bay that are part of Newport County. The largest of the islands is Aquidneck. There are three small cities on Aquidneck Island — the city of Newport (population 25,000), Middletown (16,000), and Portsmouth (17,000). Portsmouth’s territory includes several of the smaller islands along with part of Aquidneck. The Potter League is a non-profit animal shelter located in Middletown that has contracts for stray intake and sheltering for Middletown, Portsmouth, and the city of Newport. It also accepts owner surrenders from all residents of Newport County without any conditions, although it asks owners to fill out a personality profile on surrendered animals. The League offers a wide range of services and programs. In 2014 the League celebrated its 85th year of taking in the strays of Newport County. The League publishes its statistics in annual reports. In fiscal year 2014, the shelter took in 1669 animals and had a 91% live release rate, including owner-requested euthanasias. In fiscal year 2012-2013, the shelter took in 1772 animals, and had a 90% live release rate, including owner-requested euthanasias. They transferred in 369 animals, including cats from shelters that had been affected by Hurricane Sandy. According to the report for fiscal year 2011-2012, the League had a total intake of 1732 animals during the year, with a live release rate of 91% (89% if owner-requested euthanasias are included with euthanasias). The League transferred in 331 animals from “overcrowded shelters in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and the Virgin Islands.” The reports are interesting in they show that the money the League receives for its sheltering contracts is a small fraction of its total intake. One advantage that a non-profit has over a tax-funded city shelter is that non-profits can and do raise money directly from the public, often very successfully. Aquidneck Island, Rhode Island, was originally listed by this blog on August 29, 2013, based on its 2011-2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 statistics.