OUT THE FRONT DOOR

Here’s a pop quiz: In what calendar year did a community in the United States first report achieving No Kill, defined as a 90% or more live release rate maintained for the entire calendar year across all intake shelters in the jurisdiction? A – 1884 B – 1944 C – 1986 D – 1994 E – 1999 All of the years listed are landmarks for No Kill, but the correct answer is: C – 1986. In 1884 the Ellen M. Gifford Sheltering Home for Animals was founded in Boston. It was the first No Kill shelter we know of, but it did not take in all the homeless pets in Boston and so it did not create a No Kill community. It is noteworthy nonetheless for inaugurating the idea of a shelter that did not kill animals. In 1903 a shelter similar to the Gifford shelter, called Bide-A-Wee Home, was founded in New York City. In 1944 the North Shore Animal League was founded in New York. In the 1970s North Shore became the first major shelter to proudly use the term “No Kill.” Its use of the term, combined with its pioneering of adoption marketing, drew a lot of attention to No Kill. North Shore was also a limited admission shelter, though, and did not create any No Kill communities. In 1984 a group of friends who had been doing animal rescue for years settled on a large property in Utah and built a sanctuary. Today we know them as Best Friends Animal Society. Best Friends reports that they informally took over animal control and sheltering for their local jurisdictions, Kane County and the city of Kanab, in 1986, and saved well over 90% of the animals. Eventually Best Friends helped the jurisdictions set up their own animal control and sheltering system, but they have continued to take in animals that are not adopted or reclaimed in the jurisdictions. In 1994 the Adoption Pact was signed in San Francisco, guaranteeing that all healthy animals who came into the sheltering system in the community would find a home. San Francisco also saved most of the treatable animals. Although San Francisco did not reach a 90% live release rate in the 1990s, it was by far the biggest city at the time to set a goal of saving all healthy and treatable animals. Its approach to lifesaving served as an inspiration to many other communities across the United States. In 1999, the county shelter serving Otsego County, Michigan, went No Kill and reported saving over 90% of its animals. This was the first time we know of that a community-wide grassroots effort saved over 90% of animals who came into the sheltering system. There have been many other landmarks since 1999. In the year 2000 we had the first fully documented No Kill communities, as several small Colorado cities reported full statistics that showed live release rates of over 90%. In calendar year 2002, Tompkins County, New York, became the largest documented community that we know of up to that time to achieve a 90% live release rate, with an intake of over 2500 dogs and cats. A few years later Charlottesville and Reno set new records by achieving No Kill with even higher intakes. Several additional Colorado cities and counties joined the 90% group in this time period. In 2011, the first major city – Austin – became No Kill. Don’t feel bad if you did not get the right answer on the quiz. Almost no one knows about the early No Kill shelters and communities because they were founded a long time ago and few people today talk about them. They were wonderful accomplishments for their respective times, though, and without them the No Kill movement would not be what it is today.

Downriver Central Animal Control (DCAC, formerly the Southgate Animal Shelter) is a cooperative animal control and sheltering organization in southern Michigan near Detroit. It serves the cities of Wyandotte (population 26,000), Southgate (30,000), Allen Park (28,000), and Lincoln Park  (38,000). The DCAC adoption facility is in Wyandotte. In 2013, DCAC reported an 88% live release rate, with intake of 1451 animals. Of the live releases, 716 were transfers, presumably to Wyandotte. Wyandotte reported an intake of 782 cats and dogs in 2013, and their live release rate was 99.6% (scroll down to “city of Wyandotte” in the link). There is probably not a perfect overlap in statistical reporting for 2013, since Wyandotte operated its own animal control and shelter before the collaborative effort began in April 2013. The Wyandotte shelter gets help from P.A.W.S. of Michigan, which coordinates volunteers who help with adoption and care of animals. The volunteers also offer pet retention counseling. An organization called Pound Pals does temperament evaluations and helps fund medical care. The shelter has a Facebook page and Petfinder profiles that provide a photo, history, and evaluation of each pet. A private group called Shelter to Home opened a pet adoption center in Wyandotte in 2012 with the mission of featuring at-risk animals from the Detroit area. Shelter to Home was formed in 2007, and has a record of placing an average of 400 cats and kittens per year. The organization adopts out dogs but its primary emphasis is on cats. Wyandotte, Southgate, Allen Park, and Lincoln Park are counted in the Running Totals as 80%+ communities.

As you may have heard, there is a new list of No Kill communities in town, maintained by an organization called Saving 90. In a quick inspection of the site I did not see a list of founders or directors of Saving 90, but this new organization appears to be linked to the No Kill Advocacy Center, since the two sites link to each other and Nathan Winograd has been promoting Saving 90. I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get other people interested in doing shelter stats for years now, so I am thrilled to see this new site. The listings do not entirely agree with my listings, and Saving 90 says there are only 9 million people living in No Kill communities compared to the 15.6 million in my list, but the general message is the same — No Kill is possible pretty much anywhere. One advantage that Saving 90 has is that Winograd has a much bigger audience than I do, so hopefully his list will reach more people. I’m also happy about the debut of the Saving 90 site because having someone else do “the list” will mean that I can spend more time on No Kill news. So here’s the plan going forward. I will leave my existing list up for now, at least until I make sure that Saving 90 is going to stick around. But instead of doing statistical analyses of existing No Kill communities, I’m going to switch my focus to day-to-day news about No Kill. This news will still include a lot of reporting on No Kill communities, but the emphasis of the blog will shift from reporting statistics to reporting on what communities are doing – new programs they are trying, new coalitions, problems and how they are addressed, what the national organizations are up to, etc. There appears to be a real need for this type of reporting, as I’ve seen based on the response to the News Bits page over the last few months. News Bits has been more popular than any other page on this blog except for my post on the coming shelter dog shortage. And e-mail subscriptions to the blog have been on a sharp upward trend since I started News Bits. So now that someone else is handling the statistics and “the list,” I’m looking forward to integrating the news into blog posts. That way it will go out directly to e-mail subscribers and be directly sharable. If you have any opinions on how you would like to see this done — daily blog posts, “news summaries” once or twice a week, or some other format, let me know, either by commenting or sending an e-mail to the blog.

[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.] Star Valley is made up up several small communities located along a river valley that is primarily in Wyoming. The communities range in size from about 100 to 2000 people. The area is just to the south of the city of Jackson and Teton County. Most of the Star Valley communities are in Lincoln County, Wyoming, which does not have a municipal shelter. Animal sheltering is provided by a private non-profit called the Animal Humane Association of Star Valley (AHASV). AHASV was founded in 2002, and it has a shelter called Lucky’s Place that was built on land donated by the county. AHASV places several hundred animals each year. It takes in owner surrenders, but sometimes has a waiting list. A 2012 article about AHASV said: “Before this group was incorporated, the 11 small communities that comprise the Star Valley area had no companion animal rescue, sanctuary, emergency medical assistance, or subsidized spay/neuter services. Barn cats and ranch dogs were often considered to reproduce about as quickly as they were killed by vehicles, diseases, wildlife or complications from birthing. If they did happen to survive in numbers that became larger than someone cared to feed, the less-desirable ones could be shot or drowned.” AHASV changed all that. They spay/neuter all pets before they are adopted out and get them current on shots. If they are sick and can be treated, then “they are treated until they are completely well,” and terminally ill pets are treated as long as possible. Pets do not have a deadline for adoption and they stay at Lucky’s Place or in foster care until adopted. I could not find full statistics for Lincoln County for 2012 online. Therefore, I am listing the community as Worth Watching.

Erie County, on the western edge of New York state and bordering Lake Erie, has 919,000 residents. Buffalo, the county seat, has 261,000 people. Maddie’s Fund started a project in 2009 to increase live outcomes for shelter animals in the county, and the project is slated to run through September 30, 2014. The project has enlisted a coalition of six agencies. The lead agency for the coalition is the “SPCA Serving Erie County” (SPCASEC), a private, independent organization,  which takes in strays impounded by county animal control agencies and accepts owner surrenders. The shelter has a waiting list for cat surrenders. The other members of the coalition are the City of Buffalo Animal Shelter and four private rescues: HEART; Second Chance Sheltering Network; Black Dog (Second Chance); and Ten Lives Club. Maddie’s Fund reported that the coalition achieved a live release rate of 82% for year 3 of the project, the fiscal year ending on September 30, 2012. SPCASEC has posted calendar year statistics on its website for itself and for the county for 2012. The SPCASEC live release rate for calendar year 2012 was 82%, and the county coalition live release rate was 85%. These figures do not include owner-requested euthanasia or animals who died or were lost in shelter care. Total intake for the county for 2012 was 15,261 animals. Erie County is counted in the Running Totals as an 80%+ community.

Kitsap County is in the state of Washington, right across Puget Sound from Seattle. It’s a large county, with a population of over 250,000 people. The county contains four cities — Bremerton (population of about 40,000), Bainbridge Island (23,000), Port Orchard (11,000), and Poulsbo (9000). Animal control and sheltering services are provided for Kitsap County by the Kitsap Humane Society (KHS), a non-governmental charitable organization. The shelter has an animal control unit which handles stray intake, cruelty investigations, and responding to emergencies and disasters. The shelter takes in owner surrenders with a fee, which is reduced for low-income people, and it requires an appointment. The shelter issues annual reports that include its statistics. In 2010, it reported an intake of 4285 animals and a live release rate of 94%. In 2011, reported intake was 4993 with a live release rate of 95%. The 2012 annual report states that intake was 4703 animals and the live release rate was 94%. The 2012 report also notes that the shelter increased its low-cost spay-neuter surgeries by 67% over 2011. Kitsap County, WA, is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

A group of organizations involved in animal sheltering, including large mainstream organizations such as HSUS, Maddie’s Fund, and the ASPCA, has just released a draft whitepaper with this stated purpose:  “to identify meaningful ways to realize California’s policy ‘that no adoptable [or treatable] animal should be euthanized if it can be adopted into a suitable home.'” The whitepaper makes 23 recommendations overall, several of which apply to intake policies. Notably, the whitepaper recommends that all shelters should establish an appointment system for owner surrenders (see recommendations 1 and 2), that shelters should use their discretion to decline to accept animals when full (see recommendation 3), and that shelters should not impound healthy cats unless the shelter is not euthanizing cats (see recommendation 13). The whitepaper sets forth the many advantages of appointment systems for owner surrenders, such as scheduling intake at a time when the shelter can best handle it and allowing the shelter to get information about the pet. It points out that intake can actually be reduced by an appointments policy, because an appointment provides an opportunity to refer the owner to resources that can help the owner retain the pet. The whitepaper recommends providing the owner with “an honest appraisal of the likely outcome for their pet if it enters the shelter (adoption vs. euthanasia).” The recommendation for an appointment policy includes two exceptions — if an animal is unhealthy or if there is “an urgent situation or risk to the animal or community” then no appointment should be required. The whitepaper further recommends: “Shelters should balance optional intake [] with their proven capacity to maintain humane conditions and positive outcomes for new intakes and the animals in their care.” In other words, if the shelter is full, the shelter should consider refusing optional admissions (such as healthy, non-emergency owner surrenders). In addition, the whitepaper recommends that shelters should not impound healthy cats, or if they are impounded, should return them to where they are found. The recommendation is crystal clear: “No healthy cat, regardless of temperament, should be admitted by an animal shelter if the admission of that cat would cause the death of that cat or another cat in the shelter.” The whitepaper is only a draft at this point, and it was developed to apply to the situation in California, but nevertheless the issuance of this report seems to me to be a watershed moment. In the past several years progressive shelters have been experimenting with creative new policies such as Help Desks, appointments for owner surrenders, and waiting lists to reduce the number of animals surrendered. These shelters have found that many owners would like to keep their pets and just need to be referred to help for behavior problems, vet bills, or finding pet-friendly housing. Shelters have found that if they are full and ask owners to wait to surrender their pet, most owners will agree because they want to help the shelter help their pet. These new recommendations codify what progressive shelters have been seeing for years — owners will behave responsibly when asked. We now have some of the largest animal welfare organizations in the country recognizing that these progressive owner-surrender policies work and recommending that they become standard practice. The recommendation that shelters not impound healthy cats, and return such cats when impounded (unless the shelter is in a position where it does not have to euthanize cats), is an even bigger groundbreaking advance. The report points out that outcomes are much worse in California shelters for cats as compared to dogs, and that shelters are not doing cats any favor when they impound them only to kill them. People expect cats to roam and, when a cat disappears, they often do not think to check the shelter until the hold period has expired and the cat has been killed. The whitepaper notes that return-to-owner rates for cats are extremely low — around 2% nationally. In fact, “cats are at least 13 times more likely to return home by means other than the shelter.” Up until now, relatively few of the shelters that I’ve researched have had a policy of not impounding community cats. Hopefully the release of this whitepaper will encourage more shelters to take this step. It’s exciting to think that, by this one change in policy, the number of cats killed in shelters each year could plummet. Another important step forward that could result from this whitepaper is that it may finally end the debate over “open admission.” There is a segment of the animal-shelter community that insists that shelters should accept every animal presented to them, upon demand, with no conditions and no questions asked. They define this as “open admission,” and they label all shelters who do not have this policy as “limited admission.” They blame “limited admission” shelters for the high kill rates found in many “open admission” shelters, on the theory that open admission shelters are overwhelmed with animals turned away by limited admission shelters. We now have this whitepaper from a large group of animal welfare agencies, including HSUS, the ASPCA, and Maddie’s Fund, that essentially says this idea is nonsense and that “open admission” is bad policy.

Austin is a city of 843,000 people located in the hill country of Texas. It is the capital of Texas and the county seat of Travis County, which has a total population of 1,024,000 people. The Austin Animal Center (AAC) is the municipal shelter for Austin and the unincorporated parts of Travis County. Field services are under the AAC Animal Services Department, although Travis County has an officer assigned to animal cruelty investigations. AAC describes its admission policy for owner surrenders as follows: “The center is an open-intake shelter serving [] Austin and Travis County. We accept any animal from our jurisdiction that needs shelter regardless of age, health, species, breed or behavior, and no matter whether it is a stray or an owned animal.”  People who want to surrender an animal are asked to attempt to rehome it themselves first, and if that is unsuccessful to make an appointment. Austin has a contractual public-private partnership with a private non-profit, Austin Pets Alive! (APA), which pulls a large number of animals from the city shelter. APA has a program called Positive Alternatives to Shelter Surrender to help people keep their pets or rehome their pets themselves. APA has a subsidiary, American Pets Alive!, that offers webinars and yearly conferences for shelter personnel and reform advocates. The Austin Humane Society (AHS), a private non-profit, takes in some owner surrenders. AHS also has a large TNR program for feral cats which has served more than 30,000 cats since it was started in 2007. In 2011 Austin became the largest city in the United States to report a 90% or greater live release rate, with AAC at a 91% live release rate for the year. APA collated the city shelter’s outcome reports for the fiscal year 2011-2012, and noted a 5% kill rate during that time. In 2013, the ACC started posting detailed statistics on its website every month for cat and dog intakes and outcomes, with reports analyzing and comparing the statistics. For the entire year, ACC took in 17,921 dogs and cats, which is an intake of about 17 cats and dogs per 1000 people in the ACC service area. (This number would be higher if intake by APA and AHS were counted.) The live release rate for the year was 93%. The 93% figure is unchanged if the 93 animals who died in shelter care are included with euthanasias. AAC reported adopting out 7318 dogs and cats during the year and transferring 6272 dogs and cats to APA and to ACA’s rescue partners. Austin, Texas, was originally listed by this blog on April 22, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 calendar year statistics.

Montclair is a township of 38,000 people in New Jersey, about 12 miles from New York City. A private non-profit in Montclair, the Pound Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) of Montclair, ran the Montclair shelter until 2008, when the township took it over. The shelter is now called the Montclair Township Animal Shelter (MTAS). In addition to providing animal sheltering for Montclair, MTAS also provides sheltering for the nearby townships of Nutley (population 28,000), and Verona (13,000). MTAS provides animal control services for all three townships. MTAS has a trap-neuter-return program for feral cats, a lost and found page, a volunteer program, and adoption promotions. I was told in a phonecall to the shelter that they accept owner surrenders from the three townships they serve on a space-available basis. The state of New Jersey collects statistics from animal shelters, and I requested a copy of the statistics that MTAS reported to the state for 2012. The shelter reported taking in 432 animals during the year. The live release rate was 91%.

There is a lot of news from Texas this week. An audit in Austin has found overcrowding at the city shelter. This is no surprise, as many said when the new shelter was built a few years ago that it did not have sufficient animal housing. The city has already taken steps to deal with the problem by adding 100 kennels. Best Friends magazine is featuring Michael and Pam Kitkoski of Texas in the “Inspiring People” section of its May/June issue. The Kitkoskis founded Rockwall Pets in 2010, which led to the cities of Rockwall and Royse achieving No Kill status. In 2014 they founded No Kill Solutions, to consult with shelters in Dallas-Ft. Worth. Houston’s BARC public shelter has announced that it had an 80% live release rate for the first three months of 2015, after having had only a 64% live release rate in 2014. BARC is a very large operation, taking in 25,000 animals per year, and until recently was chronically underfunded by the city. The shelter attributes its improvement to increased funding and new partnerships. One rescue partner, the Rescued Pets Movement, has pulled 6700 dogs and cats from the shelter since September of 2013. The Rescued Pets Movement transports about 150 pets per week to Colorado. It takes about 60% of the animals that BARC transfers to its rescue partners. A great example of the power of one is Debbie Fatheree in Hearne, Texas. Since she started helping the Hearne Animal Shelter in 2013 she has saved 900 dogs and cats and, according to the linked article, the shelter has not euthanized a single animal. A big part of her efforts is social-media networking. She also has adoption events and recruits fosters. Maddie’s Fund has collected a list of resources on disease prevention protocols in shelters. ASPCA president Matt Bershadker has written an article pushing back at the audit report by New York City controller Scott Stringer that was critical of the city’s Animal Care and Control unit. Bershadker points out that the audit does not reflect that in the last year AC&C has taken action on most of the problems mentioned in the report. He also argues that the report does not give the AC&C credit for the degree to which it has increased the city’s live release rate. The Pet Animal Coalition of Kansas (PACK) is trying to get the state’s Department of Agriculture to tighten up requirements for animal shelters. High on the list of things they want implemented is a ban on gas chambers. At least three shelters in the state still use gas to kill impounded animals. It’s super adoption season for Best Friends, with a three-day event last weekend in New York City and events this weekend in Salt Lake City (Friday and Saturday) and Los Angeles (Saturday and Sunday). The Los Angeles event is featuring over 1000 shelter pets. Four Florida International University students have designed an open-source app that they envision being used to create a single regional database for shelter animals. This will facilitate adoptions by allowing potential adopters to quickly locate animals they have seen online, and allow shelters and rescues to work with the adopters.

Readers — I’m sure most if not all of you know about the great work that is being done by Humane Network, which is headed by the No Kill movement’s own Bonney Brown and Diane Blankenburg. They have two important current projects that may interest you: 1. The University of the Pacific Lifesaving-Centered Animal Shelter Management Certificate Program is starting up for its third year in only 19 days. It’s an online program, and there is still time to register. Here is a link to the course information: Animal Shelter Management Certificate – Lifesaving-Centered 2. Humane Network is conducting a survey for Maddie’s Institute to help inform their potential development of training resources for foster care programs. Links are: Survey for Individuals Survey for Organizations Note: Humane Network is seeking feedback from those individuals and organizations that have participated in fostering and those that have not, so they would appreciate you filling out the form even if you do not foster!

Kerry Moyers-Horton’s previous career was as an art director. She got a degree in graphic design and went to work in her home town of Chattanooga. Before she went to college, though, she had become interested in rescue work through meeting a group of people who did adoptions at a local pet store. The group was grass-roots, simply trying to help make things better in their corner of the world, and Kerry worked with them for several years. By 2002 Kerry was the leader of her rescue group, and when Best Friends held its national conference in Atlanta that year Kerry decided to attend. Kerry’s group had been using an adoption listing service provided by Rebecca Guinn’s LifeLine Animal Project in Atlanta. Kerry got better acquainted with Rebecca at the 2002 conference and also had her first contact with the national No Kill movement. She was impressed with the people she met from all over the country who were working on innovative ideas to save more shelter animals. Kerry had always tried to give her rescue work the same time and attention that she gave her day job, but after the conference she came to the realization that she no longer wanted her life to be divided in two.  She wanted to be able to do animal welfare work without distraction. Giving up her job as an art director was not an easy choice, but she felt sure it was the right decision for her. Kerry admired the work that LifeLine was doing, and asked Rebecca to let her know if a paid position became available. Soon after that Rebecca opened the LifeLine “Dog House,” which was a short-term boarding facility where rescue organizations could hold dogs who were waiting to go into foster care. This was a natural for Kerry, with her years of rescue work, and Rebecca offered her the job of manager. Kerry worked for LifeLine from 2003 to 2008, and the Dog House added a Kitty Motel and then developed into a rehabilitation center. Kerry loved the work and never regretted her career change. In 2008 a group in Chattanooga started an ambitious No Kill project that included a state-of-the-art shelter building. Kerry wanted to be a part of this new effort, and she moved back to Chattanooga to work on it. The No Kill effort was successful, and Kerry moved on to serve as executive director of a humane organization near Chattanooga. Then in early 2013 she got a call from Rebecca. LifeLine had just won the contracts for animal sheltering in both Fulton and DeKalb counties, serving over 1.5 million people, and Rebecca was calling in the troops for the historic task of making Atlanta a No Kill city. She asked Kerry to come help, and of course Kerry said yes. Kerry initially supervised several programs at the Fulton County shelter, but earlier this year she moved to the director’s position at the DeKalb County shelter. I visited the DeKalb County shelter a couple of weeks ago and got to meet Kerry and tour the shelter. The shelter was built in the early 1980s and is typical of shelters built at that time. It is next to a railroad track, and was built on a landfill. It has little natural light inside. The administrative offices were built with both heat and air conditioning, but the kennels had no built-in air conditioning system. In the old days during hot weather fans had to be used to provide a little relief to the animals. Today, the kennels have air conditioning through a jerry-rigged system that uses what looks like giant balloons. The dog runs were built with grates instead of flooring, and built in such a way that retrofitting with solid flooring would be prohibitively expensive. The only good thing about the building is that it is fairly large, so it has sufficient space for current needs. One would think that operating a municipal shelter in a large, rapidly growing southern city that is financed by the county government and housed in a badly outdated building would be quite a challenge, and it is. What surprised me during my visit, though, is how smoothly everything seems to work. A large part of that is because of Kerry’s management style. Like other LifeLine managers she has an open-door policy and stresses that they work as a team. She encourages staff and volunteers to come to her with their ideas and concerns, and relies on them to develop new approaches. The shelter has volunteer coordinators, rescue coordinators, and a trained photographer who helps each pet put its best foot forward on social media. The photographer takes amazing portraits of animals looking for homes: LifeLine right now is running at about an 85% live release rate at both the Fulton and DeKalb shelters. They are no-kill for cats, and the biggest challenge for them in continuing to raise their live release rate is dogs who are not suitable for a typical adopter. The rescue coordinators work with dozens of rescues to try to get these dogs into a situation where they can be trained and given the time they need. LifeLine is working very hard to achieve a 90% or better save rate, and they hope to be there by 2016. As with all private organizations that have a contract to run a municipal shelter, LifeLine does not have any guarantee of what will happen in the future. DeKalb County could decide not to put the shelter contract up for bid again when the current contract expires, or it could grant the contract to another organization. Another layer of uncertainty is that DeKalb County is building a new shelter in a nearby location. The design for this project was already in process when LifeLine got the contract, so while Kerry is hopeful that the new building will be an improvement she is not expecting it to be a panacea. With all the difficulties and problems, and even though No Kill in Atlanta is something of a high-wire act, the feeling I got from Kerry and from everyone associated with LifeLine is that they are quietly confident in their ability to do this. What we have seen with other cities that have achieved No Kill is that the citizens really like it and that over time more and more supporters join the effort. I think the future for No Kill in Atlanta looks very bright, thanks to the efforts of Kerry and the whole LifeLine team.