[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.] The city of Portland, Oregon, has a population of 584,000 people. It is the county seat of Multnomah County, which has 735,000 people. The Portland metro area (which includes part of the state of Washington) has almost 2.3 million people. The Animal Shelter Alliance of Portland (ASAP) is a coalition of six organizations, some of which are municipal and some private, that provide animal sheltering in the Portland metro area. The municipal members of the coalition (shelters that are responsible for stray intake) are Multnomah County Animal Services (MCAS) (serving the city of Portland and Multnomah County), the Bonnie L. Hays Shelter (BLH) (serving Washington County), and Clackamas County Dog Services. The private members of the coalition are the Oregon Humane Society, the Humane Society for Southwest Washington (HSSW) (which works with Clark County Animal Control), and the Cat Adoption Team. Together these six organizations serve four counties — Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, and Clark — containing about 2 million people. ASAP estimates that its six members care for 90% of the animals needing sheltering in the four counties. The ASAP coalition increased the live release rate for the metro area from 62% in 2006 to 79% in 2011. Maddie’s Fund has reported that the coalition had an 85% live release rate for 2012, with a combined intake of almost 32,000 animals. If the coalition were to achieve the same percentage improvement in 2013 that it had in 2012, they would finish the year at a 90% or better live release rate. Coalitions such as ASAP are becoming a trend, as more and more municipal shelters seek out and work closely with private partners. In such situations it makes no sense to look at the individual shelters in isolation, and you have to look at the community coalition as a whole to get an accurate idea of what is going on. For example, the Clackamas County municipal shelter does not pick up stray cats and does not accept owner surrendered cats, but it offers cats for adoption that have been taken in by other area organizations. Conversely, the Cat Adoption Team takes in cats but not dogs. MCAS and BLH accept owner surrenders only when they have room, but owner surrenders are accepted by HSSW, and by OHS unless they are aggressive or medically unfit for adoption. People ask me from time to time why I list communities rather than individual shelters, and coalitions such as ASAP are the reason why. Even in cases where there is no formal coalition, you cannot evaluate a municipal shelter without knowing what else is going on in the community. In particular, people often want to criticize a municipal shelter for having a waiting list for owner surrenders or otherwise limiting surrenders, but if there are non-profits in the area who take in owner surrenders, then such criticisms are missing an important part of the picture.

2014 is shaping up to be a big year for the blog. In addition to continuing to feature 90%+ and Worth Watching communities, I’m working on a couple of special projects. The first project is a big numbers crunch on the communities listed in the right sidebar. There is no universally recognized way for shelters to report their statistics, and that means that statistics vary widely in consistency and completeness. Even so, I have quite a bit of data now on public shelters that are saving 90% or more of their intake, and it’s a good sample size to start asking some questions about what makes these shelters so successful. For example, what type of management structure is most common in successful public shelters?  What public shelters are most successful at return-to-owner, and how do they do it? Is human population a limiting factor for adoptions in a typical community? Do communities with managed intake policies have higher stray intake? What is the rate of growth of the number of 90%+ communities? I hope to be able to present some data on these issues and more as the year goes on. The second new project for 2014 is a book I’m working on with a couple of well-known No Kill advocates. The book will have shelter stories and much more! We’re very excited about this project and hope to have the book available by the end of the year. A couple of housekeeping notes: I’ve added a “Running Total” page to keep up with the number of individual shelters in the 90%+ communities, the population served, and the number of Worth Watching public shelters. As for 2014 updates, I will be doing revisions of each existing blog post instead of supplemental posts. Things change rapidly in the shelter world, and doing a revised post will allow me to fix broken links and update general information as well as statistics. The result of an update will be that the old post disappears. The new post will list the date of the original post at the end. I’d like to thank everyone who helped me with the blog in 2013. Your tips, e-mails, and comments were appreciated, so please keep them coming.

Allegany County is part of the Cumberland region in western Maryland. It is a hilly, rural area with a population of about 75,000 people. The Allegany County Animal Shelter (ACAS) used to be high-kill, with a reported live release rate of about 15%. Late in 2010 a group of local volunteers, working with county management, reformed the shelter virtually overnight. Last year that turnaround culminated in the county contracting out operations to the Allegany County Animal Shelter Foundation, a private non-profit formed by the volunteers. ACAS will hit another milestone in four months, when construction starts on its much-needed new shelter building. Peter Masloch was one of the people who was most instrumental in reforming the shelter, and he provided me with information about its policies. ACAS accepts owner surrenders from county residents, with a $25 surrender fee. Sometimes the shelter asks people if they can wait a few days to surrender an animal, but they take animals immediately if the owner cannot wait. Animal control does not pick up stray cats, since they are considered free-roaming in Allegany County. The shelter partners with Homeward Bound Cat Rescue to do TNR, and those cats are not counted in intake or disposition statistics. Three of ACAS’s rescue partners have been very helpful in the shelter’s high live release rate for domesticated cats: Last Chance Animal Rescue, Lost Paws of Lancaster, and Lost Paws of New Jersey. The Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in 2011 that pit bulls are inherently dangerous dogs. Allegany County officials initially ordered that the shelter cease adopting out pit bulls, but backed off that stance after the Maryland Attorney General issued an opinion on the effect of the law pending a motion to reconsider. Currently, pit bull advocates are hoping that a legislative fix can be passed soon. In the meantime ACAS is able to adopt out pit bull mixes, since only certain purebreds are affected by the court’s ruling. In 2011, the first year of the shelter’s turnaround, ACAS did not keep precise statistics but its live release rate was approximately 90%. In 2012, the shelter’s live release rate was 96% for dogs and 93.5% for cats. Intake went up substantially in 2013 to a total of 2009 animals, but the shelter nevertheless maintained its high save rate with an overall live release rate of 95%. If animals who died in shelter care in 2013 are included with euthanasia, the live release rate was 92%. The shelter does not perform owner-requested euthanasia, and instead refers such requests to a veterinarian. Allegany County, MD, is listed in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

Brown County, Indiana, has a population of about 15,000 people. The Brown County Humane Society (BCHS), located in Nashville, Indiana, is a private shelter that contracts with Brown County to take in strays. The shelter states on its website that it “accepts any and all of Brown County’s homeless dogs and cats.” Their euthanasia policy is stated as follows: “Currently only those dogs whose behavior is dangerous and beyond our resources to rehabilitate and pets which are so sick or injured that we cannot afford to treat are euthanized.” The shelter has a high intake, although it has been trending down substantially in recent years. In 2011, for example, the shelter reported that it took in 1096 dogs and cats. That translates to an intake of 73 animals per 1,000 people. (There are various estimates of average annual shelter intake in the United States, ranging from 15 to 30 per 1000 population). In 2013, the intake was 727 cats and dogs, which is 48 per 1000 people. This report, from the 2011 Best Friends No More Homeless Pets conference, details how BCHS has worked to lower intake through their spay-neuter programs. BCHS’s live release rates for the last three years were 97% in 2011, 99% in 2012, and 98% in 2013. The 2011 figure includes animals who died in shelter care with the euthanasia total. The shelter reported deaths and euthanasias separately in 2012 and 2013. In 2012 the live release rate was 97% with deaths included, and in 2013 it was 95% with deaths included. The shelter adopted out 839 dogs and cats in 2011, 757 in 2012, and 511 in 2013. I spoke with Jane Weatherford, a member of the shelter’s board of directors, in 2012 and asked how the shelter managed to adopt out so many animals in a community of only 15,000 people. She said that shelter volunteers supplement local adoptions by taking dogs and cats to off-site adoption venues. They placed 233 animals that way in 2011. BCHS, like most successful shelters, uses social media. Its Facebook page features interesting photographs and appealing descriptions of pets up for adoption as well those who have been recently adopted. Brown County, Indiana, was originally listed by this blog on April 15, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

[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.] Spokane County is located on the western border of the state of Washington. It has a population of 471,000 people, including the 209,000 people who live in the city of Spokane, which is the county seat. The Spokane County Regional Animal Protection Service (SCRAPS) provides animal control and sheltering services for the county. It is expanding its jurisdiction as of January 2014, when it will start serving the city of Spokane as well as Millwood, Liberty Lake, and Cheney. SCRAPS accepts owner surrenders from its jurisdictions with no stated restrictions except a small fee. SCRAPS posts its statistics for the last several years on its website. For 2012, it reported a live release rate of 82% with an intake of 5086 animals. This was an improvement over the 78% reported in 2011. SCRAPS serves a large population and has a live release rate that is much better than average and is improving. It’s difficult to evaluate how well the shelter is really doing, though, because the shelter transfers a lot of animals to other organizations both inside and outside of its community coalition. The most recent community-wide statistics provided show a 74% live release rate for the coalition for 2010. There is further uncertainty due to the addition of the city of Spokane to the shelter’s jurisdiction in 2014.

The  city of Taylor, Texas, is located in Williamson County about 30 miles northeast of Austin. It has a population of about 15,000 people. Williamson County and Taylor are part of the Austin metro area. Animal control and sheltering is provided for the city by a municipal agency, the Taylor Animal Shelter. A city official sent me the shelter’s 2012 statistics. Total intake was 315 animals, with 283 impounded by animal control and 11 owner surrenders. The live release rate was 93% for the calendar year. The shelter reports transferring 30 animals in 2012, who went to the Austin Humane Society. The shelter credits its success to “great community volunteers and staff, wonderful partnerships with other shelters and rescue groups and an outstanding community.” Feral cats in Taylor receive TNR from the Shadow Cats organization, a non-profit rescue that is headquartered in nearby Round Rock. Shadow Cats returns ferals to their colonies after TNR or attempts to place them as barn cats if they cannot return to a colony. They also have a sanctuary where cats that are sick with chronic illness can live out their lives. Taylor is located in an area that is very safe for shelter animals. Williamson County and the city of Austin both have live release rates over 90%. The city of Georgetown, which is located in Williamson County, has a live release rate of about 85%. Taylor, TX, is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

Shelby County Kentucky, has a population of about 42,000 people and is located just east of Louisville. Shelby County Animal Shelter & Control is the municipal shelter for the county. The shelter states on its Petfinder site that it accepts “all unwanted and stray animals in our county” and performs “neglect and abuse investigations” for the county. Shelby County No-Kill Mission is a non-profit that works closely with the shelter. Its director and co-founder is Kelly Jedlicki. This June, the shelter will celebrate its fifth year of saving more than 90% of the animals it takes in. Shelby County was the first community in Kentucky to achieve the 90% rate. The shelter does not post its statistics online, but Rusty Newton, the shelter’s director, sent me the statistics by e-mail. The shelter keeps its statistics on a fiscal-year basis, from July through June. In fiscal year 2010-2011, the shelter took in 1651 dogs and cats and had a live release rate of 95%. In fiscal year 2011-2012, the shelter took in 1486 dogs and cats and had a live release rate of 98%. So far in the 2012-2013 fiscal year the shelter has maintained its 98% live release rate. The shelter did not report any owner-requested euthanasia or animals died or lost in shelter care. Shelby County, KY, is counted in the blog’s Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

This post is the first in what will be an occasional series trying to identify trends in the statistical data I’ve gathered in the course of doing this blog. In today’s post, I answer some frequently asked questions. 1. Is it easier for small towns to achieve a high live release rate than for big cities? I did a statistical analysis on this question on my previous blog, comparing the average population size of the successful 90%+ communities to the average size of U.S. jurisdictions as a whole, and found that the 90%+ communities I listed actually had higher populations than the average for the U.S. as a whole. What people often don’t realize when they think of this question is that there are very few big cities compared to small cities and towns, so if population size does not have any influence at all on shelter success one would expect to see many more successful small communities than large ones. 2. How long will it be before all the shelters in the U.S. get to a 90% live release rate? I had to laugh when I saw a recent article stating, apparently in all seriousness, that at the current rate of success it would be 500 years before all shelters in the U.S. achieved the 90%+ mark. The author of the article, Pat Dunaway, tried to extrapolate the future date from the existing number of 90%+ shelters and the years since the first 90%+ shelter came into existence, but she forgot one crucial thing — algebra. Her crucial mistake was to assume that the graph of shelters achieving 90%+ was a straight line over time, which is wildly inaccurate. The rate of growth is not quite logarithmic, but it’s far higher than linear. The truth is that if one wanted to try to extrapolate a date for all shelters to be at 90% or more based on historical data, one would have to use some pretty fancy mathematics, including calculus. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing aren’t going to do it. We would also have to have identified all the 90%+ shelters currently in existence, which we aren’t even close to having done yet. File this one under “Embarrassing Mistakes Made By People Who Are Out Of Their Depth.” 3. Speaking of historical data, what municipal shelter in the U.S. was the first to achieve a 90%+ live release rate, and when did it occur? The short answer is — we don’t know, because many times shelters don’t announce it to the world when they are successful, and even when they do report we do not generally have independent verification. Among all the shelters I’ve studied where data is available, though, the first shelter to report a 90%+ save rate appears to have been Otsego County, Michigan, where credible reports give 1999 as the date that they achieved a 90%+ live release rate. A related question is what shelter has the longest winning streak — i.e., the longest period of time up to the present with a documented live release rate of 90% or more. Otsego County is also a contender in this category, with a documented streak going back to 2007 (they may very well have been at 90% or above every year since 1999, but were not able to supply me with statistics from 2001 through 2006 when I inquired). The Charlottesville-Albemarle SPCA, which has full statistics posted on its website, also shows a 90%+ live release rate going back to 2007. 4. Why do so many highly successful shelters hide their data? I’ve been told several times by officers of highly successful shelters that they do not want to make their success public because they are afraid of having people from other jurisdictions drop off animals in their jurisdiction or try to surrender animals to their shelter. The unfortunate effect of this is that there are many highly successful shelters that are not getting the recognition they deserve. 5. Is there one secret to success used by all the shelters listed on the blog? The short answer to this question is “no.” Some shelters achieve high live release rates by a high rate of adoptions, while others depend almost totally on out-of-state transfers. Some shelters are independent, while others could not succeed without their rescue partners. I frequently speak to shelter officials, and it’s rare for one of them to tell me that the shelter follows any particular program. On the other hand, many of the shelters I write about have characteristics in common, including a hardworking, dedicated director and lots of community engagement. 6. Why should we trust statistics that the shelters themselves report? My answer to this question is that we should not blindly trust any statistics provided by a shelter, because at this point we do not have any industry standard on how to collect and present statistics. Nor do we have any way of independently verifying the accuracy of statistics. Instead, we should look at the statistics provided by a shelter as just one tool to use in evaluating that shelter. That’s why it concerns me when I see people mischaracterize my blog as a list of “no kill” communities or shelters. It is no such thing. Instead, it is a list of shelters that report saving 90% or more of intake. 7. What relationship does the list on this blog have to the list posted on the No Kill Advocacy Center website? The NKAC cites my blog (with some additions and deletions) as the source for a list of communities that they call the “90% Club.” I am not in contact with the NKAC and I’m not responsible for any claims that the NKAC and its officers make about the number of successful communities in the U.S. If you doubt that there are 500 cities and towns saving 90% or more of shelter animals, take it up with them, not me! Although I will say that there are certainly more communities at a 90%+ live release rate (possibly far more) than I’ve identified so far.

Is it a good idea for No Kill advocates to try to get states to pass laws mandating various aspects of No Kill programs? The devil is always in the details, and I think some of these efforts might be good, and others not so much. The subject is too big and complex for a single blog post to cover all the permutations, so I’m just going to talk about some general considerations with legal mandates A legal mandate is only as good as its enforcement mechanism. If the law just makes broad general pronouncements, such as, for example, “shelters must make every reasonable effort to rehome adoptable animals,” it will be hard to enforce. If the law provides that regulations be drafted to enforce a more granular level of control, then we have to persuade the rule-making agency to do a good job. Even if those hurdles are cleared, we may have problems of unfunded mandates. One trend in regulation generally is to try to move away from “command and control” and toward incentives. An example of this is the cap and trade approach for industries that release carbon to the atmosphere. How can the No Kill movement encourage laws and regulations that set up incentives for good shelter performance rather than trying to create good outcomes by outside control? One example of a good incentive is laws that require shelters to report their statistics to the state. These laws do not set up any mandatory performance standards, but they encourage better performance simply by making information about performance available to the public. These laws are especially effective if the state collects the data and makes it available in an online database, allowing for easy comparisons of shelters. Another example of a good incentive would be a state level program where a governor selects an outstanding shelter in the state to be recognized with an official proclamation, perhaps also recognizing a couple of runner-ups. The winners could be selected by a group of respected No Kill leaders advising the governor, and the criteria would be how well a shelter is doing. Perhaps consideration could be given to the conditions under which the shelter is operating by making the award be on the basis of “most improved.” If the national organizations got together behind such a program and generated a lot of incentives for the winners, and a lot of publicity, this could potentially be a very effective motivator. Awards like this can also be a way to increase community engagement, as entire communities get together to compete for an award. Both of the examples cited above – reporting and proclamations – are the type of thing that can actually get through a legislature and be signed by the governor. One advantage of the incentive approach over the performance mandate is that it is much easier to get incentives enacted and carried out. Mandatory rules can generate unintended consequences. No Kill advocates are pretty much uniformly opposed to mandatory spay-neuter, because it has the unintended effect of motivating people to avoid licensing their pets and maybe avoid taking their pets in for health care. What unintended consequences could mandatory performance standards for shelters have? By taking away a shelter’s flexibility to deal with its individual circumstances, can we actually make their job harder without making their performance better? What data, if any, do we have that command and control laws work to improve shelter performance? I have seen many claims for number of lives saved by the few shelter-performance laws that are in place, but no data to back up those claims. As a practical matter, no state legislature is going to adopt a law at this point in time requiring shelters to meet really high performance standards. The danger with encoding the lower standards that legislatures are actually likely to pass is that once these lower standards have the imprimatur of law it may be hard to change them. One way to avoid this might be to ask states to approve very tough standards for shelters, but make them goals rather than mandates. Saving homeless animals has always, in our country, been a separate function from animal control. The purpose of animal control is to protect the public from nuisance and dangerous animals. The purpose of animal sheltering is to find new homes or other humane dispositions for impounded animals. The first municipal animal shelter that was ever created (way back in 1870) was run by a private organization, and the beauty of private organizations has always been that they can spend their own money to save animals. Since animals are property under our law, it is very hard for legislators to justify laws that would require the public to spend more on treating or rehoming a homeless animal than its economic value (which, in the case of shelter animals, is usually nil). So, when we think about requiring public shelters to meet performance standards for lifesaving (going beyond animal control), the question of how that can be funded by the government arises. If we decide that legislation to compel veterinary treatment and rehoming is a good idea, how can we fund enforcement? One way is to ask citizens to pass a special funding measure (bond or tax) specifically for the purpose of improving lifesaving. As one final consideration, I think we have to ask if we need to go down the legislative route at all, given that No Kill momentum right now is so great that shelters are changing rapidly because they want to, not because they have to. We have a limited amount of money and person-power to spend promoting No Kill. Are those resources better spent in lobbying for laws that have not yet been proven to work and could have unintended consequences, or in helping and persuading more shelters to get on the bandwagon voluntarily? There are arguments on both sides. My own opinion is that some of the approaches I’ve outlined above would be no-brainers (state reporting laws and governmental proclamations), and special funding proposals are certainly worthy of consideration, while for other approaches it may be that our efforts would be better spent in other ways.

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.

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!

Cats are not dogs. This seems obvious, and yet the correlative to that statement – that we cannot give equal treatment to cats by treating them the same way we treat dogs – seems to be lost on many people. In the last couple of years we have had proposals for innovative programs that seek to give homeless and lost cats the same chance for life that homeless and lost dogs have – not by treating cats and dogs exactly alike, but by recognizing and accommodating their differences. Some people have reacted to these new programs by complaining that cats are being treated unfairly, and are being made second-class citizens to dogs. I’ve even heard the new cat paradigms referred to as the “war on cats.” While it’s a good thing for people to be cautious before adopting new ideas, we don’t want to be so cautious that we reject lifesaving ideas. With that in mind, what are the new cat paradigms, and what is the evidence to back them up? I’m not an expert on the new paradigms – the experts would be Dr, Kate Hurley, Dr. Julia Levy, Scott Trebatoski, and all the other professionals who have been leaders in this field. But as I understand the new paradigms, one of the central ideas is that, in most circumstances, shelters should not take in healthy cats. Gulp. That certainly is a radical idea. But after looking at the evidence, it makes perfect sense. While an impounded cat is sitting in the shelter waiting for its owner to come looking for it, it may get sick, it is taking up space for cats who really need to be in the shelter (those who are sick, injured, or starving), and the likelihood of its owners finding it is far, far less than if it had been left alone. That italicized clause is one of the keys to the new cat paradigms, and I think it is the most often misunderstood or overlooked part of the new message. So what is the scientific evidence to support the idea that a lost or straying cat is more likely to find its way home if it is just left alone? I asked Dr. Hurley this question, and she sent me two peer-reviewed studies that address the issue. The first study was done in 2005 in Montgomery County, Ohio. It looked at cats lost by residents over a 4-month period and the success of methods that owners used to find the cats. The study included 138 cats. Just over half (53%) of the lost cats were recovered. Two-thirds – 66% – of the cats who were recovered returned home on their own. That is not a typo. All other methods, including neighborhood signs, identification, advertisements, and visiting the shelter, when added up, were only about 1/2 as successful as simply waiting for the cat to come home on its own. The second-most successful method for finding a lost cat was neighborhood signs, but only 11% of found cats were found by that method. Leaving cats alone was 6 times more effective than the second-best method at returning cats home. Only 7% of the cats were recovered from the animal shelter. Now you might argue that perhaps only a few of the cats wound up in the shelter in the first place, and that explains why few were recovered from the shelter. The problem with that argument is that owners in the study took a median of 3 days, with a range of 0 to 21 days, to visit the shelter to look for their cat. And the median time between visits was 8 days. Half of owners did not visit the shelter within the typical 3-day hold time of the county, and when they did visit, their succeeding visits were not frequent enough to allow them to reliably reclaim their cats within the hold period. As the authors of the study said, it was possible that at least some of the cats in the study who were not recovered were killed by animal shelters. So, either cats did wind up in the shelter (in which case their owners did not reliably go to the shelter often enough to find them) or cats did not wind up in the shelter (in which case the shelter was irrelevant to whether they were found). Either way, impoundment is not a reliable way of returning lost cats to their homes. This gets at one of the core differences between cats and dogs, which is that cats are more likely to hide when they get lost. A lost cat may hide for days or even weeks before it makes its presence known enough to come to the attention of animal control. People tend not to look in shelters for lost cats for a very good reason, which is that they know the likelihood of their cat being in a shelter on any given day is low. Unless they have the time to literally visit the shelter every couple of days for up to one or two months, their odds of finding their cat are not good even if it is impounded. And relying on shelter personnel or volunteers to recognize a lost cat from a photo or description is tricky because so many cats look alike. The shelter hold period was designed for dogs, plain and simple. The hold period does not fit cat behavior and it is ineffective to allow cat owners to recover their pets. The second study was a national telephone survey that made contact with 2,587 households in 2010. A higher percentage of lost cats – 75% – were recovered than in the 2005 study. Of the 54 cats recovered, 48 were recovered either by searching within the neighborhood or the cat returning home on its own. The percentage of found cats who returned home on their own was 59% – not that far off from the 66% in the 2005 study, even though the two studies used different methodologies. Almost 9 out of 10 cats who were recovered either returned home on their own or were found by their owners right in their own neighborhood. Only 1 of the cats was recovered from the animal shelter (2% of the sample). Only 4 of the cat owners looked at the shelter for their lost pet. Once again, whether the low rate of recovery from the shelter was due to cats not winding up in the shelter or people not looking for them in the shelter, the result is the same – a very low likelihood of a cat being reunited with its family via the shelter. Both of these studies are small. As with just about every issue involving animal sheltering, it would be nice to have more studies and have studies involving larger numbers of animals. I think the studies are meaningful in spite of the relatively small numbers of cats involved, however, because the percentage of cats who found their way home on their own was huge in both studies. This was not a subtle result – not the kind of thing where you need a cast of thousands to make sure that your result is statistically significant. There are two possible ways for shelters to react to this data. One is to accept that impounding a cat is not a good way to reunite it with its family, and to change procedures so that healthy cats are not impounded and that people are advised about what does work – signs, searching the neighborhood, and waiting for the cat to come home. The other way would be to lecture cat owners about microchipping their cats and going to the shelter every day that their cat is lost. Which way do you think will be more successful? Some people argue that even a 2% or a 7% rate of reuniting cats with owners makes it worthwhile to impound cats. That argument completely overlooks the fact that cats who are impounded cannot go home on their own, and their owners cannot find them by looking for them in the neighborhood. When cats are impounded, we cut off their best opportunity by far to get home – letting them get back on their own – and instead substitute a method, impoundment, that endangers their lives. Shelters are stressful for cats, and stress predisposes cats to disease. Not to mention that the percentage of communities that are saving all savable cats is currently in single digits, so even if the cat does not get sick it still has the hurdle of whether it will be adopted. The two studies discussed above deal only with owned cats who are lost. There are a great many cats who go into animal shelters who do not have homes – they are either feral or they live in the community, possibly visiting many homes but not domiciled in any particular home. These “community cats” are not going to be reclaimed if they are impounded. Community cats who are healthy obviously are doing fine in their environment and do not need intervention by the shelter. Impoundment can only hurt them, unless the shelter can keep them healthy and find an adoptive home for them (or, in the case of a feral cat, a better situation than the one it was in). TNR and return-to-field are well established as the best solutions for most healthy community cats. Making return-to-field the default approach for healthy cats, whether they are community cats or lost pets, is the commonsense solution. This gets at another of the important differences between cats and dogs, which is that today there are almost no truly feral dogs in the great majority of communities in the United States. The dogs in animal shelters are, almost uniformly, dogs who have been socialized to people and have lived in homes or kennel situations before coming to the shelter. Cats have retained much more of their wild nature than dogs, and many cats who come into animal shelters have either lived outdoors all their lives or they have transitioned in and out of homes and are very capable of “living off the land.” Once again, basing our ideas of what is best for cats on our ideas of what is best for dogs does a disservice to cats. What about owner surrendered cats? When animal control stops taking in healthy cats, the shelter has more resources, and some of those resources can be used to expand pet retention programs. In cases where the owner has died or is unable to keep the cat any longer even with help, the shelter will be able to find a surrendered cat a home much more quickly because the number of incoming adult cats will be in better balance with demand by adopters. Keeping healthy cats out of the shelter not only helps the healthy cats, it also helps the ones who are not healthy. When a shelter has fewer cats it can devote more resources to each cat. If 50 cats who all need rehabilitation come in from a hoarding bust, for example, the shelter will be much better able to help those cats if it is not already full. Kitten season won’t be so overwhelming if foster homes are not already full of healthy cats. We hear a lot about improving live release rates to 95% and even higher. Having the shelter take in only the cats who really need to be there is one way to get to those higher live release rates. Although the idea of shelters not taking in healthy cats might sound radical to us today, it is not radical at all from a historical perspective. When animal shelters first started up in the 1800s before rabies vaccines had been developed, their primary purpose was to protect people from rabies by getting dogs off the streets. It was not known at that time that cats could transmit rabies too. Some animal shelters, like the ones in Boston and New York City, impounded cats starting around 1900, but it was very common throughout most of the 1900s for animal control units in the United States not to take in free-roaming cats. The idea that all shelters should routinely impound stray cats is of relatively recent origin, and it has not worked out well. So, to sum up, even to a layperson like me it seems overwhelmingly clear from this data that shelters should not impound cats unless (1) the cat is ill, injured, or otherwise in need of help, or (2) the shelter has the ability to house the cat in a stress-free environment and quickly adopt it out once the hold period expires. Makena Yarbrough, the innovative director of the Lynchburg Humane Society, the open-admission No Kill shelter serving Lynchburg, Virginia, wrote an article for her local newspaper that advises people what to do if they find a cat (although the title of the article refers to “feral” cats, it applies to all found cats). We have advice for people on what to do if they find a baby bird, and I’m sure that has saved many millions of birds from people’s well-intentioned mistakes. So I love this idea of telling people how best to help any free-roaming cats they come across. One important point is that since cats on average take longer than dogs to make their presence known after getting lost, lost and found services for cats need to emphasize that a cat that was just found today might have been lost a month or two ago, or even more. We know how to help cats. Now we just need to get the word out. For more information, check out the Million Cat Challenge and the many helpful resources that Maddie’s Fund has made available about community cats.