It has been more than 20 years now since the concept of a No Kill community was created by Rich Avanzino in San Francisco. Today many cities and counties are No Kill. We know how to do No Kill – that is, we know what processes and models we need to use – but in most communities the implementation of those processes and models confronts us with problems. As with most great endeavors, the devil is in the details. For example, we know that return-to-owner rates can be increased if animal control officers are provided with the time and equipment needed to try to find a stray animal’s home in the field at the time the animal is picked up. It is a much better outcome for everyone if the officer can take the animal home rather than to the shelter. But in many cases there are barriers in the way. The local jurisdiction may have non-waivable fees for allowing an animal to run loose, or for allowing an animal to be at large without proof of identification or rabies vaccination. If the city or county runs animal control they may be reluctant to accept the extra expense of providing animal control officers with the gear needed for effectively returning animals in the field, or the time to do so. Shelter procedures may need to be re-written and approved by city officials. There are many other types of state and local laws and ordinances that can make No Kill difficult. Pit bull bans are more often abrogated than created these days, but they still exist, as do landlord and insurance rules that discriminate against certain breeds. Mandatory spay-neuter rules tied to pet licensing can result in people not licensing their pets. Many communities have rules or policies that make trap-neuter-return and return-to-field programs for cats difficult or impossible. Getting to No Kill in a particular place may be substantially impeded by such rules and practices. A related issue is whether the shelter director has the flexibility needed to create No Kill. Does the director have the power to make decisions on policy and operations for animal control and sheltering? For example, many times a No Kill transition means that some workers will not be able to adapt to the new regime and will have to be replaced. Or the shelter, since its goal is to save a higher percentage of animals, may need to develop a more nuanced approach to temperament evaluation. If the shelter is run under contract by a non-profit, the director probably will have considerable leeway. If the director is a city or county employee, then personnel decisions, budgetary choices, and setting policy may happen at a higher level of city government, where the ultimate decision-maker is not solely focused on No Kill.  If personnel and policy decisions are controlled by the government hierarchy, above the level of the shelter director, it can greatly hinder getting to No Kill. Talent is a huge issue for No Kill. One of the reasons why we have seen such a spate of large cities going No Kill in recent years is that large cities tend to be where the talent is. Great marketers, fundraisers, and managers are less likely to be found in a remote rural county than in cities like New York, Austin, or Atlanta. A rural county may be hard-pressed to find a really competent person to run the shelter. It may be even harder to find people who are competent to develop operational, budget, fundraising, and marketing plans. Implementing effective volunteer and foster programs, and getting the best performance from shelter employees, requires many different skills. It’s easy to say “start a volunteer program.” It’s a lot harder to actually do it. The director has to figure out how to recruit and train the volunteers, how to motivate them to keep coming back, what they will and won’t be allowed to do, how to keep them safe from bites and zoonoses, what the considerations are for legal liability, what tracking of volunteers will be done, how to evaluate volunteers to make sure they are being used most effectively and prevented from doing any harm, what accommodations can be set aside for them in the shelter, and so on. Shelter intake is another issue that can stand in the way of No Kill. In most cases, the lower a shelter’s intake is in relation to the number of people in the community, the easier it is to get to No Kill. This is partly because more people equals more potential homes, but intake per capita is also a measure of how much capacity the community has to care for its pets. Wealthier, more educated communities tend to have a better track record of looking after their pets. People in those communities have fenced yards for their pets, and if they have to move they can find another home where they can keep their pets. In Boulder, Colorado, which is a wealthy, progressive, city, some 90% of stray dogs are reclaimed by their owners. There is a world of difference between that and the 10% to 20% return-to-owner rate that is more typical. When you see high shelter intake relative to the human population and a low reclaim rate, you are probably in a place where the residents don’t have the resources to keep their pets off the street and safely at home, or the resources to look for them when they disappear. Money is tremendously important to every facet of No Kill. We tend to think of money as most needed in paying veterinary costs to treat the treatables, but money is also crucial for pet retention programs and for hiring employees to run volunteer, foster, social media, and rescue-placement programs. Money can also make the difference in whether a shelter can afford an offsite adoption center or a low-cost spay-neuter clinic. Governments rarely pay the full cost of No Kill, which means that the private sector must make up the difference. In order for private fundraising to be effective, people in the community must have money to donate. If a high percentage of the local population is struggling to make the rent payment each month or buy food, the No Kill effort will probably struggle too. The shelter building is another thing that makes No Kill harder or easier. If the shelter is one of the old-style, ugly, concrete-block buildings located near the landfill or the railroad tracks, in a bad part of town, with no thought given to disease control, then it will be harder to attract adopters and volunteers and harder to keep the animals healthy. Finally, one of the most important factors in implementing No Kill is whether there are other humane organizations in town that have the shelter’s back. Is there a large humane society that pulls lots of animals from the shelter, including the toughest cases, or is the shelter going it alone? In some places the local humane society actually makes things harder for the public shelter by vacuuming up donation money, taking in all the small, cute, healthy owner surrenders, and bringing in lots of highly adoptable dogs and cats from other areas without at the same time committing to making sure that all the healthy and treatable dogs and cats in the city are safe. Setting out a list of programs that will help a community get to No Kill is easy. Actually getting there, though, is hard work in most places. In quite a few places it is very hard work. We need to educate people who are new to No Kill and who want to help make it happen about what it really requires. Sometimes people new to No Kill have an over-simplified idea of what it entails. I know I did at one time. If people understand what is required they will be much better prepared to help the effort. As we go forward we need to have training resources for shelter directors that get down to a very granular level of detail of implementation. The good news is that more and more such resources are becoming available through conferences and professional consulting services. The HSUS and Best Friends conferences both offer great opportunities for aspiring No Kill shelter directors to learn from the presenters and to network with each other. The American Pets Alive! conference is devoted to providing nuts-and-bolts instruction on getting to No Kill. We have several excellent people who offer No Kill consulting services. With all these resources, even shelter directors who are not superstars can be effective and can lead their organizations to No Kill.

Most industries pay attention to where they were in the past and where they are now. Changes over time in the parameters that are important to an industry allow people to figure out what has worked and how progress has been made. One example of statistics being used to measure progress over time are the medical industry’s use of changes in the causes of human mortality. If we see that more people are dying of diabetes, we know that spending more money on diabetes research and therapy would be a good use of tax dollars, for example. The animal shelter industry has traditionally paid little attention to statistics. When animal shelter statistics are invoked, it is often with the purpose of promoting a particular agenda rather than in an unbiased search for the truth. A big part of the reason that the shelter industry has paid little attention to statistics is that we do not have any national mechanism for collection of even the most basic shelter statistics, such as how many shelters there are, what their annual intake is, and how many animals are killed in shelters each year. In spite of the lack of statistics, though, there are a few things we can learn from what we have. Even though the absolute numbers we have are estimates, some of the trend lines are pronounced. Trends over the last 45 years show that sterilization has reduced the number of animals killed in shelters far more than all the other No Kill techniques combined. Even if we look only at the last 15 years, during which No Kill techniques have come to be in wide use, sterilization has still done more to reduce shelter killing than No Kill. This does not mean that No Kill is unimportant – far from it. But it does suggest ways to think about how to improve the situation in some of our most intractable high-kill cities today – cities like Dallas and Houston. Check out this graph of estimated shelter intake and shelter killing from 1970 to 2000: Chart 1 From 1970 to 2000 shelter killing appears to have tracked shelter intake very closely, and during that 30-year period both numbers plummeted. Shelter intake declined from an estimated 26 million animals per year to about 7 million, a reduction of 73%. Shelter killing fell from about 23 million per in 1970 to some 5 million per year in 2000, a 78% decline. Even if those numbers are somewhat off, the trend is pretty unmistakable, and it is borne out by actual numbers from several individual cities and counties. Since shelter killing is a dependent variable to intake, and killing closely tracked intake from 1970 to 2000, an important question is why intake fell so dramatically. There are only three possible reasons for intake to decline significantly. One would be if enforcement changed so that animal control officers were taking in fewer animals. That does not appear to have been what happened between 1970 and 2000. In fact, if anything, enforcement increased during that time because more and more shelters started taking in cats. The second possible explanation is that people became more responsible pet owners and owner surrenders therefore dropped. This may well have happened to some extent. Several shelter directors and workers who were active in the 1970s and 1980s have told me that they noticed that people were more reluctant to surrender animals for trivial reasons. But owner surrenders were only 30-50% of intake in the period from 1970 to 2000, so that alone could not account for the enormous plunge in intake. The third and by far the most likely reason for the fall in intake was two mass sterilization campaigns that took place between 1970 and 2000. These campaigns appear to have resulted in fewer strays in the environment and fewer litters born to owned pets. The first of these spay-neuter campaigns began in the early 1970s at a time when there was a lot of publicity about the pet overpopulation crisis. Pet overpopulation was a real crisis in the 1970s. Shelters were killing an estimated 23 million animals per year at a time when there were only about 60 million owned pets and only about 63 million households in the United States. Thus, there was more than 1 homeless animal each year for every 3 owned pets and every three households. There were also lots of strays in the environment that were never picked up by animal control, and lots of litters being born to owned pets, whose owners gave the puppies and kittens away to friends and neighbors. The pet overpopulation crisis was probably a primary reason why private veterinarians began in the 1970s to recommend to their clients that they spay and neuter their pets. Before the 1970s it was rare for veterinarians to recommend sterilization, both because the surgeries were riskier back then and because veterinarians were not convinced that sterilization was healthy for pets. The second wave of mass spay-neuter progress happened from 1990 to 2000, when organizations began offering large-scale low-cost sterilization programs and pediatric spay-neuter was proven to be a safe technique and became common. It appears likely that sterilization was primarily responsible for the fall in shelter intake of some 73% from 1970 to 2000. Another thing we can deduce from Chart 1 is that in spite of having far fewer animals to deal with, shelters were not taking any effective steps from 1970 to 2000 to increase their live releases. Live releases were about the same in 2000 as in 1970, at about 2 million per year. The fact that live releases stayed the same indicates that shelters during that 30-year period were not making efforts, or at least not making successful efforts, to get more animals out the door alive. Instead, they were relying entirely on fewer animals coming in the door as the way to reduce shelter killing. No Kill did not really take off in the United States until around the year 2000. By 2000 there were quite a few communities that were saving a majority or all of their healthy animals and a lot of their treatable animals. There were even several small city and county shelters that were saving 90% or more of their intake by 2000. No Kill increased rapidly in popularity in the period from 2000 to 2015, and by 2015 a substantial proportion of the U.S. population was living in communities that had an 80% or better live release rate. In Chart 2, we see that in the years from 2000 to 2015, shelter intake stabilized and shelter killing continued to decline, but at a slower rate. Thus, from 2000 to 2015, shelter killing is no longer in lockstep with intake. Another factor must have been present that was increasing live releases. It seems very likely that that factor was No Kill. Does the fact that shelter intake held steady from 2000 to 2015 mean that sterilization programs during those years were no longer important? Not really, as shown by Chart 2: Chart 2 Chart 2 shows that the number of owned pets has continued to grow dramatically from 2000 to 2015, even as shelter intake remained flat in those years. In 1970, the ratio of owned pets to shelter intake was about 2.6 to 1. It is reasonable to assume that such a ratio would still hold true today in the absence of effective spay-neuter initiatives. With a ratio of 2.6 to 1, shelter intake would have been some 50 million per year by 2000 and some 65 million per year by 2015, instead of the 7 million yearly shelter intake we have actually had from 2000 to 2015. If spay-neuter efforts from 2000 to 2015 have prevented an increased intake of 15 million animals per year (65 million minus 50 million) and No Kill efforts from 2000 to 2015 have reduced shelter killing by 2 million per year (5 million minus 3 million), then it is clear that spay-neuter has continued to be the most effective technique to reduce shelter killing even after intake leveled off in the year 2000. It’s not even close. Nevertheless, even though the numerical effect of No Kill programs has been much less than the effect of traditional spay-neuter, No Kill is still an essential part of stopping shelter killing. The two million per year shelter animals that are currently being saved by No Kill shelter reforms is a huge accomplishment, and that number can continue to grow until the great majority of the 7 million animals who come into shelters each year are saved. No Kill also has an importance that goes beyond the numbers. No Kill can make shelters into welcoming community centers. It can prevent the tragedy of a family having to give up a pet because of finances or behavior problems. It can stop the emotional trauma that workers in high-kill shelters suffer. It can illustrate the fact that animal lives have value. And it can influence pet care and veterinary medicine. That’s quite a lot. Now we get to the importance of all this for deciding policies today. One obvious lesson is that sterilization programs remain important to keep shelter intake suppressed. Another less obvious takeaway is that there are some communities that unfortunately do not seem to have been reached by the spay-neuter campaigns of the last 45 years. In the south part of Dallas, Texas, for example, it is reported that 85% of owned dogs have not been sterilized, compared to 12% nationwide. In cities with high intake, or high numbers of free-roaming animals in the environment, a comprehensive spay-neuter program may be the fastest way to bring shelter killing down even today. This illustrates the importance of looking at each community individually when deciding on how to reform the shelter. Some communities may need an old-fashioned sterilization campaign before they can ever hope to sustain a No Kill effort.

This is Part II in a three-part series on how the unique legal status of domestic pets affects the infrastructure of No Kill. Here is a link to Part I:  http://outthefrontdoor.com/2016/02/23/building-the-infrastructure-for-no-kill/. The very first animal shelter in the United States, way back in 1870, was created by a private SPCA that contracted with the city of Philadelphia. Ever since that time, the private sector has been heavily involved in animal control and sheltering. When a historian, Jessica Wang, wrote about public-private partnerships for a prominent academic journal in 2012, animal control and sheltering was the model she chose to use.* Today the list of cities and counties that have gotten to No Kill (or gotten close) by contracting or partnering with the private sector is long: Austin, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Richmond, Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Fairfax County, San Diego County, Washington DC, Baltimore, New York City, Williamson County, Washoe County, Kansas City (MO), Seattle, Portland, and San Antonio come to mind. And there are a slew of smaller communities that have gotten to No Kill by means of partnerships as well. I cannot think of any sizable jurisdiction that has gotten to No Kill by the efforts of a city-run or county-run shelter alone, although Hillsborough County in Florida (home of Tampa) is close, as are a few others. Why is this? What is the power of the private sector that makes the difference in whether a city gets to No Kill or not? The answer lies in the fact that animal control and sheltering are two very distinct missions, and cities are responsible for only one of those missions – animal control. Animal control, to put it simply, involves protecting people from animals. Animal sheltering, again putting it simply, involves protecting and helping the animals themselves. Cities in the United States began doing dog control in the early 1800s to protect people from the threat of rabies. There was no rabies vaccine until the last years of the 1800s, either for people or dogs, and people were terrified of catching rabies from stray dogs. Stray dogs also posed a danger to people in horse-drawn carriages, as they could spook the horses and cause runaways that often ended in death or serious injury. People in the 1800s saw dog control as a matter of life and death, and cities reacted accordingly by rounding up and killing stray dogs – usually by brutal means. The Philadelphia-based SPCA that took over the city’s dog control department in 1870 was made up of private citizens who were outraged at the cruelty of the city dog catchers. Private groups in several other cities took over some or all animal control functions in the late 1800s, including in Boston and New York City. By the early 1900s a rabies vaccine was widely available in the United States and fear of the disease gradually abated. The early 1900s saw a greatly increased concern with other animal-related public health issues, however, and animal control continued to be an important city function. As the years went by, private non-profit humane societies and SPCAs continued to be involved in animal control and sheltering. Under our federal governing system, the responsibility to manage municipal functions is assigned to the states. The states delegate most of those functions to city and county government, with state oversight through laws and regulations. Local governments are charged with the responsibility for the health and safety of citizens, and so they are responsible for policing, fire-fighting, and many aspects of public health. It is no accident that animal control units are often part of the police or health departments, because animal control (as distinct from animal sheltering) is considered to be a public safety function. Because animals are property, municipal governments generally do not have the authority to protect an animal based solely on its interest in its life. Even cruelty laws are ultimately justified on the ground that cruelty harms the moral fiber of the humans who engage in it. Finding new homes for homeless animals for their own sake is not part of a city or county’s core obligations. It is difficult for local governments to justify spending tax dollars to save the lives of homeless animals whose lives have no legal status, especially when the money could be used for things like schools, infrastructure, etc. that are clearly within the duties of government. The private sector does not have that constraint, and private organizations are free to spend their funds on trying to find unclaimed animals new homes. Thus, animal sheltering for the purpose of saving animals’ lives came to be a private function provided largely by non-profits. The non-profits might have an informal relationship with the city shelter or serve as the city shelter themselves either by contract or voluntarily. Public-private partnerships have the disadvantage that you lose the efficiency of having just one organizational chain. That lesser efficiency is outweighed, though, by having more creativity, more people involved, and more resources. The beauty of a private organization contracting with a city to provide animal control and sheltering is that the private organization can supplement the contract payment from the city with private donations. Another important advantage of public-private partnerships for animal sheltering is that private organizations usually have more flexibility in hiring decisions. In Part I of this series I wrote about several large cities that have gotten to No Kill. In each case, cooperation between the public and private sector was key. It is possible in very small towns for one person to make the difference in how a shelter operates, but in a jurisdiction that is too large for one person to handle single-handedly, cooperation is by far the most common route to success. What conclusions can we draw from all of this? One conclusion is that since partnerships are so important to No Kill, people have to be able to work together cooperatively for No Kill to happen. We need private agencies to be able to work with each other, with the shelter, and with the city. And that means that divisiveness is the enemy of No Kill. People often joke that back-biting and internecine warfare are more common among rescues than with just about any other type of institution. That has to stop. No matter how hard it may be for people who hate each other to work together, it has to be done. The goal is too important for individual enmities to be allowed to matter. There are arguments that can be made that animal sheltering, and not just animal control, should be a local government function. Pets are very important to people, and citizens in some jurisdictions have voted for extra taxes for No Kill animal sheltering. No Kill may attract people to a city, and pay for itself in that way. It seems unlikely that city and county governments will be willing to take on a duty to save all savable animals, though, because this is an era when most local governments seem to be trying to shed duties rather than take on new ones. And having cities and counties take over sole responsibility for animal control and sheltering would mean losing the flexibility and creativity that public-private partnerships have shown. We have a system in public-private partnerships that works extremely well for No Kill. Now we just need to make sure that every city and county has such a system. * Jessica Wang, “Dogs and the Making of the American State: Voluntary Association, State Power, and the Politics of Animal Control in New York City, 1850–1920,” Journal of American History 98 (March 2012): 1005-1006. doi: 10.1093/jahist/jar566.

Michigan is one of the handful of states that (1) require shelters in the state to report their statistics and (2) make the reports available online. The Michigan Pet Fund Alliance has kept track of these statistics for years, and recently they’ve released a summary covering the nine years from 2007 to 2015. The statistics show a big decline in shelter euthanasia, from 118,369 in 2007 to 27,250 in 2015. That’s a drop of 77%. A survey of most-improved shelters that the Michigan Pet Fund Alliance did recently showed that the shelters attributed their success to a change to a “compassionate director.” While a change to a new director may well have been a factor in some shelters in the state, the statistics show a quite different story for the state as a whole. According to the Michigan Pet Fund Alliance report, about 88% of the drop in the number of animals killed from 2007 to 2015 was due to fewer animals coming into Michigan shelters. Only 12% of the drop in shelter killing was due to more animals going out the door alive. Thus, the reason that Michigan shelters improved so much since 2007 was largely because shelters had fewer animals to start with, not because of any big increases in adoptions and return-to-owner. I reached out to Deborah Schutt, head of the Michigan Pet Fund Alliance, and asked her if she had any ideas about why shelter intake had dropped so much between 2007 and 2015. The first thing she mentioned in response was low-cost, high-volume spay/neuter programs. She pointed out that All About Animals Rescue (AAAR), which was founded in 2005, has been doing almost 25,000 surgeries per year, including TNR and return-to-field. Shelter intake in the county where AAAR is headquartered has dropped from 8,023 to 2,400 since 2009. Michigan’s shelter intake in 2015 was about 14 animals per 1000 people, which puts it on the low end of the average range of intake. In 2007, intake was about 23 animals per 1000 people, which is considered to be average. Some people have the misconception (no pun intended) that spay/neuter programs were an invention of No Kill. That’s incorrect. Although No Kill embraces spay/neuter programs, the big campaign to get people to spay and neuter their pets was started by humane advocates and the traditional shelter industry circa 1970, before the No Kill movement existed. At about the same time, shelter intake in the United States began to plummet. Shelter intake is thought to have been static in the U.S. as a whole since around the year 2000, but Michigan demonstrates that there is still more to be gained, at least in some places, by low-cost, high-volume spay/neuter programs. Pet retention programs can also reduce intake. Roughly half of shelter intake on average is owner surrenders, and some pet retention programs have claimed high rates of success. Managed admission can also reduce intake, as experience has shown that many owners are able to find a new home for their pets themselves, especially when the shelter helps them arrange a social media campaign or referral to a rescue. It is unclear whether such programs have been widespread enough in Michigan in the years from 2007 to 2015 to have contributed much to the fall in intake. It’s interesting that shelter intake in Colorado increased a small amount — about 3% — from 2007 to 2015, during the same period when shelter intake in Michigan was dropping by 37%. Yet Colorado today has a higher average live release rate than Michigan. This reinforces the idea that No Kill progress can be made in a variety of different ways. It may be that one of the reasons that shelter consultants have such a good success rate in improving community live releases is that they know how to look at the whole picture and see what needs to be changed. For a small shelter run by a non-profit in a resort or college town, a director with good marketing and management skills may be all that’s needed, and the transition to No Kill may be quick. In a city like San Antonio or Dallas with a serious stray problem, low spay/neuter rates, and low return-to-owner rates, one or more large, non-profit partners and an aggressive spay/neuter program may be needed. No Kill may take years to achieve in those tougher circumstances. The Michigan Pet Fund Alliance is having their annual conference next week. They deserve kudos not only for collating shelter statistics all these years, but also for telling Michigan shelters how they are doing and giving awards to high-performing shelters. Their work has no doubt been part of the progress in Michigan.

Rifle is a small town of about 9000 people in Garfield County, Colorado. The Rifle Animal Shelter, which is assisted by the non-profit Friends of the Rifle Animal Shelter, takes in several hundred animals per year. I spoke to a shelter representative who told me that the shelter has contracts with the cities of Rifle and Parachute to take in strays, and accepts owner surrenders with no restrictions except a small fee. The shelter and the Friends reported a combined 98% live release rate in 2010 and again in 2011 (scroll down in the linked documents). The shelter and Friends reported no owner-requested euthanasia in either year, and the live release rate was not significantly lower with animals who died or were lost in shelter care included in with euthanasias. The Rifle Animal Shelter also reports its statistics to the state of Colorado. In 2012, the shelter took in 769 animals and had a live release rate of 99%. For 2013, Rifle reported to the state of Colorado that it had an intake of 1200 animals. Of those, 926 were adopted out. The live release rate was 99.4%. If animals who died in shelter care are counted with euthanasias, the live release rate was 97%. Rifle is one of a group of communities in the area west of Denver that report to Maddie’s Fund and the Asilomar Accords as part of the Northwestern Colorado Coalition. Other members of the coalition are Summit, Garfield, Pitkin, and Eagle counties and the cities of Aspen and Glenwood Springs. The coalition reported an overall 97% live release rate in 2010 and 98% in 2011 (see pages 1-2 in the links). Rifle, CO, was originally listed by this blog on May 6, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

I’d like to say thanks to everyone who commented and sent me e-mails about the blog’s listing criteria going forward. The suggestions were really great and have helped me a lot in making a decision. I’ve decided to go with the idea of asking the non-transparent shelters to provide their statistics to me as an official statement which can be uploaded to the blog. The way I’m going to implement this is to move all communities that do not have their statistics publicly accessible to a separate, temporary page on the blog that I will call “Other 90%+.” Then I will send an e-mail, with a copy of the Basic Matrix attached, to the shelter directors for each of the “Other 90%+” communities and ask that the matrix (or a similar form) be filled out and returned to me within 30 days, along with a statement from the director that the form represents the shelter’s statistics for the year 2013 and that I have permission to post it or link to it on the blog. In the meantime I will reduce the running totals to reflect the smaller number of communities in the right sidebar. There will be quite a drop in the totals, but hopefully it will be only temporary. Communities that do not respond to the inquiry within 30 days will be moved to the Worth Watching page or dropped. In order to keep the requirements for listing uniform across the board, I’m going to require that shelters either list publicly, or send to me for posting, statistics that include at least intake, adoptions, returns-to-owner, transfers, and euthanasias. If I have any question whether transfers are to other 90%+ organizations I will check that with the shelters. If a shelter operates as part of a coalition and coalition statistics are provided, the statistics must be corrected for intra-coalition transfers. This will take some time to implement, so the blog will be a mess for the next few weeks. Thanks in advance for your patience. Even if we come out of this with a much smaller number of communities, I think it will be worth it because we will have much more uniform information about the communities that are listed. For whatever reasons, most shelter directors do not make statistics a priority. That will never change unless we start supporting the idea that transparency is important.

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.

Several public shelters reported progress on live releases this week. The Southern Pines Animal Shelter in Mississippi takes in almost 5000 animals per year and provides animal sheltering for a county of 75,000 people as well as for surrounding counties. They had a live release rate of over 75% for 2014, but in the last 5 months they have been over 90% each month. Shelter manager Ginny Sims attributes the improvement to new programs, fosters, volunteers, and new partnerships. Sacramento’s city shelter, the Front Street Animal Shelter, has made great strides since director Gina Knepp took over in 2011. Now comes word that the Sacramento County shelter has also improved by using adoption specials. Director David Dickenson says the live release rate at the county shelter so far this year is 75%. The Los Angeles Animal Shelter reports a 73% save rate currently, with 85% for dogs and 57% for cats. Best Friends, through its No Kill Los Angeles initiative, is trying to reduce the kill rate for cats with a neonatal kitten program and support for TNR and return-to-field. The City of Calistoga, California, has decided to grant a contract to the Petaluma Animal Services Foundation (PASF) for animal control and sheltering. This article about the process describes how a social media campaign helped to persuade city officials to select PASF over a rival bidder based on PASF’s history of higher live release rates, even though the PASF bid will cost the city slightly more. In transport news, shelter dogs are being flown as carry-on passengers on commercial flights from the Big Island of Hawaii to the Portland, Oregon, area. About 60 dogs have been placed through this program so far. Brent Toellner has two blog posts on length of stay – the importance of managing it, and how to decrease it. And Peter Wolf’s Vox Felina blog is celebrating its five-year anniversary. The fourth in the Maddie’s Fund series of free webcasts on the five initiatives of the Million Cat Challenge is set for Tuesday, April 28, at 9 PM EST. The presenters are Ollie Davidson, program director at the Tree House Animal Shelter in Chicago, and Kathleen Olson, director of a Washington state shelter with intake of over 12,000 animals per year. Both shelters improved the shelter environment and saved more animals after instituting capacity for care programs. Register here. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer is criticizing NYC Animal Care & Control. The AC&C has a five-year contract with the city. The Humane Society of Silicon Valley won the Shorty Award in the Best Social Good category for its “Eddie the Terrible” marketing campaign. PetSmart Charities has an interactive page showing its impact by state. The Center for Shelter Dogs has many webinars covering a variety of topics. The Humane Society of Utah has a cat room with remote-controlled toys that people can operate online through the iPet Companion website. In addition to amusing the cats, the shelter hopes that the promotion will call attention to available cats and help change the perception of the shelter as a sad place.

Nevada County is located in northern California, and it shares a border with the state of Nevada. The county has almost 100,000 human residents. On July 1, 2010, a non-profit called Sammie’s Friends took over management of the Nevada County Animal Shelter from the county sheriff’s office. Animal control is still done by the sheriff’s office. In addition to the strays picked up by animal control, the shelter accepts stray animals from the public. It also accepts owner surrenders “when possible” and with a small fee. Shelter director Cheryl Wicks wrote an article for the spring 2012 newsletter in which she takes us through a day in the life of the shelter. As she says: “Running the shelter is a little like driving an ambulance, you must go fast and pay attention to detail because somebody’s life may depend on it. You must be ready to turn on a dime at any moment because amongst the everyday work there are endless surprises.” Curt Romander, a co-founder of Sammie’s Friends, told me: “We have a large budget dedicated to medical care of sick or injured animals that come into the shelter. This budget is funded by donations from the community and grants. We are also funded by proceeds from our thrift store which has been very successful.” The spring 2014 newsletter describes how Sammie’s Friends funded veterinary care for the shelter and for animals in the community for years before taking over the shelter. Romander sent me full statistics for the shelter for 2013, and they are linked here: Nevada County CA 2013 Statistics. He notes that the shelter has “maintained a euthanasia rate below 1% for the past 4 years.” My calculation of the live release rate for 2013 was 99.4%. The modified live release rate, with deaths in foster care, at the veterinarian, and at the shelter counted with euthanasias, is 96%. The shelter places most of its animals by adoption, with 1147 animals (71% of its 2013 intake of 1626 animals) having been adopted. This is an adoption rate of 12 per thousand people. The spring 2013 newsletter describes one challenging case — a bonded pair of large, nine-year-old dogs who were aggressive toward cats. The shelter placed the dogs with a foster who trained them to leave cats alone, and ultimately adopted both of them. Nevada County, CA, was originally listed by this blog on April 30, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on August 29, 2005. The epic destruction that followed resulted in a revamping of US disaster preparedness, including big changes in how pets are treated by disaster relief agencies. In this article, Becky Robinson, the head of Alley Cat Allies, looks back at the changes in cat protection protocols in the decade since Katrina. Update on the Irvine Animal Care Center in California: The Irvine shelter had a great reputation until last year, when charges surfaced that the shelter had deviated from its No Kill mission. Two managers have since resigned. A report on the shelter made by a veterinarian who trained at the UC Davis shelter medicine program is now in, and it recommends team decisions on euthanasia and changes to dog behavior evaluations. Further reports on other aspects of the shelter’s performance will be forthcoming. This article has a look at the dismal state of things in several Louisiana and Arkansas shelters. The article highlights the fact that animal sheltering is still today, as it always has been in the United States, a system of haves and have-nots. It would be interesting to know how the cities featured in the article compare to more successful communities on metrics such as shelter funding, intake per thousand people, household income, education level, spay-neuter rates of owned pets, number of cats who have received TNR, etc. The Million Cat Challenge booth at HSUS Expo this past week was very popular, and the Challenge signed up a lot of new members. A new textbook – Animal Behavior for Shelter Veterinarians and Staff – will be released in June. One of the most controversial issues in No Kill sheltering right now is how to evaluate temperament in shelter animals, so this book fills a need. It is authored by three experts with the ASPCA. The book is mentioned in this report on the National Council on Pet Population’s second research symposium last year. Researchers in North Carolina and Connecticut have devised a program to track outdoor cats. Science on outdoor cats is fraught with controversy over the extent to which domestic cats affect wildlife. The early results from the Cat Tracker study suggest that the answer could turn out to be – not much. The study has data on 100 cats so far, and the results are that most cats “stay close to home.” Many times when cats do wander they are visiting another home nearby rather than massacring wildlife. Robin Starr, the CEO of the Richmond SPCA, spoke out strongly this past week on the occasion of the Virginia governor signing a bill redefining “private animal shelter” to clarify that the purpose of shelters is to adopt animals out to new homes. Speaking of the extraordinarily high kill rate at PETA’s “shelter,” Starr said that PETA’s argument that most of the animals it receives are old, sick, or injured is no excuse, since the Richmond SPCA receives such animals too, and it treats and rehabilitates them and finds them homes. In transport news, the ASPCA has a program called the Nancy Silverman Rescue Ride which will transport 9000 cats and dogs from the southeast to the northeast over the next three years. The inaugural trip was in January, moving 11 dogs from South Carolina to Washington, DC. Huntsville, Alabama, had a successful adoption event last Thursday as part of the North Shore Tour for Life event. Local No Kill activists have been urging the shelter to hold low-cost adoption events for years, so this is a step in the right direction. The shelter had only a 74% save rate last year, however, so it has a long way to go. A free mobile training program in Jacksonville by Pit Sisters offers basic manners classes for dogs living in zip codes identified as having the highest numbers of owner surrenders. This blog post by Animal Farm Foundation, which awarded a grant for the program, has an interview with the founder of Pit Sisters. Progress is reported at the Rowan County Animal Shelter. Rowan County is in a rural area northeast of Charlotte, North Carolina. It has about 138,000 residents and the shelter has a high intake. Transports are part of the shelter’s improvement. Stealing of pet dogs for food has become a big problem in Vietnam, and owners are fighting back. This NBC News article describes a growing phenomenon of people in villages targeted by dog thieves banding together to fight them. In one case in 2012, it ended with 10 villagers being convicted of the murder of two dog thieves who were caught in the act. Since then at least 20 more dog thieves have been killed by people defending their dogs. The villagers argue that they have been forced to defend their dogs because the police do not take dog stealing seriously. Scholarships for students who foster and help adopt out pets for a No Kill shelter – what could be better?

Macomb County, which has a population of about 850,000 people, is immediately northeast of Detroit and is part of the Detroit metro area. In January 2013 Macomb County appointed Jeff Randazzo as manager of the county animal shelter. He reports that the shelter has gone from an 80% kill rate to an 80% save rate. He cites pet retention, SNR, modificiations to the physical environment of the shelter, and other changes as reasons for the improvement. Francis Battista reports the final statistics from two community cat projects, in Albuquerque and San Antonio, that Best Friends did in collaboration with PetSmart Charities. The three-year programs led to a drop in cat intake in Albuquerque and a plummeting of cat euthanasia in both cities. Here’s an article by Dawn Erwin on Texas bill SB 1911, which will be heard on Tuesday, and which could greatly complicate veterinary treatment for shelter animals in Texas. The Koret shelter medicine program has provided links to presentation materials for several lectures at the recent HSUS Expo, including a talk by Dr. Kate Hurley on “Implementing the Cat Revolution.” Lots of transports happened this weekend. Wings of Rescue alone transported 250 dogs and cats from southern California to the Pacific northwest. In Eau Clare County, Wisconsin, the shelter has run out of dogs and is taking in dogs from other counties. Huffington Post has a wonderful article about the rescue of the Vick dogs – how several organizations pulled together and how the precedent they set has allowed former fighting dogs to have a chance for life. KC Pet Project has another in their series of miracle reunions, brought about by staff who will not give up on returning pets to their owners. In this latest case, they found a microchip in a stray cat but the numbers for the owner had been disconnected. They contacted a friend whose number had been provided as an emergency contact and were finally able to connect with the owner. It had been 7 years since the cat was lost! Owner and cat were both delighted with the reunion. Maddie’s has compiled a master list of Lost and Found pages. A great tribute to Rich Avanzino from Gregory Castle of Best Friends. Don’t miss the Maddie’s webcast this Tuesday on managed admissions. The Northeast Animal Shelter, established in 1976, has had 120,000 adoptions. A thoughtful post from John Sibley on New York City breaking the 90% barrier in February. CNN Money did an investigation in 15 cities and counties across the United States and found that dogs are being killed for unpaid fines. The investigation also found thousands of warrants that are pending for minor infractions relating to pets. Best Friends has marketing help available to its network partners for adoption specials each month throughout the year. The help includes “downloadable, customizable flyers and emails, Web banners, social media images, and much more.” A new textbook, Animal Behavior for Shelter Veterinarians and Staff, is coming out soon and it has chapters on shelter enrichment for dogs and cats. It’s appreciation week for both volunteers and animal control officers. It seems as though the USDA and PIJAC are both supporting an effort to develop standards for dog breeders. What could possibly go wrong? Here are links to the blog and Twitter feed of Dr. Jessica Hekman and the blog and Twitter feed of Dr. Julie Hecht. Lots of interesting reading on the Science of Dog.

The Chester County SPCA (CCSPCA) is an open admission shelter that serves two counties in Pennsylvania – Chester and Delaware. Chester and Delaware are contiguous counties lying just west of Philadelphia. Chester County has a high median income, whereas Delaware County is closer to average. Together, the two counties have a population of over 1 million people. The CCSPCA got a new board in 2013 following allegations of mismanagement. The board hired two directors, neither of whom lasted very long, and since last September it has had another new director, Adam Lamb. The shelter says it has saved over 90% of its animals in each of the last four months. The shelter has started new programs, including a TNR program, pet retention, wellness programs for pets, kennel enrichment, follow up on adoptions, and revised adoption procedures. It has expanded its hours and is spending more on vet care. The shelter has received a grant of $305,000 from PetSmart Charities to start a community-cat program that can help 4700 cats over the next 26 months. Intake for 2013 was reported as 5690, which is an intake of only 5 pets per thousand people. That is quite low, although it is similar to the intake for the open-admission shelter in Fairfax County, just outside of Washington, DC. The shelter has posted its full statistics for the past 5 months, but does not post statistics further back because it has transitioned to a new, more transparent method of reporting statistics. In a phone call to the shelter I was told that CCSPCA does animal control for some townships. Other townships have their own staff who bring animals to the shelter once picked up. [edited 4-2-2015]