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

On September 8th, San Antonio’s Animal Care Services (ACS) announced that it had met the No Kill standard of a 90% live release rate (LRR). Sounds great – but the news report, and another report, said that the shelter is defining the national standard for No Kill as 90% of healthy and treatable animals. That’s wrong – the generally accepted No Kill standard is 90% of all intake. I’ve never heard of No Kill being defined as saving 90% of healthy-treatables. My perusal of the stats posted on the ACS website did not indicate that they will be at 90% or better for their latest fiscal year, which ends at the end of September – instead it looks more like the LRR for the year, calculated by the standard Asilomar method, will be closer to 85%. I’m a big fan of the San Antonio effort – they are working really hard and the 85% or so that they have achieved so far is a fabulous accomplishment under the circumstances they are dealing with. They want to do even better. They are transparent, posting their full statistics online, and I do not think they were intentionally trying to deceive anyone. In fact, San Antonio would be on my short list of amazing American cities working to improve shelter lifesaving. But I don’t think they should be saying that saving 90% of healthy-treatables is “No Kill,” because that isn’t a generally accepted definition of No Kill. And the LRR for any individual month should not be used as a basis to claim No Kill, in my opinion, since LRR can vary a lot from month to month during the year. So ACS – keep up your wonderful work, but please wait to claim No Kill status until you have chalked up an LRR of 90% or above based on total intake, for an entire year. I’m sure that will be soon. The six public shelters in Los Angeles take in about 55,000 animals per year. For fiscal year 2014-2015, the “save rate” was 78.5%. For dogs the number was 88.4%, which is encouraging, but for cats it was only 68.7%. Best Friends announced last July that they had run the numbers from 2014 and decided that the best way to increase lifesaving for cats would be to open a second kitten nursery. Best Friend’s existing kitten nursery in Los Angeles is currently caring for about 2150 kittens per year, but they want to add another 4400 kittens each year to the effort. If that plan is successful, it should make a huge difference in the Los Angeles live release rate. The Humane Society of Silicon Valley, which won the Shorty Award earlier this year in the Best Social Good category for its “Eddie the Terrible” marketing campaign, is back with another bizarrely hilarious proposal. This time they are looking for fosters for ringworm kittens. I posted a couple of weeks ago that two of the four counties in Michigan that still used a gas chamber to kill shelter animals had stopped the practice. Now one of the two remaining counties, Cass County, has announced that it will stop using its gas chamber by January 1, 2016, if not sooner. The remaining Michigan county that still uses a gas chamber, Branch County, had its shelter damaged by a fire last May, but unfortunately the gas chamber was not damaged. County officials may bar the use of the chamber once the shelter is repaired and reopened. Meanwhile Sandy City, Utah, will stop the use of its gas chamber beginning next year. The leaders of the city of Waco and McLennan County had a “state of the city and county” dinner recently. The major achievement mentioned by the Waco mayor was how the city has increased the live release rate at the public shelter since taking it over two years ago. There has been a trend in the past year or two for cities and counties to realize that having a No Kill public shelter is an important asset. Kudos to the Waco mayor for understanding the value of what Waco has achieved and how much it says about the city. Another city that realizes the value of No Kill is Atlanta. This story quotes the chairperson of the board of LifeLine, the non-profit contractor that has revolutionized Atlanta’s shelters, on the importance of a lifesaving shelter in attracting new people to Atlanta. LifeLine has recruited over 100 rescue partners since taking over the contracts in 2013 for the two shelters that serve Atlanta. The American Bird Conservancy strikes again, as a participant in a stealth plan to try to destroy TNR in Washington, DC. The nation’s capital has come a long way toward No Kill in recent years, and TNR has been a big part of it. Now the city’s Department of the Environment is asking the city to adopt its proposed Wildlife Action Plan, which, on pages 145-146, asks that government-sanctioned TNR programs in the district be re-examined. Instead of returning the cats to their territory after sterilization, the plan suggests that they be taken in by shelters (this is code for saying that the cats should be killed, since most of them are feral and not adoptable) and that the government should support the “cats indoors” program. I hope the city doesn’t fall for this. Adams Morgan, a neighborhood in DC, was the site of a groundbreaking TNR project in 1990 that led to the formation of Alley Cat Allies. The TNR project gradually reduced the number of feral cats and now there are none where the original colony was. I’m sure that Alley Cat Allies and other groups will present the overwhelming evidence in favor of TNR as not only the most humane but the most effective and least costly method of feral cat control. The Washington Humane Society, which currently does TNR, was blindsided by the plan (they were not consulted) and they are arguing against it. There is something a little absurd in the idea of the District trying to make itself into a replica of how nature was in the time before people poured concrete over everything. If the bird people really want to protect the birds, they would be better off using their energy to promote “smart growth” for new construction in the District rather than persecuting cats. There are several other important cat-related stories this week: The New Yorker has a video on TNR that does a good job of showing how much work and care goes into TNR. Unfortunately the video cites the cat predation numbers from the infamous 2013 Smithsonian study without comment on how unlikely those numbers are on their face, but that is a flaw in an otherwise good video. The Texas State Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners has found that veterinarian Kristen Lindsey (whose name you may recall from a controversy over an allegation that she had killed a cat with a bow and arrow) committed an unspecified violation. More details will be announced in October. HSUS has two “Rethinking the Cat” symposiums coming up, on September 18 in Indianapolis and September 24 in Madison, Wisconsin. A recent study posted on PlosOne points out that there are lots of people who are feeding feral cats but not taking them in for TNR. Dr. Emily Weiss connects the dots by asking if we should be seeking ways to recruit these people, not necessarily to do TNR themselves, but to take responsibility to contact organizations that do TNR. Asheville’s city council has unanimously approved Brother Wolf’s bid for permission to open a cat cafe in the “heart of downtown.” Don’t miss this blog by Dr. Kate Hurley on what makes a “good and worthwhile life” in animal welfare. A few more news bits in what has been a busy week: A rescue group that started helping the Smyth County Animal Shelter in Virginia last year reports that it has decreased the shelter’s euthanasia rate from 89% to 14%. The Elizabethton/Carter County shelter in Tennessee has a new director with big plans to increase its live release rate. El Paso, Texas, may be the worst city in the United States for shelter animals. Here is a thoughtful article about some of the problems in Dallas with free-roaming dogs. “Urgent” pages have saved a lot of lives, but they can also create a lot of counterproductive drama. This post on the Maddie’s Fund blog describes one shelter director’s innovations for running a more effective Urgent page. This article about the new Virginia law on animal shelters gives more attention to PETA’s views than to the proponents of the law, but it gives an idea of the battle currently being waged. Hillary Clinton, pet parent to two mixed-breed dogs, had a great response to a question about puppy mills, saying that they are terrible places for animals and we need to do more about them. Hand2Paw, a Philadelphia non-profit, helps young people who have aged out of foster care at age 18 with no place to go by providing volunteer and intern experience working with homeless animals at local shelters. Some of the young people have been hired as shelter workers. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg animal shelter has successfully implemented a managed admission plan. The plan, which includes helping owners to retain their pets, has reduced admissions by a startling 30%. The shelter reports that the community has embraced the new plan.

To borrow a phrase from the last few State of the Union speeches, the state of No Kill — is strong. In fact, it’s great. But the movement is now at a place where it behooves us to take stock and think about where we are and where we’re going. So here is my two cents on the State of No Kill. No Kill has matured enough as a movement that it has divided into two wings. We have a moderate, practical group that is made up of people who are doing the boots-on-the-ground work and direct support of boots-on-the-ground. These people include the directors of No Kill shelters, the active consultants, the donor organizations, the people in large national organizations who are working on individual community No Kill efforts, and shelter medicine specialists. The moderate wing has been enormously successful, as can be seen by the rapid growth of No Kill communities. The second faction is what I call the radical wing. It is made up of advocates who speak directly to the public and try to get them to take action to reform their local shelters through grassroots political and social pressure. The radical wing is led by Nathan Winograd, and it has also been very successful at what it does. In my work I frequently see cases where grassroots pressure from local people has caused city or county leaders to pay attention to their animal shelter. Pressure by itself does not create No Kill, and it seems to me that these communities do not actually succeed in getting to No Kill without people from the moderate middle coming in and taking the practical steps to effect the transition, but the radical wing can wake people up and give the moderate middle a chance to work. The State of No Kill is not perfect, though. The biggest issue I see right now is that No Kill moderates have not developed a leadership class to speak for them as a whole. Right now No Kill has been proven to work anywhere, under any circumstances, although some communities (San Antonio, for example) face far greater challenges than others. But there is no leadership structure in the moderate group to carry this message. This appears to be because the moderate middle is large and diverse, consisting as it does of several big organizations and hundreds of individuals who are actively managing No Kill shelters and programs. The radical wing has tried to fill this gap to some extent by talking about No Kill successes, but the radical wing lacks credibility with the traditional shelter establishment because the radical wing’s leaders are, by and large, engaged in advocacy rather than in the day-to-day work of running No Kill shelters. The radical wing, in my opinion, is more effective at its core mission, which is to get the No Kill message out to the masses and to urge existing No Kill communities to become even better. The reason that most effective movements have more than one wing is precisely because there is more than one message that needs to be conveyed. The radical wing of advocates has enough to do carrying its message of the faults with the system. It should not be expected to also carry the positive message of the moderate group of boots-on-the-ground creators of No Kill communities. No Kill moderates are ideally positioned at this time to move the traditional shelter establishment rapidly in the direction of No Kill. The debate about the effectiveness of No Kill is over. There is a need now for the traditional shelter establishment to hear from a moderate No Kill faction that is speaking with a clear voice. A moderate middle that is not interested in criticizing the traditional shelter establishment or in setting standards that the traditional establishment thinks are unattainable. Instead, the message of the moderates should be “we are people who are currently working in open-admission No Kill shelters and we understand what your problems are and we are here to help you.” There are signs that No Kill’s moderates are coalescing. A recent example is the Million Cat Challenge, which has a long list of signatories from the moderate middle. The Challenge got off to an impressive start and I can’t help but think that the support of the signatories had a lot to do with it. And in recent years the Best Friends No More Homeless Pets Conference has become a kind of de facto meeting place for No Kill moderates. The natural next step is for No Kill’s moderates to formalize in some fashion a leadership structure to guide its outreach to the traditional shelter establishment. It would be helpful if that leadership started off by setting some standards — i.e., what does “No Kill” mean, what is an “open admission” shelter, how should shelters calculate their statistics, what is required for shelter transparency, what are best practices, etc. This would be a big, much-needed, and worthwhile task all by itself. An even greater need, however, is for the moderates to be able to speak with a unified voice to the traditional shelter establishment, to let that establishment know that No Kill is now mainstream and that we will welcome them in joining us.

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

La Plata County is located in southwestern Colorado and has 51,000 residents. Its county seat is Durango, which has 17,000 residents. The impounding agency for the city and county is La Plata County Humane Society (LPCHS), which has an animal control division. LPCHS describes itself as an “open-admission animal shelter.” The shelter accepts owner surrenders from La Plata County and Durango but asks that people call first. A shelter representative told me that, in addition to open-admission acceptance of La Plata and Durango animals, LPCHS also accepts animals from outside of its jurisdiction when it has room. All animals are spayed or neutered, vaccinated, and microchipped before they leave the shelter. The shelter offers owner-requested euthanasia. LPCHS participates in the PetSmart Charities Rescue Waggin’ program. This article describes a recent transport from LPCHS to the Humane Society of Boulder Valley. LPCHS shelter director Chris Nelson said they had not euthanized a dog for space since they began to participate in the program. Lisa Pedersen, director of the Humane Society of Boulder Valley, said they might be short of dogs to adopt out without the transfers. She attributed that fact to the attitude of people in Boulder Valley, stating that adoption from the shelter was the “popular choice” for people in the area. LPCHS submits its statistics to the state of Colorado. For 2013, total intake was 3047 animals. This gives the shelter an extremely high pets-per-thousand-people rate of 60. The shelter adopted out 1905 animals and transferred 193. The live release rate was 92%. The modified live release rate including shelter deaths was 91%.

Lake County is in west central Colorado and has a population of 7300 people. The city of Leadville, the county seat, has 2600 inhabitants. Lake County is in an extremely mountainous area, and it has an elevation that is mostly above 9000 feet. The county contains the highest peak in Colorado, Mt. Elbert. The Leadville/Lake County Animal Shelter (LLCAS) is run by the city and county. I called the shelter and was told that LLCAS accepts owner surrenders from its jurisdiction subject to a small fee and on a space-available basis. The shelter is open 7 days a week and closes only on major holidays. Statistics from the Colorado Department of Agriculture for 2012 show that LLCAS took in 181 dogs and cats in 2012 and had a live release rate of 99% for 2012 (98% if the one animal who died in shelter care is included with euthanasias). The shelter’s intake was 25 animals per 1000 people in 2012. In 2013, the shelter’s intake increased to 208 animals. The live release rate was 99%, or 96% if the animals who died in shelter care are included with euthanasias. Lake County was originally listed by this blog on November 25, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

First, a housekeeping note – if your organization does not already have my blog on your press release distribution list, please feel free to add it. My e-mail is administrator@outthefrontdoor.com. And now to the news. Brother Wolf, the innovative non-profit that has worked with the county shelter in Asheville, North Carolina, to go No Kill, has announced a 5-year plan to build a large sanctuary that will eventually house 600 dogs and 600 cats on 82.5 acres. The purpose of the sanctuary is to rehabilitate animals who need more time and care than the existing shelters can easily provide. The $4.9 million sanctuary will have a veterinary clinic on site. The plans include a learning center and guest cabins for visitors. Brother Wolf’s founder and president, Denise Bitz, decided to leave her career as a nurse and open Brother Wolf after a visit to Best Friends in 2010, so she is familiar with the life-changing experiences that a sanctuary can provide. Paul Berry, a former CEO of Best Friends, is now the executive director of Brother Wolf. There are several upcoming conferences. The SPARCS International Conference on Dog Behavior is being held in Phoenix on June 19-21. The presenters include Michael Hennessy, who will speak on reducing stress in shelter dogs. Best Friends National Conference is being held July 16-19 in Atlanta. The 12th annual ASPCA Cornell Maddie’s Shelter Medicine Conference is being held on July 31-August 2 in Ithaca. Pets who are overdue on their rabies vaccines and come in contact with a rabid animal can safely receive booster vaccination rather than quarantine or euthanasia, according to a study published in JAVMA. This finding will be included in the upcoming edition of the definitive rabies public health guide later this year, which should result in it becoming standard practice. A government office in New Mexico teamed up with a rescue to set up a cat library. The way it works is that an employee who needs a break during the day can “check out” a cat for a short period of fun and relaxation. The program has resulted in 100 adoptions in three years. Speaking of libraries, reading to shy shelter animals helps them come out of their shells. Big news from Houston this week. The city shelter, BARC, had a ribbon-cutting celebration for the opening of Phase I of its $6.1 million adoption center. The city has also brought Emancipet, an Austin based spay-neuter organization, to Houston. Emancipet has a 48′ mobile clinic that can provide 35 reduced-cost or free spay-neuter surgeries per day. Emancipet has started a fundraising effort to build three permanent clinics in Houston by 2017. The ASPCA has pledged $1 million to the effort. A proposed bill in New York State would provide $200,000 in annual funding for TNR programs. The bill is being opposed by a coalition that includes conservation groups. The Just One Day adoption event was held this past Thursday, and several shelters reported good results. The Muncie shelter held a very successful 24-hour event. Here is an interesting blog from a veterinarian who thinks that veterinarians should refuse to participate in shelter killing of healthy or treatable animals. She makes an analogy to the moral stand that doctors have taken against participating in the execution of human prisoners. The discussion in the comments is also interesting, and remarkably civilized on this contentious topic. If you are not keeping an eye on the Maddie’s Institute blog, you are missing out on some great free guidance for using social media. The most recent article discusses frequency of posting to Facebook. Miami-Dade County Animal Services has a 28′ by 8′ van called the Hope Express dedicated to mobile adoptions. It is self-contained, requiring no electrical or water hookups, and is “easy” to set up and break down. it has 24 animal compartments that can be increased to 56 with dividers to accommodate various sizes of pets. Since its launch last summer it has been the centerpiece of events at many types of venues including parks, malls, and downtown Miami. The sides of the van lift up to provide shade and to allow people to view the animals in their compartments. May 17-23 was Dog Bite Prevention Week. Julie Hecht has an interesting post on current thinking about dog aggression – that it is more often situational and learned rather than generalized and innate. HSUS has a webinar on July 1 on how to change adoption policies to remove barriers to adoption and attract potential adopters.

Today I have a guest post written in conjunction with Bonney Brown and Diane Blankenburg about their consulting organization, Humane Network. Brown and Blankenburg are well known in the animal shelter world for their work in leading Nevada Humane Society (NHS) for several years in its transition to achieving and sustaining a community-wide live release rate of 94%. NHS had (and still has) a partnership with Washoe County Regional Animal Services (WCRAS) in providing animal control and sheltering for Washoe County, Nevada, which contains the cities of Reno and Sparks. Their success in Washoe County was an especially important milestone in shelter lifesaving because it was not a progressive or wealthy community. Almost all successes in community-wide lifesaving before Washoe County were in resort or college towns, or progressive places like San Francisco and New Hampshire. Reno was a more typical city, with economic challenges and a very high rate of shelter intake. So when Washoe County achieved a live release rate of over 90% it was proof that high save rates could be achieved anywhere. As Brown says, when a community is trying to increase their live release rate “the devil is in the details.” The basic best practices for lifesaving shelter operations were developed back in the 1970s and 1980s, and in the last few years some important new programs have been added. The issue for shelters that want to increase their live release rate is not so much deciding what programs need to be put in place to increase lifesaving – that is pretty well standardized today – but how to implement the programs. There are a myriad of large and small “how to” issues in getting from here to there, and that’s where Humane Network can help. For example, everyone knows that having a foster program is important for lifesaving. What isn’t so obvious is how to set up a foster program, how to recruit the foster caregivers, how to recruit the right person to run the program, what training the foster parents need, what level of support they should have, and what documentation is needed. What about liability? What about the foster contract? What does a foster do if an animal gets sick in the middle of the night? Who pays for routine expenses like food? What procedures should be in place to protect animals in foster? What will the program cost and how will funds be raised to pay for it? Is it sustainable? In addition to helping shelters with the myriad details that come up in the implementation of lifesaving programs, Brown and Blankenburg have found that one of the most important keys to success is follow-up. Even when shelter staff are given a detailed road map to institute a best-practice program, follow-up is important to provide moral support, make sure that the roadmap is understood, and answer the additional questions that so often arise. In some cases shelters have already achieved a high live release rate at the time Humane Network is called in, but they are not doing it in a sustainable way. They are burning themselves out by working long hours, or spending the organization’s endowment, or relying on frequent emergency pleas to the community. In those cases a consultation can help the organization get to a point where it can maintain its success long-term. The Humane Network team can also help organizations with applying for grants, including, in some cases, grants to pay for the consultation process itself. Helping communities get lifesaving programs up and running is only one part of what has been keeping Humane Network busy for the last three years. Another service they provide is helping organizations recruit the right leadership. Leadership is one of the most critical needs for any animal shelter because so many different talents, including business and people skills, are required. But recruiting executives to run animal welfare organizations can be challenging because the pay is often not competitive with other fields and the level of public scrutiny can be daunting. Brown and Blankenburg help organizations sort through what qualities are critical for success, and then help them find suitable candidates. People who work in the private sector in business management, marketing, human resources, and related areas generally receive training in various aspects of management and leadership, but that type of training is unusual in the animal shelter industry. Brown points out that animal shelter administrators often promote people on the basis of how well they have done at the operations level rather than looking at whether they possess the necessary management skills. When this lack of experience in management is combined with a lack of training in leadership skills, the new shelter manager does not have the tools to succeed. He or she may not know how to give feedback, resolve conflicts, or delegate, and may not realize that part of delegation is following up to make sure that things get done. The Humane Network team can advise on what gaps in knowledge or experience are fixable with mentoring and should not be disqualifying. The challenge that shelters and animal welfare organizations face in recruiting and training good leadership is one reason that Brown and Blankenburg started a certificate course in Lifesaving-Centered Animal Shelter Management at the University of the Pacific. They believe that the certificate program can help people from outside the shelter industry get hired, and can help people who have risen through the ranks within the industry to fill gaps in management skills and leadership training. Enrollment in the certificate program has grown to the point that courses will now be offered year-round. Another issue with reforming a shelter is that it has to be done on the fly. Shelters are not like a manufacturing business that can just shut down for two weeks to retool. Reforming a shelter is more like replacing an escalator while it is in use, or operating on a beating heart. The animals will not stop coming in the door, and part of reform has to be keeping the shelter functioning as changes are being made. This difficulty can sometimes make directors leery about taking the initial leap to start reforms. In cases like this Humane Network can break the logjam by providing a strategy for getting it done. It helps for a consultant to have a track record of actually running a shelter and creating a sustainable lifesaving program, because the consultant has probably experienced many of the same problems faced by the shelter director. In addition to consulting with community-based shelters and animal welfare organizations, Humane Network has been working with some of the large national organizations on program development. Humane Network has done projects with Maddie’s Fund, Best Friends Animal Society, Petco Foundation, and Alley Cat Allies. With Alley Cat Allies, for example, they have developed a series of “toolkit” guides. One of them is a 90-page workbook on how to set up a foster program for cats and kittens (“Saving Cats and Kittens with a Foster Care Program”). The length of this brochure, 90 pages on 8″ by 11″ paper, illustrates how important it is to show shelters each step in the process rather than just telling them to “start a foster program.” In addition to working with the large national organizations, Humane Network sometimes works with other consultants. For example, they worked with the shelter medicine program at UC Davis on a project they did for the Animal Foundation in Las Vegas. The demand for their consulting services has been high, and Brown and Blankenburg have been going non-stop since they launched Humane Network. In the future they hope to have time to do more work on the big-picture question of the next steps for our movement. Stay tuned.

A wonderful story that gets little attention is what happened in 1998 in Otsego County, Michigan. That year, a group of citizens got together and decided that they wanted to stop the killing at their county shelter. They did so in a big way, achieving a live release rate of over 90% in 1999 and every year since then for which we have statistics. The Otsego County shelter was one of the first No Kill shelters in the United States. This article is a nice reminiscence by the current Otsego County shelter director about the people who made the community No Kill. The Salina Animal Shelter in Salina, Kansas, has announced that it has achieved a 90% live release rate. The Petco Foundation has provided a grant to help the shelter upgrade its facilities and sustain its live release rate. The Stockton, California shelter, which is under new management, announced a free adoption event for pits and pit mixes to try to reduce the numbers at the shelter. Twenty-four hours later, 13 of the dogs had been adopted or rescued. Hillsborough County, Florida (where Tampa is located) has had a mystery drop of up to 20% in cat intake at the city/county shelter. Both stray impounds and owner surrenders have dropped. The shelter has a community cat program, but director Scott Trebatoski does not think that program has been in effect long enough to account for the change. He speculates that maybe there has been a change in attitude as to how people deal with cats in their neighborhoods. Perhaps people who hear about the community cat program are deciding to do-it-themselves by getting neighborhood cats spayed and neutered. It will be interesting to see if the drop persists through kitten season. A great story about the power of one. Lisa McCormick of Belleville, Illinois, adopted a couple of cats from an Illinois pound 15 years ago. The pound did not adopt out many animals, and it had buckets of collars sitting on top of its gas chamber. McCormick was inspired to start a rescue, and since 2002 her rescue, Partners for Pets, has re-homed over 12,000 dogs and cats. The rescue has acquired a site for a new shelter and will be moving soon. And a great story about what a No Kill group can do to create the change they want to see. Operation Pets Alive of Montgomery County, Texas, just north of the Houston metro area, is partnering with the county shelter to help it move toward No Kill. Operation Pets Alive programs include transports, offsite adoption events, fostering, and targeted spay-neuter. One of the No Kill flagship shelters, the Nevada Humane Society, is increasing its efforts to serve its area. There are neighborhoods in every city that have few resources for pets, just as there are neighborhoods that have few resources for people to buy healthy food. In such neighborhoods it can be hard for the providers of free and low-cost spay-neutering and pet health services to reach the people who need that help. Recently some shelters have started programs to reach out to these neighborhoods on a person-to-person basis, and NHS is one of them. The shelter’s director, Kevin Ryan, has announced that this work will be furthered by the shelter’s selection as a Pets For Life mentor in the HSUS program. Lost Dogs of America has a very helpful blog on how to trace an animal’s owner from its microchip even when the contact information is out of date or the chip was never registered. A former shelter dog is doing search and rescue in Nepal. Dubuque County, Iowa, is discussing a deal with a private non-profit No Kill, Whispurring Hope Rescue, to take over most animal control duties in the county and adopt out animals. A new documentary, Dog by Dog, follows the money trail in the puppy mill business. Sometimes transporters have to refuse to work with a shelter. It doesn’t happen very often, and it is hard for rescuers to walk away from a shelter, but it keeps transports safe. One of Best Friends’ week-long workshops on how to start and run a sanctuary is coming up June 7-13. Best Friends has been putting on these workshops since 1999. Peter Wolf has a cautionary tale about what can happen when you try to fool Mother Nature. Here is a helpful blog post about getting access to journal articles about canine science. Dogs Playing for Life hosted a very successful event for shelter staff and volunteers from six shelters in Phoenix, Oregon, last week. The director of one of the shelters said play time had a “fully transformational” effect on one German Shepherd who had previously leaped at her gate and barked when approached. One of the host shelters, the Jackson County Animal Shelter, is currently at an 85% live release rate and is aiming for 95%.

In just the last year there has been an enormous increase in communities that are reporting saving 90% or more of their animals, and an even bigger increase in communities reporting 80% or more. Because there are so many communities to report on, I no longer have enough time to do the amount of research needed for my traditional listings. So I have to make a choice — either do as many listings as I can the way I’ve always done them (which would mean most 90%+ and 80%+ communities don’t get listed at all), or change to a new method where I list all reported communities but the listings are not researched in-depth (which would mean that I make listings based on shelter press releases and media reports without independently verifying them and without researching things like shelter policies, other organizations in the community, local controversies, etc.). I’ve decided to go with the second option, because what my readers want is to know about all communities that are doing well, not just a fraction of them. The downsides are that there will be less information in each listing, and that listings will be based on media reports which may not always be correct. I think the number of bad listings will be pretty small, and I will take them down when I find out about them, but there probably will be an occasional one. The way I’m going to implement this is to list in the right sidebar every community that I feature, lumping together 90% Documented, 90% Reported, and Worth Watching. New listings may be full-length features as they are now or shorter posts, depending on how much information the shelter has made available. The right sidebar will be called Notable Communities. Each post will have a notice stating whether it is 90%+, 80%+ or Worth Watching, but the posts will not be separated by those subcategories in the right sidebar. At some point soon I may need to save space in the right sidebar by listing only the most prominent community in a group of communities. For example, listing Williamson County, Texas, and not Round Rock. I will not be able to update listings yearly as I have been doing. That means that people will have to be careful in using the listings on individual communities and may have to do some of their own research to get the latest numbers. As for the Running Totals, my plan is to delete the current count, which is based on number of communities, and go to a count based on human population living in 90%+ and 80%+ communities. I’m going to do a spreadsheet where I will list each 90%+ community and each 80%+ community and its population and post those totals as separate Running Totals. Again, these numbers are going to be subject to the caveat that I will not have checked each community as closely as I used to. In other developments, the News Bits page has become the blog’s most popular feature. I have plans to migrate News Bits over to Facebook eventually, but it may be a while until I get around to that. In the meantime, when a News Bit involves a newly announced 80% or 90% community, I may post it as a blog as well as a News Bit, so that I can link to it in the right sidebar. So over the next month or two the blog may look like a construction zone, and it might even blow up a few times, but hopefully we will come out of it with a better idea of just how successful No Kill really is.

Crawford County in northern Michigan has a population of about 14,000, including the county seat of Grayling. The AuSable Valley Animal Shelter (AVAS) is a non-profit corporation located in Grayling that does animal sheltering for Crawford County. I could not find an owner surrender policy on the AVAS website, so I inquired about the policy in a call to the shelter. I was told that AVAS accepts owner surrenders from Crawford County residents, with no conditions other than a fee. In 2013, the shelter took in 170 cats and dogs (scroll down in the link to Animal Shelter of Crawford County). It had a live release rate of 99.4%. All of its live releases were reclaims or adoptions, except for one dog who was transferred. The form listed online by the state for 2012 had errors in it, so I obtained the 2012 statistics directly from the shelter. The shelter had an intake of 173 cats and dogs, and adopted out 113, returned 63 to their owners, transferred 1, and euthanized 1, for a live release rate of 99%. There were no owner-requested euthanasias and no animals died or were lost in shelter care in 2012. AVAS reported a 99% live release rate for 2011 to the state of Michigan, with an intake of 187 animals (scroll down in the link to the report for “Crawford County Animal Shelter”). This Facebook page describes how a volunteer named Dixie Lobsinger ran the county animal shelter from 1992 until retiring in 2005, and instituted many programs such as low income spay-neuter and offsite adoptions. In 2012, the Michigan Pet Fund Alliance recognized Crawford County for its success. An article about the award reported: “Although the AuSable Valley Animal Shelter serves Crawford County, the award was given to include broader efforts to care for animals in the community such as the Leaning Oaks Cat Haven, a cat shelter in Beaver Creek Township, Crawford County Animal Control Officer Gail Foguth, individuals who rescue homeless animals and people who make donations to the shelter.” Crawford County, MI, was originally listed by this blog on May 31, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

Gogebic County in Michigan and Iron County in Wisconsin are located across the state boundary from each other at the western end of Michigan’s upper peninsula. Gogebic County contains the town of Ironwood, which has over 5,000 people. Together, the population of the two counties is over 22,000 people. The “Helping Orphaned Pets Everywhere” (H.O.P.E.) animal shelter, located in Ironwood, contracts with Gogebic and Iron counties  to provide sheltering for lost, stray, and abandoned animals and cruelty cases. The shelter also accepts owner surrenders “as space permits.” I called the shelter for more detail on the owner surrender policy and was told that if someone needs to surrender a pet and cannot wait, the shelter will take the pet even if they are full. A 2009 article about the shelter states: “Animals are not euthanized except in cases of unrelievable suffering, terminal illness or a known history of being a threat to the public.” The state of Michigan collects statistics on all animal shelters in the state and posts them online. The report for H.O.P.E. for 2013 can be accessed here (scroll down to Help Orphaned Pets Everywhere). Intake in 2013 was 407 cats and dogs. The live release rate was 98%, with no reported owner-requested euthanasias. All animals adopted out were spayed and neutered. The shelter reported a 99% live release rate in 2012, with an intake of 472 cats and dogs. In 2011, H.O.P.E. reported a live release rate of 98% with an intake of 401 cats and dogs. Gogebic County, MI, was originally listed by this blog on June 4, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.