Benzie County is in western Michigan, along the shore of Lake Michigan. It is a rural county with lots of parks and trails, and has a population of about 16,000 people. The county has the distinction of being the smallest in Michigan in land area, and it has a correspondingly small animal shelter. Benzie County Animal Control provides both animal control and sheltering services for the county. It accepts owner surrenders for a small fee. A non-profit, the Animal Welfare League of Benzie County, has spay-neuter and education programs and provides medical care for injured animals. In 2013 the county took in 419 animals. The great majority of them were returned to owner or adopted. The live release rate for the year was 98% (scroll down to “Benzie County” in the link). Benzie County has done well for several years, but 2013 showed an improvement. In 2009, the shelter took in 538 animals and had an 80% live release rate. In 2010, it took in 381 animals and improved to a live release rate of 93%.  In 2011, the live release rate was 92% with an intake of 428 cats and dogs. Intake was 359 in 2012, with a live release rate of 92%. Benzie County, MI, was originally listed by this blog on June 1, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

Clear Creek (9100 residents) and Gilpin (5400 residents) are small counties in a mountainous area west of Denver. Clear Creek has two towns of 1000 or more population: Georgetown (1100), and Idaho Springs (1900). Gilpin has a few small towns of 600 people or less. Both counties are part of the greater Denver metro area. The Clear Creek/Gilpin County Animal Shelter, which is called Charlie’s Place, serves both counties. It is located in the town of Dumont in Clear Creek County. The shelter was named for a favorite dog owned by the donor of the land for the shelter. I spoke with Sue LeBarron, who has been director of the shelter since it opened 5 years ago, and she told me that the shelter accepts owner surrenders from Clear Creek County and Gilpin County with no conditions. Charlie’s Place helps neighboring shelters by taking in surrenders from other jurisdictions in the area when they can. They also have a transport program where they take in dogs from out of state that are at high risk of euthanasia. The shelter is supported by a non-profit, the Friends of Charlie’s Place (FOCP). A newsletter reporting on 2013 stated that FOCP had helped in the placement of over 180 animals in 2013, redesigned the shelter’s exercise park, helped with pet retention and adoption initiatives, and organized fundraising events. FOCP also pays the expenses of animals transferred in from out of the shelter’s jurisdiction. LeBarron told me that feral cats are uncommon in the area, and when they are impounded the shelter seeks to place them as barn cats. The shelter does offsite adoption events for domesticated cats. It offers low-cost microchipping, vaccination clinics, and low-cost and free spay-neuter services. Charlie’s Place reports its shelter statistics to the Colorado Department of Agriculture. For 2012, the shelter reported taking in 485 dogs and cats, which is an intake of 33 animals per 1000 people. The shelter transferred in 116 dogs from out of state and 31 dogs and 9 cats from in state, which accounts for the relatively high intake per person. Without the transfers, the intake per 1000 people was 23. The Colorado reporting form has no category for fosters, so Charlie’s Place reports fostered animals in the “other” category. The shelter’s live release rate for 2012 was 99%. For 2013, the shelter took in 455 animals and again had a 99% live release rate. They had no deaths in shelter care. The shelter once again helped animals from outside its jurisdiction, transferring in 136 dogs and 7 cats. Clear Creek and Gilpin Counties were originally listed by this blog on November 22, 2013, based on their 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

I’d like to thank everyone for their patience while the blog has been undergoing changes the last three months. I’ve still got some tweaking and editing to do, but the blog is mostly back together again now, with the running totals, a re-worked right sidebar, and a couple of new pages. The right sidebar now lists 144 communities that have been at or above a 90% live release rate for at least one year and make their statistics publicly available. This category – 90% Documented – is the one I’m going to concentrate on, and the other categories (90% Reported and Worth Watching) will not be updated as frequently. Please keep in mind that “the list” on this blog is not a comprehensive list of 90%+ communities. For one thing, it would take a whole team of people working 40-hour weeks to identify, research in depth, write up, and update all the communities that are either at 90%+ or closing in on it. And it’s complicated because everyone has a different idea of how to calculate 90%, or whether that should even be the standard in the first place. The list should therefore be viewed as illustrative, not definitive. In other news, I’m very involved right now in writing a book on the origins of the No Kill movement. This project has included doing about 3 dozen interviews so far, reading 40 or so books (most of them very obscure), and sifting through about 5 reams of documents, not to mention what I’ve found online. It’s a fun project but it’s much bigger than I thought. It’s amazing how far the history of No Kill reaches back, and how many people have been crucial in making it what it is today. Needless to say, this has been keeping me extremely busy!

Garfield County has a large landmass that stretches from west of Denver to the western border of Colorado. It has a population of over 56,000 people. The county seat is Glenwood Springs, which has a population of about 10,000. Colorado Animal Rescue (CAS) is a non-profit that has animal sheltering contracts with the county and Glenwood Springs. (The city of Rifle is located in Garfield County, but it has its own animal shelter that reports separately.) CAS takes in strays and owner surrenders, but has a waiting list for owner surrenders and charges a fee. CAS reported a 96% live release rate to Maddie’s Fund in 2010, with an intake of 931 animals (scroll down in the link). In 2011, the shelter reported a live release rate of 97% with an intake of 992. The shelter did not report any owner-requested euthanasias, and the live release rate with animals who died or were lost in shelter care included with euthanasias was 96%. CAS also reports its statistics each year to the state of Colorado. In 2012, it reported an intake of 1098 animals. The live release rate was 97%. Garfield County and Glenwood Springs are two 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, Pitkin, and Eagle counties and the cities of Aspen and Rifle. The coalition reported an overall 97% live release rate in 2010 and 98% in 2011 (see pages 1-2 in the links). In 2013, CAS reported to the state of Colorado. Its intake was 1096 animals, with a live release rate of 96%. The modified live release rate, counting the deaths in shelter care, was not significantly lower. Garfield County and Glenwood Springs were originally listed by this blog on May 8, 2013, based on their 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

In Which The Author Looks At Philosophy And Arrives At A Surprising Conclusion About The Best Method For No Kill To Market Itself (with apologies to Dickens) The animal welfare era in the United States started somewhere around 1900. Before 1900, treatment of animals in a way that caused pain or fear, including killing, was ethically acceptable to most people as long as the treatment was motivated by a legitimate human interest such as business, health, or safety, and did not involve cruelty for cruelty’s sake. The harm in cruelty for cruelty’s sake was not the pain suffered by the animals, but the degradation of the humans involved. The animal welfare viewpoint is that use of animals, including killing them, is ethical as long as it is done “humanely,” i.e. without unnecessary pain or fear to the animal. Animal welfare uses the standard that an animal’s interest in avoiding pain and fear should be balanced against the good derived by a human’s use of the animal. This may not sound like much of a distinction from the 1800s, but in practice the difference was large. For example, throughout most of the 1800s it was ethically acceptable to beat a horse to make it pull an overloaded cart, or to tie the legs of calves and stack them on top of each other for transport. Such treatment is not acceptable under an animal welfare view. The animal welfare viewpoint has by now survived a long time and is entrenched as part of our law and culture. Animal welfare is lacking in that so many of the “interests” cited by people to justify animal suffering, such as cosmetics testing and fox hunting, seem petty. Animal welfare is also revolutionary, though, in that it is a tacit admission that animals are not just property and their interests must be considered. Some people today are trying to create a third era of our relationship to animals — an animal rights era. Under an animal rights view, it is not ethical for humans to use animals for human benefit. Keeping pets is very problematic under an animal rights view because keeping pets necessarily deprives them of many freedoms that undomesticated animals have, such as the freedom to travel, to choose their society, to live with equals, to mate as they choose, to eat what they want, etc. This is the problem of paternalism. One could argue that pets have a much better life than undomesticated or wild animals, but that assumes that a good life does not include freedom. We reject that idea out of hand for ourselves, so it is hard to justify it as a rationale for pet-keeping. [Note: The view that pet-keeping is unethical does not entail killing pets. Instead it entails stopping the breeding of pets so that existing pets, as they live out their lives in their homes and die of old age or disease, are not replaced with new pets.] In any event, advocates for animal rights have so far had little success in moving society beyond the prevailing animal welfare view. Indeed, even animal welfare appears to have retrenched in some respects in recent decades with the unchecked growth of corporate power in general and factory farms in particular. So where does No Kill fit into the spectrum of animal welfare to animal rights? Although we sometimes hear “rights talk” from No Kill advocates, when you examine the tenets of No Kill closely they are not that compatible with animal rights. No Kill is fine with pet-keeping, for one thing. For another, although some No Kill advocates are vegan, I think it is safe to say that the majority of them are not. Similarly, it seems doubtful that most No Kill advocates refuse to buy products that contain animal parts or were tested on animals. A different type of rights justification for No Kill might be that shelter pets are more like family members than animals, and thus they should enjoy human rights by proxy. This view is not compatible with the No Kill movement, though, because it would allow for the killing of feral cats and unsocialized dogs, while calling into question the propriety of killing dangerous dogs who had been raised in homes. It also has the same problem of paternalism as the animal rights justification, since humans do not give up their right to make life choices simply by living in families. Even very young children are capable of expressing choices, and part of family life is to raise children to adulthood where they can make all of their own choices. Could the relationship of domestic pets to humans serve as the basis of a contracts justification for special treatment of pets, including homeless shelter animals? Under this view, animals who are not merely domesticated but have also moved into the homes of people and become their companions have in essence entered into a contract with humans where duties and benefits flow both ways. In exchange for the love and companionship we get from domestic pets, we undertake to give them a certain quality of life for their full life span. This alternative would allow the killing of vicious dogs, because such dogs have not carried out their part of the contract. It also would avoid the problem of paternalism, because it is not rights-based. It is not compatible with No Kill, however, because it does not protect feral cats and unsocialized dogs. It also suffers from the problem of contingency, because it could be argued that the contractual duty exists only while the animal is living in a home, and disappears if the animal loses the home. If the animal rights, proxy rights, and contractual approaches do not fit No Kill, what about the plain old justification of animal welfare? Animal welfare is, at base, a utilitarian philosophy of balancing the harm to an animal against the benefit to humans of a particular action. As it turns out, No Kill fits easily into the animal welfare philosophy. The harm to the animal in shelter killing is profound, because the loss of life is about the worst loss one can sustain. Some people would argue that suffering is the greater harm, and that shelter animals are in extreme danger of suffering neglect or cruelty in the future. There is no data to support this argument, however, so it can be dismissed from a utilitarian calculation, at least until the time when such data is available. The benefit to humans of shelter impoundment is that it gets animals off the street and keeps them from being nuisances. There is no benefit to humans of shelter killing itself, except as a means to maintain the ability to take animals off the street and to reduce costs of nuisance abatement. With No Kill, we now know that we can prevent homeless pets from being nuisances by impounding them and finding new homes for them. Medical treatment can be paid for by people who get satisfaction out of helping animals. Shelter killing thus provides no benefit to humans as long as the shelter can function without killing and with no additional costs. That is practically a description of the philosophy of No Kill. As mentioned above, the animal welfare viewpoint is not great for animals because almost any non-trivial human interest can be used to justify subjecting an animal to pain or even death. In the case of No Kill, though, there is absolutely no benefit to humans from shelter killing, because in a No Kill shelter the shelter performs its job without any need for killing. The animal welfare view has no problem with the issue of paternalism because it is not rights-based. It has no problem with the issue of killing dangerous dogs, because the benefit to the dog of being rehomed is outweighed by the danger to people and other animals of serious injury or death from the dangerous dog. An animal welfare view favors placement of feral cats in colonies and placement of unsocialized dogs in sanctuaries with other dogs, as long as these activities are supported by volunteers who get satisfaction from helping these animals, at no cost to taxpayers. The animal welfare view of No Kill is not as glamorous as animal rights. It is not as uplifting as viewing No Kill as an historic battle for an oppressed class. It won’t allow us to feel like heroes. But the benefits of accepting that No Kill is simply a logical extension of animal welfare are huge. Animal welfare is already the standard for our culture’s treatment of animals. It is the way our establishments, including businesses and the legal system, have been dealing with animal issues for the last 100 years. We don’t have to change the way people think in order to gain acceptance of No Kill. We just have to point out that No Kill makes sense. It helps animals and does not hurt people. That’s all the argument we need. So maybe we’d do better to get off our soap boxes and start explaining, with power points and graphs and success stories, why No Kill is merely a logical extension of the type of treatment of animals that we’ve already been affording them for the last 100 years. It won’t be as much fun as a march on Washington, but it may be a lot more effective.

San Juan County, population 15,800, is an archipelago located off the shore of the state of Washington. There are no bridges to the islands of San Juan County, and transportation is by air or water. The four main islands are San Juan (population 6800), Orcas (4500), Lopez (2200), and Shaw (240). The county has one incorporated city, Friday Harbor, which has 2200 residents and is located on San Juan Island. There are two animal shelters that serve San Juan County — the Friday Harbor Animal Protection Society (FHAPS) on San Juan Island and the Orcas Animal Protection Society (OAPS) on Orcas Island. Both shelters are non-profits that take in strays and owner surrenders. I spoke with officials from both shelters about the history and operation of the shelters. Years ago, the shelters were part of the same organization (hence the similarity in their names) but now they are separate organizations. OAPS accepts owner surrenders except for dogs that are dangerous to people or have killed other animals. They do not perform owner-requested euthanasia. In 2012 their intake was 218 animals, including 65 animals that they took in to help other shelters. They returned 83 animals to their owners and adopted out 109. They did not euthanize any dogs in 2012, and had to euthanize 10 cats for medical reasons, mostly elderly cats in renal failure. Their live release rate for 2012 was 95%. In 2013, OAPS had an intake of 160 animals, with a live release rate of 98%. The live release rate was 97% if animals who died in shelter care are included as euthanasias. The shelter official I spoke with at OAPS attributes their high live release rates to a vigorous spay-neuter program that was started 25 years ago. Feral cats get TNR and domesticated cats can be spayed or neutered for free. All shelter dogs are spayed or neutered, and OAPS will subsidize spaying and neutering for owned dogs at the local veterinarian, based on financial need. Here is a link to OAPS’s 2013 statistics: Orcas APS stats 2013 See the Worth Watching category for a separate report on FHAPS. OAPS and FHAPS both take in animals from Lopez Island, which has a foster program but does not have a public shelter. They also are ready to help when they get calls from the smaller islands in the county such as Shaw and Waldron, and the shelters help each other when needed. Orcas Island, WA, was originally listed by this blog on October 5, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

Duluth, Minnesota, is a city of 86,000 people located at the western tip of Lake Superior. The city of Superior, Wisconsin (population 27,000), is just across the bay from Duluth. The metro area of the two cities is referred to as the Twin Ports. Duluth has a city animal control department and a shelter where strays are held for several days. If an animal is not reclaimed during the hold period, it goes to the Animal Allies Humane Society. An Animal Allies shelter official told me in a telephone conversation that Animal Allies contracts with Duluth and three additional jurisdictions in Minnesota for animal sheltering — Hermantown (population 9000), Proctor (population 3000), and the southern sector of St. Louis County. Animal Allies also signed a contract starting January 1, 2012 for animal sheltering for the city of Superior. Animal Allies has shelter facilities in Duluth and Superior. Animal Allies accepts owner surrenders by appointment. The shelter official told me that they try to schedule appointments as they have room for intake, but they make exceptions and will take in an animal immediately if an owner cannot wait for a spot to open up. Animal Allies launched the Campaign for Zero in 2010 for the city of Duluth. They describe the campaign this way: “This campaign aimed to eliminate the euthanasia of healthy cats and dogs entering both shelters in the Duluth community.  January 1, 2011 marked its successful completion and since then, saving the lives of every healthy pet, in addition to scores of treatable animals, continues to be achieved by progressive spay/neuter, adoption, and humane education initiatives. When Animal Allies began operating the City of Superior owned shelter on January 1, 2012, the Campaign for Zero expanded with the organization.” Animal Allies has statistics posted on their website for 2009 through 2011 for the Duluth community (Animal Allies and Duluth Animal Control),  and for the Twin Ports area (including Superior) for 2012 and 2013. The live release rate was 88% in 2009 and 93% in 2010, the first year of the Campaign for Zero. For 2011, the coalition reported a 95% live release rate. The 2012 Twin Ports live release rate was 97%. In 2013, the Twin Ports live release rate was again 97%, with a total intake of 3334. The live release rate for 2013 was 95% if owner-requested euthanasia and animals who died or were lost in shelter care are included. Duluth, MN, was originally listed by this blog on April 17, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

Polk County, located in the North Carolina foothills southeast of Asheville, has a human population of 21,000. The Foothills Humane Society (FHS) is a non-profit animal shelter that handles stray intake and animal sheltering for all of Polk County. The shelter also serves towns in northern Greenville and Spartanburg counties over the border in South Carolina, which adds about 4,000 to the human population served by the shelter. The shelter describes itself as “open admission.” FHS reports very high save rates. On a website page that is no longer available, the shelter reported that its save rates were 98.7% in 2010, 97.8% in 2011, and 98.9% in 2012 (the 2011 statistics are available here, and 11-month statistics for 2012 here). They reported taking in 1705 cats and dogs in 2012, including feral cats. The shelter e-mailed me their full statistics for 2012 upon request, which verify the 98.9% figure for that year. The shelter reported no owner-requested euthanasia, and had a 97% live release rate if the “died or lost in shelter care” category is included in euthanasias. For 2013, the shelter reported that it “maintained a 98% placement (live release) rate.” Intake was 1202 animals, or 1609 if feral cats are included. One of the big reasons for the success of FHS is the Po’ Kitties program, which was started in 2007. Po’ Kitties performs TNR on feral cats in the shelter’s service area, and is the default solution for feral cats. It appears to have reduced euthanasia of feral cats to near zero. FHS reports that Po’ Kitties served 540 cats in 2012 and 407 in 2013. FHS has implemented many improvements and programs in recent years. In an annual report that is no longer available online, FHS reported that it renovated its shelter in 2012, adding a catio and an intake center. It offered low-cost spay-neuter services, including free spay-neuter for pit bulls. The shelter supplied donated cat and dog food to recipients of the Meals on Wheels program and to owners who could not afford pet food. Another key to the shelter’s success was its foster program. The shelter reported that in 2011, 262 animals went into foster. FHS also had an active transfer program, transferring 350 animals to rescue in 2011 and 393 in 2012. In 2013, the shelter reports that it increased its return-to-owner rate by 32%, purchased a transport van with an ASPCA grant, and partnered with 30 rescue groups. It continued its shelter improvements, one of which was the addition of an on-site emergency shelter for horses. The shelter had over 100 volunteers who logged 5700 hours in 2013, and 52 active foster homes. Polk County, NC, is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

The city of Portland, Oregon, has a population of 584,000 people. It is the county seat of Multnomah County, which has 735,000 people. The Portland metro area (which includes part of the state of Washington) has almost 2.3 million people. The Animal Shelter Alliance of Portland (ASAP) is a coalition of six organizations, some of which are municipal and some private, that provide animal sheltering in the Portland metro area. The municipal members of the coalition (shelters that are responsible for stray intake) are Multnomah County Animal Services (MCAS) (serving the city of Portland and Multnomah County), the Bonnie L. Hays Shelter (BLH) (serving Washington County), and Clackamas County Dog Services. The private members of the coalition are the Oregon Humane Society, the Humane Society for Southwest Washington (HSSW) (which works with Clark County Animal Control), and the Cat Adoption Team. Together these six organizations serve four counties — Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, and Clark — containing about 2 million people. ASAP estimates that its six members care for 90% of the animals needing sheltering in the four counties. Coalitions such as ASAP are becoming a trend, as more and more municipal shelters seek out and work closely with private partners. In such situations you have to look at the community coalition as a whole, rather than the individual shelters, to get an accurate idea of what is going on. For example, the Clackamas County municipal shelter does not pick up stray cats and does not accept owner surrendered cats, but it offers cats for adoption that have been taken in by other area organizations. Conversely, the Cat Adoption Team takes in cats but not dogs. MCAS and BLH accept owner surrenders only when they have room, but owner surrenders are accepted by HSSW and OHS. The ASAP coalition increased the live release rate for the metro area from 62% in 2006 to 79% in 2011. Maddie’s Fund reported that the coalition had an 85% live release rate for 2012, with a combined intake of almost 32,000 animals. The coalition’s live release rate first exceeded 90% in 2013, with a live release rate of 91% for an intake of just over 30,000 animals. If owner-requested euthanasia and animals who died or were lost in shelter care are counted with euthanasias, the live release rate was 86% for 2013. (The ASAP statistics are linked here.) With ASAP’s service area of about 2 million people, it was the largest metro area in 2013 to report a 90% or better live release rate under the standard calculation. Multnomah County’s live release rate for 2013, calculated separately on MCAS intake alone, was 87%. It is not unusual, when you have a coalition, for a shelter that does animal control intake to have a lower live release rate than other intake shelters in the coalition, since animal control generally involves the most difficult situations such as hoarders, dog-fighting busts, etc. When other shelters in the area of the animal control shelter are doing intake of owner surrenders, it can artificially depress the success rate of the animal control shelter. In 2014, Both MCAS and the coalition as a whole improved their live release rates (the full coalition Asilomar statistics are not posted as of this writing.) MCAS has reported 90.2% for 2014, and ASAP as a whole has reported a 93% live release rate for 2014 (see header in link). The Portland metro area is counted in the blog’s running totals as a 90%+ community.

There’s an article about Target Zero (TZ) in the most recent issue of Animal Sheltering (the HSUS magazine). The article has a pretty good discussion of how TZ developed its program and how it has been implemented in Waco and Baton Rouge. It got me thinking about the different ways that No Kill programs can be implemented. First of all, I should state at the outset of this discussion that I disagree with one of TZ’s basic premises, which is that reducing intake is more important than increasing live releases. I think they are both equally important. The article states that TZ has relied on Peter Marsh’s research for the conclusion that reducing intake matters more. I’ve read Peter Marsh’s research, and as far as I can see it relies entirely on data from traditional shelters — shelters that have low live release rates. With shelters like that, it’s true that the only thing that lowers shelter killing is lowering intake, but the reason for that is that those shelters do not have modern, marketing-based adoption programs. So of course their adoption rates aren’t going to be very high. Yet TZ has used Marsh’s research to justify putting adoptions low on its priority scale. But it’s possible that Marsh’s approach will work well in some cities — cities like Waco and Baton Rouge. The methods for reducing intake (as opposed to increasing live releases) tend to be low tech — things like TNR, having appointments for surrender, charging a surrender fee, targeted spay-neuter programs, returning animals in the field, updating city ordinances, etc. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recruit veterinarians or manage any of those things. Methods for increasing live releases, on the other hand, tend to require creativity and marketing and people skills. Having a successful mega-adoption event is not easy (I know this from personal experience, it’s amazing all the different skills needed). Implementing an effective shelter marketing program takes just as much skill, in my opinion, as directing a political campaign or running a big disaster-relief program. Not a place for amateurs. One of the sticking points for getting to No Kill in many, many places has been leadership. We see it happen over and over again that a city or county hires a new shelter director, hopeful that the director will take the local shelter to No Kill, but it doesn’t happen. To implement all the programs that will both decrease intake and increase live releases requires a lot of particular skills, and it may be that there just aren’t that many people who are in the market to be shelter directors who have that particular skill set. So, getting back to TZ, I’m wondering if they have hit upon something, which is that if you are in a city with a high-intake, high-kill shelter and shelter leadership that is willing but does not fall into that small category of people who have the skill set to be No Kill rock stars, perhaps the best thing you can do is to pick the low-hanging fruit. Get intake down by the easy methods that anyone could do, start the city and the shelter on the road to success. As they get the intake under control they will be inspired to start working on the harder stuff such as a neonatal foster program and mega-adoption events. Yes it’s very tempting to say the city should just fire the current director and somehow find a No Kill rock star, but in a lot of cities that’s just not going to happen, and meanwhile time goes by and animals keep dying. Another important point is that there may still be places in the country where there is a lot to be gained from increasing spay-neuter programs. The average spay-neuter rate for owned pets in the United States is 85% or more, which means there must be a lot of communities where we’ve pretty much maxed out the benefits to be had from low-cost spay neuter. There must be lots of communities where people have gotten the message and they are very responsibly spaying and neutering their pets. But in some places with high intake, there still might be a lot to be gained from spay-neuter. If that’s the case, then it makes sense to push spay-neuter as one of your initial programs, because it’s easy to implement and easy to fund in most instances. TZ seems to be tailoring its program recommendations to the different situations in the different cities it works with. In Huntsville, for example, it helped the shelter put on a mega-adoption event that was very successful. Rick DuCharme, who is a senior consultant to TZ along with Marsh, has put on many successful mega-adoption events in Jacksonville, so it’s not like TZ doesn’t have the skills on board to advise about adoptions. Finally, TZ seems to emphasize collaboration. This is a hot-button issue with some No Kill advocates, who believe that collaboration just slows things down. Again, though, perhaps there are are places where collaboration is the fastest way to get to the goal. I’m still very much on the fence on the issue of whether TZ is on the right track or not. I still disagree with the conclusions Marsh draws from his research. But I believe the TZ approach is something that bears thinking about and discussion. Maybe the TZ program isn’t right for every city — certainly Kansas City Pet Project proved that it’s possible to implement intake reduction and live-release-increasing programs at the same time and do it very successfully. But it might be that one-size-fits-all isn’t a good approach, and that the TZ methods have a place in cities and counties that are starting with very little.

Rio Blanco County is located in the northwestern part of Colorado on the Utah border. The 2010 census counted 6700 county residents, including the towns of Rangely (population 2400) and Meeker (2500). The County has two animal shelters, one serving Rangely and the other serving Meeker. Both shelters also accept animals picked up by the sheriff in unincorporated areas of the county. The Rangely Animal Shelter (RAS) is a municipal agency that handles animal control and sheltering for Rangely. Animals are vaccinated, neutered, and microchipped before being adopted. The RAS manager told me that they have a small, waivable fee for owner surrenders and will either take them in immediately or help the owner place the pet. They have a TNR program and they adopt out kittens born to feral mothers. The statistics submitted to the state by RAS for 2012 show a live release rate of 99%. The live release rate does not change if the one animal who died in shelter care in 2012 is included with euthanasias. In 2013, RAS took in 313 animals and had a 99.7% live release rate. The live release rate was 99.3% if the one animal who died in shelter care is included with euthanasias. The Meeker Animal Shelter (MAS) is also a municipal agency that provides animal control as well as sheltering. I spoke to the animal control officer, who told me that although MAS does not impound cats, she will respond to calls about sick or injured cats and take them to a local veterinarian. MAS accepts owner surrenders subject, at times, to a monitored waiting list. A rescue in Meeker called the Cat Coalition does TNR in the area. MAS took in 107 dogs in 2012 and had a 99% live release rate. The shelter took in 115 dogs in 2013 with a live release rate of 100%. No animals died or were lost in shelter care in 2013. Rio Blanco County was originally listed by this blog on December 9, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

Montmorency County, Michigan, is located in the northern part of Michigan’s lower peninsula, and has about 10,000 residents. Up until 2009, the county sheriff’s office handled animal control. The Elk Country Animal Shelter (ECAS) is a 501(c)(3) organization that supported the county shelter for years and finally took it over entirely in April 2009. Animals were kept in outdoor kennels at the sheriffs office and ECAS’s first order of business was to create a shelter building where the animals could be indoors. The shelter lists owner surrenders as a service it provides and does not list any restrictions on surrenders on its website. Here are the live release rates for the county as reported to the state of Michigan for the five years since ECAS took over the shelter: 2009 — 97% 2010 — 97% 2011 — 97% 2012 — 97% 2013 — 92% The Elk Country shelter had to deal with a hoarding/cruelty situation early in 2013 where the shelter wound up taking in close to 40 dogs. Since Elk Country is a very small shelter, the 40 dogs represented a substantial part of its dog intake for the year. The shelter’s mission was endangered in 2012 when a contract dispute with the county caused ECAS to stop formally taking in strays. Volunteers for the shelter went out on their own time and rescued strays and took them to a neighboring shelter. Fortunately the dispute only lasted a couple of weeks, and on April 11, 2012 the county approved the funding asked for by the shelter. The shelter provides for much of its income by its own fundraising. Montmorency County, MI, was originally listed by this blog on May 17, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.