No Kill – Animal Welfare Movement

February 19, 2025

Being a Good Steward

One of the most glaring things about President Trump’s efforts to weed out wasteful spending is the fact that our government went well beyond being wasteful and appeared to spend for the sake of just spending (our tax dollars). Government was not a good steward; in fact, government departments acted like they were competing to be the worst spenders. Government knew of their waste and did nothing to stop it. The feds are not an example that we can afford to follow.

It is one thing to root out the bad apples in government; but, we have people in Congress demanding that efforts to end wasteful spending be stopped and look the other way. The worst part of all of this is that Americans voted these people into office. Either we are blind to the people we vote for or we are just plain stupid. If you still believe what the legacy media is telling you, then you really don’t know what is going on in the world. Anyone who encourages government employees to waste money are idiots.

Sometimes, in order to be a good steward, we need to stop listening to the people around us who are trying to direct our paths. It is easy to take up the cause to help homeless animals if we put on blinders that prevent us from seeing homeless people. I have always advocated for helping animals. But do animals hold a higher priority than that of people?

Animal rights groups are made up of one dimensional people. They only see the animals that exist in our world. That’s great, animals need our help. We can make catchy phrases to “speak for those who have no voice.” Animal rights groups are free to live in that world.

But those of us in animal welfare have to live in the real world. When we are fighting for our budgets, we realize that we are competing against other needs. We are not like the federal government that has been given such large budgets that they are free to spend it on nonsensical things. We have to fight for money just to feed our animals.

You are right, I am still steamed about the animal rights group going to the media to complain that one of our local cities turned down a TNR grant because they could not commit to keeping the grant going after the “free” money ran out. The city had the foresight to recognize that they didn’t have the money to care for feral cats now, so they didn’t want to default on the grant later. We call that integrity.

You see, if you show integrity in your stewardship of your budget, your city/county commission is more likely to fund you. I worked in one county in which our County Administer desperately tried to cut our budget. For a while, I worked full time in creating budget scenarios in which I outlined various levels of budget cuts. But, I had an excellent relationship with our County Commission. We were always funded at the same level. Why? Because we showed that we were serious about being a good steward.

I draw this comparison because there will be people trying to tear down your budgetary decisions for being frugal with your government funds. These people only see things from their own perspective. Given how tight money is, I would gladly forgo funding for a TNR program, if that money could be used to help homeless children. Being a grownup is knowing that you don’t always get what you want; you usually get what you need. Sometimes keeping a feral cat population going only encourages coyote populations to move into our cities. Fortunately, the statistics for coyotes eating cats are not part of the no-kill equation. In case you missed that: the more coyotes that eat cats, the faster that we can become a no-kill community.

February 4, 2025February 4, 2025

Say What?

In looking at my last post, no one can accuse me of smooth-talking. So? What do I do with it? Do I throw it out or do I try to sift through it? Let’s try again.

Animal Welfare is looking at each individual animal and attempts to do what is best for it given current resources. Animal Rights is looking at the plight of groups of animals and shifting the mindset of society to raise the animal’s plight to higher importance.

From an Animal Welfare approach you look at the condition of an animal and determine if you can improve the animal’s condition given the resources at hand. It becomes most noticeable when determining whether an organization should treat a medically compromised animal. What factors do you consider? Probably the most important factor is if there is any home where the animal’s owner will show up and assume financial responsibility for the animal. Organizations with limited budgets will be more likely to treat an injured animal if the animal is wearing some form of identification, hinting that an owner might be out looking for their pet. The difficulty is trying to get inside the mind of that owner as to what they would accept as a reasonable amount that they would pay out for their pet.

When treating an injured animal, the organization has to decide if care for the one animal outweighs the care for the other animals in your care. The one notion that people cannot get their heads around is that animal shelters do not have unlimited resources. I have witnessed many incidents in which an animal’s owner would surrender their pet, as a stray, to the animal shelter because they didn’t want to pay the cost for the medical treatment that their pet needed. These folks seem to be the least understanding when the shelter decides that the cost of treatment is beyond them as well. People think that the shelter should throw any amount of funds so that the owner can come return later to adopt back their own pet. So, seeing an ID on the animal is not always an indication that someone is out there in the world to accept financial responsibility of the pet. It does, however, give shelter staff hope and I am more likely to hold the animal longer at the shelter and offer up more money to help the animal with ID.

From an animal rights perspective, the decision to treat the animal is easy. All animals deserve the right to live. The only exception is the animal is demonstrating that it is in such pain and the animal would be better off being put to sleep. Animal rights folks would browbeat anyone standing in the way to prevent treatment. The animal rights folks would just as likely treat a potentially dangerous animal as it would any other.

From an animal welfare perspective, a shelter might hold off on treatment of an animal that doesn’t offer any return on investment. In other words, is the animal adoptable, or after a long stay you are going to have to euthanize the animal anyway? And then you are out the funds that you could have used to save other animals. From an animal rights perspective, you see that one animal representing every other animal and that if you don’t save the one, then that is your attitude towards all the rest. In the case of potentially dangerous animals, the animal rights folks have me pegged. I would rather keep a dangerous dog comfortable during its stray holding period than throw a bunch of money towards it when I have no notion of returning the animal back into the community.

From an outside perspective, one group makes the decision and moves on to help the animals that they are capable of helping. From the other perspective, the groups sees that failure to help that one animal is evidence that other animals won’t be helped either. As such, animal rights groups will attempt to teach you a lesson and go public to try to turn your community against you. The best beating, in their minds, is from the people who fund your organization.

Animal Rights groups cannot wrap their heads around the fact that animal shelters have limited resources. They are not smart enough to understand that communities that fund the animal shelter also have limited resources. Time after time, when I was fighting for funding for my shelter, I heard other voices crying out that funding that was allocated to me would take away from allocations to children in the community. Animal Rights folks can’t understand the competition that animal shelters face for funding.

An Animal Rights group might offer limited funding to push their efforts, but they expect the animal shelter to continue funding the project after it gets off to a good start. The problem is that communities are more sensitive to the economy than are the animal right folks. If the economy is hard now, it is likely to be worse when the pilot program ends. You can’t make a promise to fund a project two or three years down the road when you can’t afford it now.

Notwithstanding the economic climate; the animal rights folks will feel slighted because they feel their cause is higher than any other that communities might face in the future. As such, they will make a public spectacle to bloody the community leaders and the animal shelter staff. I have had to fight this battle many times in my career and for that reason, I don’t think much of animal rights groups. If there is any message to send them; despite what they feel are their priorities, in budget deliberations, children trumps animals every time. Animal Rights folks believe that their cause is the only one that matters; that is their world. Communities have to deal with a much larger world.

A public animal shelter rarely gains financially when they become No-Kill. Animal Rights groups, on the other hand, can access private funding for punishing animal shelters into submission. In the end, public animal shelters have to go through great financial hardship when pushing the No-Kill agenda, but the taskmasters are financially rewarded. There is example after example of governmental organizations spending tons of money to gain and hang on to their No-Kill status. Read about the City of Austin going through it. Just ask Google: Mainly, no-kill created shelter overcrowding, forced shelter staff to reduce the quality of care for their animals, and came at a great expense. Was it worth it? Depends on who you ask. It mostly depends on the amount of available cash that a city has to spend on such efforts. Most cities could not have pulled off what Austin did… none that I ever worked in. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t have our own success stories. I found that the most successful programs that we pulled off were ones in which we made it financially feasible for animal rescue groups to join our cause.

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Why do I bother with this now? As a governmental employee, I had to wear a muzzle throughout my career. When I retired, I was able to throw off my muzzle and speak my truth, even if it first appeared as gibberish on paper. At least, it is unfiltered gibberish. And, I hate bullies. When I see bullies, in any form, I’ll lash out. Animal Rights groups are eager to bully an animal shelter into compliance. Sometimes it is justified but usually, it isn’t

February 2, 2025

Animal Welfare vs. Animal Rights

I have a tremendous appreciation for animal welfare organizations and little appreciation for animal rights organizations. It recently dawned on me as to how I can distinguish between the two. I am quite surprised as to how it took me so long. Much of it has to do with the evolution of an organization.

Most of us start out wanting to help animals; it is a noble task. We become so effective at helping animals that we are motivated to want to change society to help animals. When we take on this task, we have to assure ourselves that the task is noble and the cause is righteous.

Today, we frequently see folks taking on causes that are not accepted as righteous. All of the bullying in the world will not make a cause righteous; if anything, it makes it worse.

We frequently see this in the animal welfare movement when other organizations or people want to force their ideology upon us. Oddly, if forced upon us long enough the cause actually might shift to righteousness. No-Kill was shoved down our throats long enough that we began to see the benefits of drinking that in. It still becomes problematic when the goal of becoming No-Kill is just a statistical issue and not a moral issue.

I can remember back when the board of a major humane society would call me at night telling me that I was doing a disservice to my community by not killing 90% of the animals that came into my care. Now, we are assaulted if we are forced to kill over 10% of our animals. The humane society lost its contract with the county due to its large euthanasia numbers and it felt that its cause was righteous because the board members were convinced that 90% of the animals were too dangerous to put on the streets of the community. Well, looking back at that, we see that they caved to stupidity.

But, is the 10% that we deal with today also an effort in stupidity? It’s just a number! It is just a statistic! Well, it is not. That number represents everything to animal rights organizations. It is the difference between calling shelter staff saviors or killers. It has become a number that keeps the bad guys bad and the good guys good.

How important is that number? Are we willing to adopt out dangerous animals just to meet our statistical goal, so that we can look like the good guys on paper? Are we willing to turn domestic cats out into a cold winter, so that we can call ourselves no-kill? What is it worth to us? Are we willing to be inhumane so as to meet a statistical number? If the answer is yes, then you might want to look again at your mission statement.

It is possible to reduce euthanasia to zero. Is that helping or hurting your community? What about the animals?

I recently watched one of my favorite organizations move from animal welfare to animal rights. I grieve for them and for the rest of us.

February 1, 2025

Trap, Neuter, and Release (TNR) Programs

One of our local cities forfeited a million-dollar grant to reduce the city’s feral cat program through a program of trapping, neutering, and releasing (TNR) the sterile cats back into the community. There are two sides to this issue and from my perspective, I’ve never seen a positive long-term outcome with TNR programs. Unless feeling good is your desired outcome. Sure, a number of years ago, organizations touted success stories, but many of those proved unfounded over time.

Communities began seeing surplus cats in communities because many people saw cats as too independent to be considered pets; so they didn’t invest in spaying or neutering their cats that seem to come and go from their households. When things are going well for cats, they like to breed. Most species are the same way. The offspring of these “domestic” cats started becoming feral. A feral population is dependent on the carrying capacity of the community. As food became scarce, the cats would stop breeding.

“Little Old Ladies” upset the carrying capacity of the community by setting out food for the cats to eat. The cats would start to breed again until they exceeded the carrying capacity again. Like raccoon populations, disease would wipe out the population when the population is stressed with too many animals. Raccoons are usually on a seven-year cycle.

The problem with TNR programs is that in addition to spaying and neutering the cats, the cats are offered vaccinations, thus reducing the possibility of death through disease. Another problem with managing feral cat problems is that an excess removal of cats allows vermin to increase. I recall that in one neighborhood that was aggressively against cats discovered that rats grew in population corresponding to the removal of the cats. Anytime you are messing with animal populations, you are messing with Mother Nature.

Cats became a growing concern in animal shelters wanting to become no-kill. It seemed at the rate that cat’s breed, that having a 90% release rate was looking like a passing dream. Some shelters, to meet their no-kill goal, started taking the cats surrendered at the shelter and treating them as part of a TNR solution. They were taking the cats surrendered by their owners and sterilizing them and then releasing them back into the community. The trick was to release them into an area where the owners would not know what they had done. Some believed that throwing a domestic cat in the wild to starve to death was inhumane. No one reported on the impact of these starving cats. So they may or may not have survived. The point was that by doing this, the shelter could boast that they have reached no-kill. Many began to say that TNR stood for Trap, Neuter, and Re-abandon.

The notion, if people continued to feed feral cats, it was better to feed a sterile cat than a fertile cat. Or so we thought. It seems that over time, populations adjust. Even in a population of sterile cats, if the carry capacity increases, the population will adjust for that increase. Cats from other areas will move in. Thus the reason that TNR programs fail. They are good for a while, but if left unattended the fertile cats take over again and they do so quickly.

No-kill is a constant goal for animal shelters and even a short time win looks good for statistics and that is what no-kill is all about is finding other solutions for the animals in our shelters because killing an animal just doesn’t seem like a good solution. I have always advocated that the best solution to killing animals is to prevent their births. Not enough is being done to sterilize every pet. Shelters continue to adopt intact animals…. stupid….. very stupid. Pet owners cannot be trusted to take care of sterilizing their newly adopted pet. Trust me, I have years and years of experience in this area. It is shocking the number of men who tie their testicles to that of their dog’s.

So? Is TNR worthwhile? It is a short-term solution to a bigger program. It makes us feel good by helping with our statistics and staff doesn’t have to perform euthanasia. It provides additional business for our local veterinarians. While you are doing it, it’ll feel good. A few years down the road, you’ll look back and wonder if you had made any impact at all.

Mother Nature maintains everything in a balance. The best way to upset that balance is to introduce humans into the equation (something that I picked up in college and later realized in life). For TNR to be successful over a long period of time, you’ll have to continue your efforts. As we have discovered that TNR usually has an immediate impact that you can feel good about; but, when you stop TNR, the feral population will rebound.

March 3, 2024March 4, 2024

Unfunded Mandates

Our Governor announced his desire for our State to become a “No-Kill State” and maintain that status. On the surface, that sounds swell; but, anytime I hear about a governing body wanting to pass down mandates to lower communities, I think of the Haden Bill in California that passed down such severe mandates that many animal shelters had to close shop. State governing bodies tend to know little to nothing about the dynamics of running local animal shelters. California proved that.

At a time when my State passed laws outlawing DEI in schools and businesses, they enacted their own version of DEI onto insurance companies where they demanded that all animals be treated the same. So insurance companies were forced to raise their rates so that poodles and pit bulls could be treated the same. Since legislators know so little about dog breeds, I worry that our Governor knows little about the dynamics of running an animal shelter.

Thanks to Bidenomics, people are facing harsh inflation. Many of us have to find ways to cut back to just survive. During these troubling times, people are choosing to cut back on their pets so as not to be forced to cut back on the beer. The number of animals being surrendered to animal shelters is high. So, our Governor picks this time to demand animal shelters become no-kill.

The only true solution to no-kill is to bring an end to breeding. If we sterilized every pit bull and pit bull mix in the country, we could solve 70% of the pet overpopulation in animal shelters within a few years. If the Governor wants to help with the situation, instead of making it worse, he could fund low-cost spay/neuter centers around the State.

The good news is that our State has 2 billion dollars left over from last year’s budget. He has the money to help shelters. Is any of that money going to be available to animal shelters? Of course not. That is why we call these things unfunded mandates. But let’s face it, we have a homeless problem and increased crime due to our illegal immigrant invasion. Is any of those funds going to provide more police? Probably not. So where do we decide to put this money in time of our current crisis? A baseball stadium.

Will a baseball stadium help animals? Nope! Will a baseball stadium help the homeless? Nope! Will the baseball stadium decrease crime? Nope! The only thing that a baseball stadium can bring to our community is the entertainment district that will surround the stadium. We just might finally get a nice new restaurant that will serve a good hotdog.

State bodies have to stop making life harder for those who run animal shelters. Their job is to see the big picture. The older that I become, I see our governing bodies becoming more nearsighted.

November 26, 2023March 10, 2024

Deep in the Trenches

In previous posts, I mentioned the risks involved in working in the field of animal welfare. Those risks included getting fired. I have been fired. Multiple times. I hold them as trophies for doing the right thing or for just being pigheaded. You decide.

I was the animal control officer for a neighboring town while completing my degree. With a diploma in hand, I began my job hunt.

Lane County, Oregon: I was hired as the Field Supervisor. The job required that I work 11 or 12-hour days and then handle all of the emergency calls at night. It is amazing how quickly a new job can wear you down. Animal Control fell under the Finance Director. You can imagine that the only interest he had was numbers. And so it was. He placed a citation quota on all of the animal control officers and only those who met his quota of 40 citations a month would see promotions or offered the new trucks or equipment. I was opposed to this. I think we should use more than one tool in dealing with pet owners. My boss disagreed. I lasted three months. I remember the sense of joy that overwhelmed me when I realized that I didn’t have to go back to working there.

Lesson learned: sometimes it is better to be fired when you are not smart enough to leave.

In my next job, I was hired as the Chief Field Supervisor serving Portland Oregon and the gal who hired me claimed that having been fired from Lane County was a very big mark in my favor in getting the job.

Jacksonville Florida: Jacksonville Florida was in the middle of major layoffs. Animal Control was under the Environmental Services Department. We shared that Department with Sanitation Services. The Sanitation folks were undergoing the greatest number of layoffs, so our boss decided to lay off the entire administrative staff of Animal Services to make room for his buddies in Sanitation. If it is any consolation, the Sanitation folks discovered they were unprepared for working in Animal Control and I got to watch my old organization tank in the media. Working in the South forces you to face the dynamics of the “Good-Ole-Boy” system. Although located in Florida, Jacksonville is the southern end of the old South. Coming from the North, sometimes the old South is a hard pill to swallow when you believe that the laws should be distributed evenly for everyone.

Lesson learned: You’re either a good old boy or you are not. Stay away from working in the South. And as I once was told, “maintain a firm grip on your Northern ethics.”

Milwaukee Wisconsin: At some point in my career I wanted to take on a challenge. I had spent years enjoying our adoption successes in Gainesville Florida and wanted to turn a high-kill shelter around. Milwaukee claimed that they wanted to experience an evolution in their policies and wanted to become more progressive. I started bringing in rescues and volunteers into the shelter only to have been met with resistance by a couple of employees. One of the employees had worked there for 30 years and he fought every effort to improve the place. Clearly, I could not get around this obstacle and found myself unemployed. Again!

Lesson learned: Sometimes your ego prevents you from seeing a bad situation. Don’t be fooled by organizations that claim to want to evolve when they are impaired by immovable forces within their organization.

Roanoke Virginia: I call this “out of the pan and into the fire”. One of the local private animal shelters in Roanoke was trying to get me fired before I set foot in the county. I remember an early meeting that this group called to discuss the animal shelter; when I arrived they would not let me attend the meeting. I think the only time I was ever invited to their shelter was when they wanted to lynch me. In the previous post, I talked about turning this shelter around from having a 10% live release rate to over 90%. We were adopting out all of our adoptable animals, but that wasn’t enough for our volunteers. They were demanding that we release dangerous dogs out for adoption. Not on my watch! The people that I worked for were all peacemakers; I had to go. Let them deal with damage control. I came to meet some of the nastiest people working in the animal rescue field here. But, despite their behavior towards humans, they made up for it, in their efforts towards animals. Even dangerous animals.

Lesson learned: I am old-school animal control; where I believe my primary obligation is to protect the community that I serve. There is no place for us old guys because the profession is evolving in which the animals come before the community. I’d rather be fired than have to work in a place that considers placing potentially dangerous animals out for adoption. Didn’t I warn myself about working in the South?

So there you have it. The whole purpose of my blog is to prepare people who want to get into the animal welfare profession. It isn’t all about playing with kittens all day. But, those kittens come in handy on a stressful day.

I enjoyed my career and I count my terminations as trophies. I have to live with myself and I feel like I did my part in keeping each community that I worked for safe. And to think that I studied Wildlife Resources in College so that I could man a fire watch tower and enjoy the beautiful scenery. Either way, in both professions I would have had to deal with ticks.

November 26, 2023March 10, 2024

The Evolution of the Animal Shelter Profession

I was once called “old school.” I guess they meant that I am stuck to the old ways of the profession when the responsibility of being an Animal Control Officer was to serve and protect the public. Our profession has evolved, and to be honest, I am glad that I am now retired because I can’t stop being old school..

The No Kill Movement started the evolution. Our professional focus turned to the plight of the animals in our care. I have to admit, it was very fulfilling to see euthanasia rates decline. Shelters with a live release rate of 10% started seeing more animals getting adopted and eventually many shelters saw live release rates over 90%.

The problem was that many claimed that a 90% live release rate was still too low and that decisions had to be made to place animals that were not considered adoptable. Pit bulls became the poster breed for this cause. Organizations were attempting to convince the public that pit bulls were the breed to own. Even ones that had a history of aggression.

Recently, in my community, a woman was killed by a pair of pit bulls. The Newspaper, along with the local Animal Control organization wrote an article assuring the public that pit bulls are a maligned breed and that you should ignore the deaths caused by the breed. After all, “all breeds are the same.” Don’t let another pit bull related death interfere with the adoption of these animals from the animal shelter.

The problem with this evolution is that it is making people stupid. Animal Shelters are so focused on adopting every animal that they fail to warn people about the genetic characteristics that control an animal’s behavior. Let’s face it, when shelters have a population of 70% pit bulls, they have quite a sales job to make. After all, their mission is no longer to protect people, but to have the highest possible adoption rate…. no matter what the cost.

Since this evolution has sucked so many animal shelters in, it might become necessary to outlaw the adoption of potentially dangerous animals. The Commonwealth of Virginia outlaws the holding back of information about a dog’s previous behavior problems to potential adopters. I used to think that keeping adopters in the dark was a Southern thing, but it appears that it has spilled over into the rest of the Country. Maybe communities should reenact some old school philosophies.

I’m not suggesting that some breeds should be banned; I just think that animal shelters should get back to the days of full disclosure when adopting animals. An era of integrity and respecting the mission that people must come first.

October 18, 2023March 10, 2024

Shortcuts to No-Kill

Disclaimer: Although this blog is intended to be a joke, it doesn’t mean that animal shelters have not used these techniques.

Never announce your plan to become no-kill. The City of Austin is a good example of being too eager to announce to the world that they’ve become no-kill. When the word got out, pet owners from surrounding counties began delivering their pets to them. Austin had to throw tremendous resources out to maintain their no-kill status and eventually had to build a new animal shelter to meet the new demand.

I’ve seem incidents in which the announcement of having an adoption event created the problem of pet owners seeing your adoption efforts and decides that this is the best time to surrender their pet to their animal shelter. The best way to keep your animal shelter free of guilt-ridden pet owners is to constantly remind them that you are “a kill shelter.”

The formula for becoming a no-kill animal shelter is that your live outcomes have to equal or exceed your live intakes. Obviously, dead intakes don’t count. If you are one of the few remaining animal shelters that do not sterilize your animals before adoption, you might as well give up on becoming a no-kill shelter. The spaying and neutering of animals is the primary tool towards no-kill. Of course, if you don’t spay or neuter before adoption, you probably are not so progressive to be thinking no-kill anyway. Sure sterilization costs money; but you cannot trust adopters to shoulder the responsibility to perform this task on their own. Sending a shelter pet out to reproduce more animals is just insane.

Years ago, we were going to put a State initiative out to require animal shelters to sterilize pets prior to adoption. The jurisdictions with the greatest populations were all for it. The smaller jurisdictions claimed that it would require higher adoption fees and thus reduce adoptions. We passed the law based on the “class of the city.” It was a worthless law because the larger jurisdictions were already sterilizing their animals and it appeared that the smaller jurisdictions would not. They were blinded by the fact that they were just adding to the problem in their communities.

Create a policy that you’ll only allow intakes when you have an open cage. Of course this means that your animal control officers will be unable to pickup stray dogs. I remember reading about the outcry of citizens in a large Texas city that complained about packs of dogs were running their streets because their animal control officers were ignoring them. Fortunately, Texans are not opposed to carrying guns for their own protection.

Delaware was one of the first States to ban euthanasia for space. The reasoning was that as long as cage space was available, euthanasia was unnecessary. The didn’t have the foresight to realize that banks of open cages would be necessary for animal control officer to drop off animals. It didn’t make sense that animals would have to remain out in the trucks until space was made for the animals. This is the mistake that politicians make listen to animal rescue groups who don’t have a clear picture as to what the real world is really like.

Forgive me, I am now going to go off on a tangent. It’s my blog, so? Politicians in Utah were convinced that pet liability insurance should be the same for all animals. They were convinced that the cost of Pit Bull insurance should be the same as Poodles. They turned a blind eye to the fact that one breed was outweighing the insurance costs of other breeds. So, if you live in Utah, you will have to pay more for pet insurance to cover the cost that result from Pit Bull ownership. I guess you could liken it to the cost of groceries in which we have to pay more as a result of those who cater to thief. Okay, I got that out of my system…. let’s move on…..

Delay responding to dogs hit by car (HBC). The animal will either die or possibly picked up by a good Samaritan. Although there is a risk that the good Samaritan might think to bring the animal to the animal shelter. Put up the Closed Sign and hope for the best.

Destroy your night drop off cages. Night drop off cages are a great way to increase your intakes; you don’t want that. I worked at a location that we placed a camera to record the nightly drop offs. We witnessed an animal control truck, from another jurisdiction, dropping off animals. I have no idea as to how they report that in their monthly statistics. We once pulled out a homeless man from the same cages; which were protected from the weather. Fortunately for us, the guy walked off; I have no idea how we would have reported him on our statistics.

Require appointments for animal surrenders. This was one of the first “go to” policies when no-kill became a thing. The policy stopped last minute notions of people wanting to get rid of their pets; but saw an increase in the number of people turning in “a stray” animals. Policies frequently backfire.

So…. require an appointment to turn in a stray dog! Of course, that causes an increase in the number of dogs abandoned in the community or tied to the front door of your building. But, as I suggested earlier, don’t patrol for stray dogs.

Let’s not forget about cats. Cats make up one of the largest groups that lead to euthanasia. Many shelters started limiting their intakes to “domestic dogs.” I guess they were worried about some non-domestic dogs showing up.

I think you are now catching the drift: stop any process that takes in live animals that will render them dead. You can start with stopping the euthanasia service you offer to pet owners. Veterinarians provide this service as well and don’t have to report it as a statistic. Due to the notion that pets are personal property, many pet owners believe that they can have their pet killed on a whim. I always had a policy that pet owners could surrender their pet to the animal shelter, but could not demand the euthanasia of the animal. I would explain that in order for my shelter to kill an animal we had to own the animal. As the new owner of the animal we would decide the animal’s fate. This stops the notion that a person can demand that they pet be killed so that no one else could have it. I know, this sounds crazy, but it has happened many times. I am not going to kill a puppy because the owner doesn’t want anyone else to own it. Now, if the puppy has eaten a couple family members, I might reconsider.

Keep in mind; I am not suggesting that you do any or all of these things; I am just reporting options that are available to you. After all, we have a reason that we call this dark humor.

One of the problems that I’ve faced with animal control officers is that many of them prefer to impound an animal rather that return the animal back to the owner with a ticket. I hate to say that I’ve had these officer working for me and I did everything that I could do to get rid of them. The problem is worse when the animal control officers are not employed by the animal shelter, but are employed by the local police department. This is quite common and poses quite a problem. One of the last places that I worked, the animal control officer intentionally over stressed the animal shelter by identifying colonies of sick cats and delivering them to the animal shelter. Obviously, it hurts your statistics when you have to euthanize the animals as well as it impacts other healthy animals in your facility. I only bring this up to show that not everything is under your control. Outside forces will influence shelter statistics. As well as inside forces.

When I first started in the business, City Council members started noticing that I was listing animals available for adoption in the local newspaper. One of those members reported to the Chief of Police that I had listed the same animal multiple times. I got called into the Chief’s office and was told to euthanize any animal that was over its stray hold time even though space was not an issue. The lesson to learn is that if you work for a bunch of buttheads, give your animals new names when they are listed in the newspaper.

Probably the most effect way to move animals out of your shelter is to give rescue groups sufficient motivation to take your animals. The first step is to prepare the animal for adoption. Give the animal all of its vaccinations and perform the sterilization of the animal. If that isn’t enough to stimulate rescues to take your animals…. pay them.

Maddie’s Fund offered community grants in which they allowed us to pay our rescues to take our animals. Oddly, we may have been Maddie’s Fund’s only success story. Because Maddie discovered how difficult it is to get animal shelters to work with one another. It seems, for them, anything you got two shelters together, all they did is fight. Our group in central Florida was a different story. We overcame our issues to work together to get animals adopted. It was a noble cause and money flowed. Maddie’s Fund extended our grant numerous times because, I think, they liked to have a project that they could point their finger at that was successful.

It is too bad that more shelters couldn’t get along. One success story failed to keep that funding going. Maddie went off in other directions. Humane groups cannot seem to get along with one another even when money is at stake and animal’s lives are at stake.

Some of the national humane organizations provide funding for animal transport services. The notion is that if you can’t adopt animals in your community, maybe they would be welcome somewhere else. Unfortunately, Pit Bulls have pretty much saturated the country.

This is when I dust off my harebrained ideal of forcing pet owners to sterilize their pets. I think that anywhere an animal shelter is overcrowded with 50% or more of a specific breed that the community should force the owners who have that breed to sterilize their pet. People who are selling the breed should be forced to sterilize the dogs that they sell.

Let’s face it. Pit Bull owners are still some of the most irresponsible pet owners around; otherwise, why are they still being bred when our animal shelters are overwhelmed with them?

So? You have a shelter full of Pit Bull dogs and they are hindering your efforts to maintaining your No-Kill status. You begin paying a rescue from another State to come rescue your dogs. Let’s say that the rescue that you are using has a very poor live release rate. So in fact you are paying a rescue to come in and euthanize your dogs. In hind sight, I always looked at the live release rate of rescuers that I worked with; but that doesn’t mean that others do as well. The whole point of being No-Kill is that of your own statistics. No one really looks at the statistics of the rescues that you use. Well, until the news finds out about it.

Let’s face it. There is so much pressure on shelters becoming No-Kill that it is easy to see the shelter’s administration making stupid decisions. Many of those decisions become obstacles to the primary mission of the public animal shelter to protect the people of their community.

One of the risks that you face is that even when you meet the status of being a No-Kill shelter, volunteers will cause an uprising when you refuse to adopt animals that clearly would put the public at risk. The people who determine your employment might hold the volunteers in higher esteem than protecting the public. I’ve always said that doing the right thing frequently puts your job at risk, but keeping your community’s children safe is a higher goal than keeping your job.

Sorry, that must have hit a nerve with me.

Every shelter should do whatever it takes to find homes for the animals in their care, but you should not take that goal so far as to put the community at risk. Currently, animal shelters are full of unadoptable animals that remain in cages because the shelter is worried about its statistics. At some point, someone must point out that keeping an animal in a cage for the rest of its life is inhumane.

October 7, 2023March 10, 2024

No Kill Defined

I was recently reading an article in the local newspaper where one of our resident rescue organizations was enlightening the media and local residents that the term “no kill” was used incorrectly. It dawned on me that the term no-kill has been around so long that few of us remember when the term was first drafted. So let us go back more than a few years when the term didn’t exist.

Euthanasia used to be the end-all solution to animal shelter problems with keeping communities safe from dangerous dogs and surplus pets. Most animal shelters reported that they euthanized 70% of their animals. Even back then, it was a dismal statistic. For those who don’t remember kindergarten math, that is a 30% live release rate.

Someone suggested that shelters should stop killing animals. As much as that had a good sound to it; the question was raised as to how do you deal with dangerous, sick, injured, or aged animals? It was obvious that a 100% live release rate was impractical. So after many years of discussion, it was decided that a 90% live release rate was a wonderful number to strive for. It is the number that still exists today. So? Is no kill practical? Or better yet, is no kill the correct term to use? The answer is: It depends.

Through the years animal shelters’ mission got lost to the no-kill movement. We stopped caring about keeping our communities safe or providing a humane shelter environment; we cared only for our no-kill status. Above all else, we had to stop killing animals. We performed that duty by adopting aggressive animals into homes with children and introducing overcrowding into our shelters. Our mission was to keep animals alive at any cost.

Today, the 90% live release rate is more commonly reported in shelters. We reached that goal through poor adoption practices, shutting our doors to intakes, and pet sterilization programs. We successfully stopped providing a service to our communities and focused solely on our statistics; a noble cause to be able to call ourselves a “no-kill shelter.”

The people who object to 90% are the private rescues who don’t take in animals from the public. They don’t have to deal with the people who surrender their pets because medical costs are too high to save their pets. They don’t take in pets who have been hit by cars and are in pain. They don’t live in the reality of what it is like to be a public animal shelter.

I’ve always thought that we should have done away with the no-kill term and stop providing for pets as individuals and go back to our original mandate to serve our communities by providing safe streets and humane TEMPORARY sheltering.

There is a reason that I make a point of saying that shelters should provide temporary shelter. Looking at the size of cages and kennels, it is clear that animal shelters were not designed for the long-term holding of one animal, let alone three or four. And yet, we began stockpiling animals in inhumane cages.

We should celebrate the no-kill status of our shelter, but we need to look at the cost to the health and well-being of our communities and the animals themselves. Every time I hear about someone lambasting no-kill as being a lie, I want to ask them what they are doing to keep the lie alive.

The truth of the matter is that animal rescue groups find advantages in having a public animal shelter killing animals in their community. They have someone to point at with the notion of claiming that they are better than that shelter; you just need to donate to us. It is not uncommon for a rescue group to bring their sick and injured animals to the public animal shelter so that they can claim that they were not the ones that euthanized that animal. All the while still pointing that finger of disgust at them. It didn’t take long for the no-kill movement to make ugly monsters of animal rescue groups. The fact is that someone has to kill animals and the public animal shelter takes on that task so that the rescue groups in their community don’t have to. And yes, taking on that task hurts our statistics.

So, the next time someone starts pointing a finger at the public shelter’s no-kill rate, it is that way because the shelter takes in injured animals from their owners and the public. They decide that a dead dangerous animal is better than an adopted dangerous animal. They decide that the kennel space is too small for one animal, let alone three or four. They do it because it is still the humane thing to do.

To compound the issue, rescue groups like to “rescue” the most adoptable animals in public animal shelters, leaving the marginal ones behind. When I left the profession, I was directing an animal shelter in which 70% of our dog population were pit bulls. More than any other breed, pit bulls are one of the hardest to get adopted. Our neighborhood humane society felt it was necessary to bring in dogs from out of State because we didn’t offer an acceptable variety of adoptable breeds. I can’t blame them; they too were worried about their statistics and couldn’t care less for the pit bulls that remained in the public shelter.

So, one of the most contentious issues was about that 10%. Questions arose as to whether they were “adoptable animals.” It became necessary to “grade” the animals. That grading came about as the Asilomar Accords. I decided to cheat and asked an AI to explain what the Accords were:

“The Asilomar Accords are a set of guidelines and principles that were developed in 2004 by a group of animal welfare leaders in the United States. The purpose of the Asilomar Accords is to promote collaboration and transparency among different animal organizations and to reduce the euthanasia of healthy and treatable dogs and cats in shelters.
1. The Asilomar Accords provide standard definitions for categorizing the health and behavior of shelter animals, as well as a common format for reporting shelter statistics and calculating live release rates.
2. The Asilomar Accords are voluntary and not legally binding, but many animal shelters across the country have adopted them as a way to measure their progress and impact on saving animal lives.”

So, the notion was to keep healthy and treatable animals off of the euthanasia list. The Asilomar Accords were an important part of record keeping and were used widely by organizations dishing out financial grants.