No Kill is more than "noble"; it's doable!

I have heard this phrase many a time in the past months from different people: "No kill is noble, but it can't be done here because of _____." Insert one defeatist reason or another, and this is the main obstacle to reaching something doable. It is being done at this time in places like Charlottesville, VA and Reno, NV--where save rates of more than 80-90 percent have been reached in the past year alone.

The closet comparison between homeless animal intake numbers in a very high growth area such as Las Cruces is Reno. I have picked up the phone and talked to Bonney Brown myself, the director of the Nevada Humane Society, and she is very responsive and willing to share ideas and information. She came to Nevada via Best Friends Animal Society, so of course she has that positive drive. She just sent me a copy of their Animal Help Desk manual, and I plan to use it as a basis for a pet help line program being developed here by the Humane Society of Southern New Mexico. Pet retention efforts are also part of the entire no kill solution base.

Oftentimes, shelter leaders will hear of another area experiencing success, and they will automatically look for the holes in what is being done or reported or for excuses of why it isn't possible in their areas and completely dismiss/distrust the success. Instead, you'd hope they'd do something uncharacteristic--like perhaps pick up the phone and talk to another shelter leader in another area experiencing success to see what they have been doing and how they are reaching that success. After all, if euthanasia is just a reality and given, why not take some chances and try things differently? What's the worst that can happen?

The comment received from "dog lover" is much appreciated, and I agree that spay/neuter is one of the most important elements in the No Kill Equation. Education for adults and children alike; research and programs to reach high volumes of surgeries; and providing many services and opportunities for people to do this very right thing is something we need to strive toward and start working on today. I have already written about this subject more than once in this blog, and it will be a main theme throughout. We'll explore all ideas regarding spay and neuter.

However, the reason shelters need an entire equation and many kinds of efforts and programs to help solve the issue is that the problem is not simple. If it were a simple 1 minus 1 equals 0 kind of equation, then simply raising awareness and volumes of spay/neuter surgeries would be the only answer. However, any shelter professional can tell you it isn't that simple. There are issues with animal behavior that people have no idea how to deal with (hence,the need for pet help lines and Dog Whisperer episodes!); there are issues with people's expectations of animals despite more and more animals being openly welcomed into homes as family members; there are issues of people being unable to care for their pets after loss of life or health; and there are issues of finding better ways to work with animal control departments and educate them as the first responders in the field that can work with and not against people at every turn. If the issue were that simple, a 10 or more step solution would not be necessary.

I am also sure that for shelter staff, euthanasia is never an easy decision nor an enjoyable/rewarding experience. You'd have to be sadistic for that! There is nothing more tragic than the fact that humane organizations are in the business of killing the very beings they are sworn to protect. My heart goes out to people who carry out this awful work. I suspect that is what causes so much conflict--it starts internally. Most shelter workers also do not receive the kind of emotional support and counseling they need.

This struggle dates back to the founder of the first ASPCA in America in 1866, Henry Bergh. He was a powerhouse animal savior and advocate of one. Although he tried to change and modify pound practices from the outside, he refused to accept the City of New York's offers to run the pound under contract because he deeply understood the great divide between protecting animals and the business carried out at the city pound. Though things have progressed since the days pound animals were drowned or clubbed to death in mass killings and the public spectacles of these killings, things have also stagnated in this country in the area of animal sheltering since humane societies took the reigns of pounds--which happened shortly after Bergh's death.

For a stark example of the stagnation, it is only now that shelter medicine has come out as a "new, emerging" field in the world of veterinary medicine. It has taken that long for shelter animals to merit that kind of attention, which is odd. After all, it is understandable that humane organizations took the reigns of shelters to provide better care and opportunities to homeless animals and more humane deaths, but what took so long to merit good vet care? Shouldn't the main priority be care of and lifesaving for these animals? Well, that is what no kill is all about. It even adds opportunities for behavior modification to help an animal become more "adoptable".

So, back to that hero of long ago ... Henry Bergh fought until the very end to not take over pound operations. This is from a passage of "Redemption", which offers a rich and detailed history of sheltering in our country: "He [Bergh] believed the ASPCA was a tool to champion and protect life, not to end it. He believed that its role to protect animals from people was fundamentally at odds with that of a pound. Bergh understood implicitly that animal welfare and animal control were two separate and distinct movements, each opposing the other on fundamental issues of life and death. To this day, that tension can be bridged somewhat, but never eliminated."

It is because this work is hard on the minds, hearts, and souls of shelter staff that you'd think they'd be on the path to exploring other alternatives. It is hard to explore or try other avenues, however, when leaders have accepted and completely internalized the myths of there being more homeless animals than available homes and that the best we can hope to do is save a few lucky dogs and cats and kill the rest. This is a vicious cycle for our shelters and their staff, which is why a complete change of heart and mind is required from the top down. Imagine the power of success, even in bits at a time? Imagine the power of negativity and defeatism being replaced by a resolve to accept and fight the challenges with a positive, can-do attitude?

That said, I end this post with an assurance to "dog lover" that this blog will definitely talk about the importance of spay and neuter and the various ways to raise awareness and volume of this important part of no kill. But, I also will pose challenges to our leadership to raise the bar for our shelter as I believe that despite the fact that killing may be reality for shelters, this should not stop us from trying to reach higher goals.

This reminds me of one of the monthly meetings our City and County managers were having with area animal advocates during the shelter's transition time and when they were first forming the newly-coined Animal Services Center of the Mesilla Valley (ASCMV). They kept assuring us that we'd be soon moving past the pound mentality our shelter had been operating under. At one point, they presented their mission and vision statements for the ASCMV. They said they had sat and discussed these with each other at length, and we anxiously waited to hear what they came up with, hoping for something progressive and visionary.

Instead, they repeated the same mantra ... that no kill was a noble idea of a very far, far future, but the ASCMV's mission was to adhere to state statues and laws regarding the running of an animal shelter. That was a real letdown ... at least for myself. I wanted to stand up and say, "With all due respect, Mr. Moore and Mr. Haines, but that is not either a vision nor mission statement ... that's a given."

Of course our shelter has to adhere to state and local laws. When and if no kill does oppose laws or the way they are enforced, it does so from a legal point-of-view. If your current laws, such as ours, are in opposition to implementation of good programs for feral cats--for example--you lobby and fight for the laws and ordinances to be changed in such a way to allow for these programs. If, for another example, your current laws don't allow the shelter to fix dogs and cats found roaming at large until they are in the system the third time and the owner comes to claim them and pay their dues, you work to change that law, too, so that you can automatically spay and neuter any dog/cat coming into the facility.

One by one ... one law at a time ... one attitude at a time ... one animal at a time ... you work toward saving more lives until you start to turn the tide. You don't just shrug your shoulders and say it cannot be done.

What holds us back from joining the no kill revolution?

First, thanks to the person who made the anonymous comment ...

... about getting turned off at our shelter's door just by a sign that started exhibiting a negative, distrusting atmosphere before this person entered to look for a dog to adopt. And, I hope more people in the public will start to speak up about their experiences. I say this not because I encourage mean-spiritedness with no purpose, but because I honestly believe that in order to improve and get to no kill, the first step is for our shelter to take a self-critical, sobering look at itself through the eyes of the many good people they turn off and away, which does directly tie into the numbers of animals that get killed.

Let's not let the no kill phrase get in the way of working toward lifesaving

No kill as a term seems to send everyone on different loops—from a person off the streets who is not familiar with shelter lingo to animal-welfare advocates and shelter professionals who work regularly in this world and especially for leaders in our communities who don’t think animal welfare warrants the time, money, and staff necessary to do the kind of heavy research it takes to muddle through the world of no kill much less lead the efforts toward a change in philosophy and the way shelters do business.

Some people I know prefer to use the term low kill, and Maddie’s Fund started shying away from the term no kill—probably because success has been slow for this program despite the hundreds of millions dedicated to it—and started calling shelters “adoption guarantee” when they reach their goals of adopting out all “healthy” animals. To me, we spend too much time worrying about and arguing about terminology. Even terms like healthy, adoptable, treatable (medically/behaviorally), and all the other terms that are used in shelters are relative to the way they are either equitably and thoroughly applied--or, as is the case in most shelters, not applied fairly. Furthermore, statistics from one shelter to another are not easily comparable because these numbers are not collected and reported on in the same ways at all shelters. Only programs like Maddie’s Fund and the matrix suggested by the No Kill Advocacy Center are starting to standardize statistics across the board, but anyone can skew their own statistics with the way they categorize the incoming animals. Confusing is just the tip of the iceberg.

No kill from the No Kill Advocacy Center’s point of view is simple. It means not killing any healthy and treatable animals that can and should be saved and reserving euthanasia only for the dictionary definition of the word—giving a humane death to those who are irremediably suffering because of illness or injury, to those with a poor prognosis for recovery from an illness, and to those seriously vicious dogs that pose a threat to our community. In this sense of no kill, one can see what they mean ... if you reach the goal of only performing euthanasia in the true sense of the word, then you are no longer killing ... hence, you have reached no kill.

Determining which animals fall in which categories takes trained medical and behavioral professionals and a commitment to assess and route animals on an individual basis. Otherwise, animals are assessed less fairly and thoroughly, such as deciding to kill one dog over another for simply being of a certain breed or color or age or just not as “cute” as some others (the fate of most pit bulls, for example) or because the dog is behaving in a shy, fearful manner (understandable behavior in a shelter setting).

People in the general public are understandably confused. Recently, our shelter’s new leadership announced a no kill goal and said it would take five to seven years to get there. All people saw and registered in the headlines and news bites were the words no kill. To regular people, this means we are there NOW. All those animals they are having issues with—the ones that escape and jump out, the ones that dig too many holes in the yard, the ones that bark all night out of sheer boredom, the cats that spray the house, the ones who were toylike and cute as puppies and kittens but grew up to be annoying without leadership and attention to the animals’ needs—well, all those animals are ending up at our shelter even more so than in the past.

This is where the community needs to understand that things aren’t that simple that someone snaps their fingers and the shelter suddenly grows in its capacity and the services and programs it offers. That does take time. Whether it takes a year to make strides or a few years to completely reach the goal are also arguments that take our focus away from what matters most—which is action and taking it now. Even discussions that say increased funding is needed first can make it so no one acts until that happens, and all we are doing is wasting more time and more lives.

This is where Richard Avanzino and Maddie’s Fund are teaching us some lessons. When Avanzino took over the San Francisco ASPCA in the early 1990s, he had zero experience running shelters and the non-profit was three months away from bankruptcy. He didn’t wait for funding; he started acting. He is the grandfather of comprehensive adoption programs, one of the necessary elements leading to no kill. That’s why Maddie’s Fund focuses so much on this aspect, but what this is showing is that if you throw millions toward that aspect alone, your success will be marginal. All of the comprehensive no kill programs and services need to be happening at the same time. When that started working in San Francisco, Avanzino not only pulled that SPCA out of bankruptcy but grew it into one of the richest shelter non-profits at that time and by 1994, San Francisco was the safest community for homeless animals.

So, let it take as long as it takes, and don’t worry about that in the beginning, but start working toward implementing all the programs and services that help bring it about TODAY, especially beginning with the sheer willpower to stop the needless killing—whatever it takes. This set of To Dos for shelters is simple (see my last blog for the high-level list), and though each can be tailored for each community and tweaked or added to, that should not stop us from moving forward now. For too long, our leaders here have been talking about our shelter being in transition since the city and county took over operations of it in January. That has gone on for about eight months now.

It’s time for all of us—advocates like myself and those in the general public that are responsible pet owners and anyone who cares at all about animal welfare—whether we all can agree on the terminology or not, to ask that this time of transition come to an end and some real talk and action begin toward the various programs and services that are going to get us there.

Start asking the tough questions and demand answers. Our animal services are made possible by either our tax dollars or charitable contributions, so we are all stakeholders in reaching the no kill goal and for the welfare of the animals in our system. For example, Dona Ana County recently purchased a van that could be out in the South part of the county today providing volume spay/neuter services, and this is where 60% of the strays brought into the shelter by animal control come from. So, what are they waiting for? More questions to ask that can lead to action: How can we get more funding to the spay/neuter programs that do exist to launch an aggressive PR campaign using radio and print media and billboards? Who can go start knocking on doors to ask people what is preventing them from fixing their pets, and how can we overcome these obstacles in proactive, positive ways?

Lastly, the entire community needs to be allowed and welcomed to support the shelter in tackling and implementing each and every service and program that needs to be in place. Starting work on these programs does not take years' worth of time. Maybe the full benefits may take years to materialize, but there should be measurable progress made year-by-year to show you are headed in the right direction. Then, maybe the funding and other opportunities will present themselves when we prove that we deserve them.