The Long & Winding Road

After three years of heavy traveling, after over 50-plus cities, and three nations, my speaking engagements are winding down and I will be taking a break to finish some projects.

If you are interested in hearing me speak, I have only four dates left in 2010:

• Raleigh, NC, September 25. They sold out pretty quickly but moved into a bigger venue that can seat about 340 so additional seats have become available. The event is free. Register by clicking here.

• Austin, TX, September 28. I will be speaking at the all-day No Kill workshop. There are only a few seats left. Register by clicking here.

• Ft. Lauderdale, FL, October 9. I will be speaking at the No Kill Nation’s all-day No Kill seminar. Register by clicking here.

• Farmington, NM, November 20. I will finish up with a two-hour Building a No Kill Community seminar. Registration details will be available within two weeks. (I’ll announce on twitter.)

Webinars

If you can’t come to the seminars, I will be bringing them to your home/office. Starting October 22, I will be teaming up with Mike Fry of Animal Ark and Animal Wise Radio to offer a monthly series of low-cost webinars to help shelters, rescue organizations, private citizens, and municipalities learn more about and begin implementing the programs and services of the No Kill Equation. Topics will include reforming animal control, turbocharging adoption programs, building a volunteer and foster care program, non-lethal community cat initiatives, using legislation and litigation to save lives, and much more.

The interactive sessions will feature some of the most successful shelter directors, animal law attorneys, and advocates in the USA and beyond. One Friday afternoon each month, the webinars will be streaming live to computers worldwide.

Our first webinar is Reforming Animal Control with Ryan Clinton of FixAustin. Learn how to reform your local shelter through a campaign for change that includes public advocacy, lobbying and legislation, and harnessing the power of community compassion.

Ryan is a writer, appellate attorney, and civic advocate in Austin, Texas. In 2005, Ryan founded FixAustin.org, a non-profit animal-advocacy organization working to end the killing of animals in Austin shelters. He also serves on the board of directors of the Central Texas Animal Alliance and provides legal counsel to Austin Pets Alive. Thanks to FixAustin, in 2010, the Austin City Council unanimously passed a law that put Austin on the road to No Kill.

Ryan’s presentation is crucial for those who want to reform their medieval, regressive, killing shelters. I receive a lot of e-mails from people telling me their shelters are horrible and they want to change them. This is the webinar to attend. Learn more and register by clicking here.

Radio

As always, you can also join me every Sunday morning on Animal Wise Radio, where I discuss what is happening in the No Kill movement with hosts Mike Fry and Beth Nelson.

And periodically, I do interviews with others. If you were not able to listen live, I joined Alex and Brenda from the Dogs in Danger radio hour to talk about the ASPCA betraying the animals by defending poorly performing killing shelters. The latest salvo was their assault on accountability and transparency. According to the ASPCA, if shelters have to tell people how many animals they take in, adopt, and kill, people will realize shelters are killing and will be less sympathetic to them. In other words, keep the people in the dark so that killing can continue without public scrutiny. You can listen to the interview of September 5 by clicking here.

Read

Have you read Redemption and Irreconcilable Differences? Learn more by clicking here.

Are you signed up to receive the No Kill Advocacy Center’s free e-newsletter, The No Kill Advocate? Read the current issue and sign up to receive it by clicking here.

Stay Connected

Click here for other ways to stay connected.

But if you’d like to be notified in advance about No Kill news, upcoming events, and more, follow me on twitter by clicking here.

The Butcher Who Cried “Hoarder”

Ingrid Newkirk is the Butcher of Norfolk. The whereabouts of this little dog are unknown. If his fate is anything like 97% of the animals PETA seeks out every year, his lifeless body is in PETA’s freezer.

Attention: Dog and cat killers. Ingrid Newkirk of PETA would like to protect you, shield you, promote you, and defend you. There is only one criterion: call yourself an animal shelter. It doesn’t matter if you kill in the face of readily available lifesaving alternatives. Why should it? They do the same, every single day.

It doesn’t matter if you neglect and abuse them before you kill them. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feed them, it doesn’t matter if you allow puppies to drown in drains, and it doesn’t even matter if you beat them to death. PETA will champion your cause.

They will write letters to the editor for you. They will write Op Ed pieces for you. They will attack anyone who criticizes you. They will threaten lawsuits. Whatever it takes. Because as long as you are needlessly killing animals and as long as you are claiming you have no choice but to do so because of “pet overpopulation,” you are providing Newkirk a valuable service. You are giving her political cover for her own dark impulses, which results in PETA seeking out and killing thousands of defenseless animals every year.

The latest salvo from the Butcher of Norfolk is an Op Ed piece in The Jersey Journal, in response to protests by animal lovers in that community, where she comes to the defense of the Liberty Humane Society’s (LHS) recent killing of animals. The Butcher cites Niki Dawson, the interim director at LHS, who stated that she arrived to find the shelter “abysmal, horrendous, shocking, horrifying… It’s difficult to put into words what it’s like to see 99 dogs crammed into a facility built to comfortably house only 50. What it’s like to witness 274 cats in a building meant for only 80. Perhaps the best description is a word we in this field know only so well: HOARDER.”

Dawson should know; she was accused of the same thing when she was forced out of Camden County’s shelter as the director. In fact, her successors used the same tactic in order to justify the killing of hundreds of animals there after she left. Dawson had more than the claimed capacity at Camden County, and the “excess” were simply executed. But the Dawson who was trying to save animals in Camden knew something that the one who was hired to kill them in Jersey City appears to have conveniently forgotten: it is not the number of animals in the facility per se, but the quality of their care.

The fact that a shelter was built for 50 dogs but has 99 means little if the dogs are kept clean, well-cared for, and socialized. And even if you were to accept her statement at face value, even if it was all true, LHS did not have to resort to the extreme, unethical, and cruel option of killing that the Butcher implies is the only logical recourse. They could have cleaned the cages they claimed were filthy. They could have socialized and fostered the animals they claimed were going crazy. They could have adopted out the ones they claimed were being warehoused. Dawson and I had an e-mail exchange over the numbers of animals at LHS. And in addition to sample flyers and promotions and a guide to increasing adoptions, I sent her the following on August 14:

While I see you have been reaching out to the rescue community, you need to reach out to the public. You are across the river from an adoption market of 8 million people, and Liberty’s surrounding suburbs are a good market for animals, and in that context, [finding homes for] less than 50 dogs and 200 cats is very doable. Keep in mind that in a community of 400,000 people, the [Nevada Humane Society is] adopting out 1,000 animals a month in Reno. The key is to reach out to the public in a positive, engaging way without the hoarder language you’ve been using to get the rescue community’s attention. There is no reason why you could not move the “excess” animals quickly through a positive marketing and adoption promotion, utilizing adoption venues in the shelter, throughout the community, and even, if need be, across the river. I am enclosing a packet of information which I hope will help. It includes adoption promotion ideas, marketing ideas, and more. It will come in two separate e-mails because of the size and amount of information.

Also, keep in mind that shelters can comfortably exceed capacity of design, as long as they do it smartly. There are over 500 animals on any given day at the NHS though the facility was not “built” to house that many but even veterinary critics who thought a shelter should not exceed design capacity changed their minds after visiting for themselves. As long as the animals are clean, well cared for, and socialized regularly, it’s not an issue. Most shelters, including all government agencies, have moved away from engineering standards toward performance standards. You can talk to Sue Cosby at the PSPCA how she comfortable housed animals in the garage, which was not built for animal holding, during a flu epidemic in the shelter so she did not have to kill. Again, the key is to use performance standards for animal well being.

You can literally see New York City, the largest City in the U.S. and a prime adoption market, from Liberty Park in Jersey City. That is eight million people on top of the 600,000 in Jersey City and Hudson County to appeal to for the adoption of 250 animals. They could have adopted all of them and more in a single weekend. But that is not what they chose to do. I went on Liberty Humane Society’s website today. They haven’t had an adoption promotion event since June, during the last administration. The next one is not until September 18, over one month after I suggested it. Feeble efforts lead to feeble results. But I guess it is just easier to scream “hoarder,” blame the past administration, and kill the animals. Just like Dawson’s successors in Camden County did to her.

The irony, of course, is that had anyone been protesting the Camden massacre, the Butcher would have condemned Dawson as a hoarder and come to their defense. But these are just facts. And, like I said, the Butcher is not going to let them get in the way of a sensationalist story. So what does the Butcher do? Lies to the readers of The Jersey Journal by suggesting homes are not available; that there are “far more dogs and cats than there are homes. Millions more.” To prove this, the Butcher of Norfolk does not offer statistics or data. She doesn’t even offer any analysis. How could she? It is, in fact, not true.

There are about 3,000,000 dogs and cats being killed because shelters do a lousy job at adoptions. In fact, some shelters don’t do any adoptions. Every year, however, over 21 million people are looking to bring home a new companion animal in the U.S., a number which is growing every year. Where will that new dog (or cat) come from? Some are already committed to adopting from shelters and they will do so. Others will go to a pet store, breeder, or other commercial-type source. But roughly 17 million people have not decided where their new pet will come from and studies show they have a positive view of shelters, are open to adopting from shelters, and can be convinced to do so. These are the people shelters need to reach to successfully adopt more animals to them. Even if roughly 80% of those people got a dog or cat from somewhere other than a shelter, we could still zero out the killing.

The problem is not a lack of homes, the problem is that the shelters the Butcher champions find killing easier than doing what is necessary to stop it. They simply refuse to innovate, modernize, and emulate the state-of-the-art sheltering protocols that progressive shelters have followed in order to revamp their adoption programs. Why? Because doing so takes dedication and effort, when it is so much easier to exploit the boogeyman of “hoarding” and use it to attack those who want to end the killing.

Never mind that the average length of stay for animals at the open admission animal control shelter I ran in New York was only eight days and that no animal ever celebrated an anniversary there. Never mind that the average length of stay at the open admission No Kill Nevada Humane Society, which adopts out 10,000 a year, is 14 days, or about a vacation-level stay for a dog in a boarding kennel. Are we really going to accept that these animals would be better off dead?

But, once again, don’t worry about the facts. They just get in the way. After all, the Butcher says, “PETA ran an ad pleading for homes for 28 cats. Three people responded.”  First of all, this never happened. It is made up. If PETA is saying that despite $30,000,000 in revenues, millions of animal-loving members (who falsely believe that PETA is an animal rights organization), and a powerhouse media reach, they could not find homes for 28 cats, we have no choice but to dismiss such a claim as an absurdity and a lie. There are countless examples of shelters emptying their facilities by adoption when they reached out for help. And they do not have PETA’s media savvy, millions of supporters, and unlimited resources.

There is no doubt that the facility in Liberty is run down. There is no doubt that it is need of significant capitalization. The animal holding spaces are inadequate and the shelter is in disrepair. That is the byproduct of the “catch and kill” paradigm that does not value animals. The No Kill movement has redefined not just sheltering, but the actual physical shelters themselves. The No Kill movement has created facilities that eliminate stainless steel cages and chain link kennels. These new shelters are the physical manifestation of the right to life and quality care ethic embodied in the No Kill philosophy.

Compare these No Kill shelters with two killing shelters championed by PETA:

Dogs wait for adoption in Animal Ark’s spacious “kennels.” The physical shelter is reflective of how caring the programs and staff are there.

It’s play time at the Charlottesville SPCA. Good care and socialization are synonymous with the No Kill philosophy.

Cats lounge about and enjoy the sun and fresh air in this cat colony room at the Nevada Humane Society: a clean, caring, comfortable No Kill shelter.

A dog and puppies at Houston’s animal control shelter. Diarrhea is all over the cage floor and in the water bowl but is not cleaned. Shelter staff have allowed puppies to drown in the trench drain, kittens to go without food and water, and one employee beat a dog but was not fired. Employees who scored the lowest on city aptitude tests were placed in animal control. Read a report of conditions by clicking here. PETA has defended this shelter.

A cat begs for food at King County’s abusive pound. Cats were not fed during a long holiday weekend. An employee who came forward as a whistleblower was threatened with violence by union-protected staff. Read a report of conditions by clicking here. PETA told the County Council not to listen to “radicals” who want to improve conditions.

Who really cares about the animals?

But despite the infrastructure challenges at LHS, they are not responsible for the recent spate of killings. Nor can the dirty shelter be blamed. All of that could have been addressed without the needle. It is a little something I like to call “cleaning.” And a little something else I like to call “adoption.” It means marketing your animals, not just once every three months as LHS is doing, but every weekend, every day, to the millions of people who surround you and love animals. You know, those Americans who spend $50 billion a year on their companion animals, who miss work when they get sick, who keep pictures of them in their wallets. The very people the Butcher accuses of being irresponsible and uncaring, even though they send her organization $30,000,000 a year in donations, falsely believing that she will use that money to save animals, not kill them herself and promote their killing by others.

Once again, it is so much easier to lie. To falsely claim, as the Butcher does, that most pounds in this country are good places, where animals receive loving care, and that the No Kill movement is a threat to these wonderful institutions. As the thousands of dedicated activists nationwide working to reform their community’s abusive, medieval shelters can attest, the reality is that “shelters” across the countries are not just needlessly killing; they are neglecting and abusing animals before they put them to death.

We have inherited a paradigm of neglect and killing, of built in excuses that have allowed governments to underfund their shelters, that have allowed wealthy humane societies to kill animals while hoarding the millions of dollars given by animal lovers to care for the animals, that have allowed cities like Houston, the fourth largest in the U.S., to appoint people who score the lowest on city aptitude tests to the animal shelter and then allow them to keep working even when they beat dogs to death (a shelter PETA has openly defended).  And in fact, the so-called “professionals” who work there are not only lazy and inept, they are ignorant of basic protocols: of how to clean and disinfect, of how to keep animals moving efficiently through the system and into loving, new homes, of how to keep them healthy. Even if they did know, many of them wouldn’t care. But the reality is that they do not know, because teaching them and then holding them accountable to those protocols are not a priority for uncaring government bureaucrats and were never a priority for the large national organizations which are supposed to provide oversight, but do not. Instead, they just legitimize the poor care and killing, by blaming the “irresponsible public” and “pet overpopulation.”

And PETA never says a word. Never complains. Doesn’t hold them accountable. In fact, when they do comment, it is to defend these facilities. It is only when someone takes over that kind of shelter and tries to end the killing that the Butcher stands up and says, “Look, the facility is dirty. No Kill is to blame.”  Her conclusion: “Municipalities need to stand firm.” They need to continue killing in the face of alternatives. They need to keep passing punitive laws that are not funded, that cause poor people to relinquish their animals, that cause killing to increase wherever they are passed. Because, in her warped, deluded, twisted way of thinking, the movement to end killing, to provide better care, to build more humane shelters, is the problem. And it is easy to see why she wants people to think so.

If the No Kill movement succeeds, and the killing of animals is no longer legitimized by blaming the public and overpopulation; if, in fact, it is no longer done, then her own killing of thousands of animals every year loses its political cover. It will be universally regarded as the needless slaughter it really is, and the sickening manifestation of a deeply disturbed individual. And how will she ever get away with it then?

———————–

YesBiscuit! broke the story first. Read more by clicking here.

Redemption Turns 3

Today marks the third anniversary of the publication of Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America. At the time of its publication, the religion of pet overpopulation was beyond question and the notion of killing as unavoidable was firmly entrenched. Today, the voices that defend that point of view are on the retreat and some are falling all over themselves to embrace the new paradigm.

When I first submitted Redemption to a literary agent, I received my fair share of offer letters. I also received my fair share of rejection letters. Most of the latter were form letters:  very short, very polite, variations of “It’s not the right fit for us” and wishing me the best of luck. But one I can remember almost verbatim. He suggested I ask myself how many people would pay $20 to read it. “Very few,” he said. And I “should probably rethink my desire to publish it.” But I did not write Redemption to make money. In fact, I was prepared to print out copies of Redemption myself and hand them out on the street for free, if need be. But I did not believe that would be necessary. I had faith in people.

When I think back about that rejection letter, I hold no animus. I realized then that the literary agent was not trying to hurt me for the sake of hurting me or to be mean-spirited. In his mind, he was probably trying to save me from disappointment. He could not conceive of anyone spending a few bucks to read Redemption. Of all the letters I received, that was the only one I’ve kept for posterity. I sometimes think about it, and sometimes think about writing him. I never will, but it is fun to fantasize about it.

A successful non-fiction book sells 5,000 to 7,500 copies. Redemption has sold ten times that amount, and is on pace to surpass 100,000 copies in print. But more than that, that little book has saved tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives, and has completely redefined animal sheltering in the U.S. and abroad.

I originally began writing Redemption in Ithaca, New York. I wanted to tell the story of San Francisco and Tompkins County in order to replicate the model nationwide. But it became a radically different book based on my experiences after leaving Ithaca. When I first founded the No Kill Advocacy Center, I embarked on several efforts to spread the No Kill Equation. Not only was I going to do assessments for shelters, I was going to hold national conferences and a training academy for shelter managers and directors on No Kill sheltering. But I quickly found out the extent to which the status quo was not interested in changing.

Today, the No Kill Conference sells out in a matter of weeks and brings together people from nearly every state in the union and across the world, from as far away as Switzerland, Thailand, France, Australia, and New Zealand. Today, we could fill a hall with nearly 1,000 people based on the numbers turned away every year for lack of space. But it wasn’t like that, pre-Redemption. Even if Facebook was as popular then as it is now, it is unlikely a page like the No Kill Nation which was “founded on the principles and inspiration found in the book Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America” would have 75,000 fans like it does today.

When I talk about the No Kill Advocacy Center’s No Kill Conference, it is generally assumed that we had our first one in Washington D.C. in 2009. That is not entirely accurate. In fact, I had two in San Diego back in 2005 and 2006. I specifically marketed it to shelter directors, those in power. I had a unique experience, having created the nation’s first—and at the time only—No Kill community, and I wanted to share it with them so they too could achieve success. The schedule and workshops were ambitious. And it included one-on-one time for community-specific private consultations. But hardly anyone showed up. That first year, we had less than 50 people. The second one, even less than that. I canceled the Executive Director Training Academy due to a lack of interest.

But I did begin visiting “shelters” nationwide, not at the request of shelter directors, but by grassroots activists and over the opposition of the establishment. And though I was familiar with the realities of killing in U.S. sheltering, having experienced it firsthand through my work as a rescuer, doing TNR, with the Stanford Cat Network, Palo Alto Humane Society, San Francisco SPCA, and Tompkins County, I was literally blown away. I knew much of the killing was needless, but I was not adequately prepared for what else I found: the rampant neglect and abuse in shelters across the country that precedes that killing. I could go into a very cosmopolitan city, a progressive city, a city that likes to think of itself as ahead of the curve culturally, socially, politically, and institutionally, a city like Los Angeles, and the pound system would be medieval in its barbarity. Across the country, it was largely the same: filth, animals wallowing in their own waste, untreated medical conditions, lazy and inept managers, and neglectful and abusive staff. The mythology that no one wants to kill was not only off the mark, it was a wholesale lie. And the numbers started to make sense; all the pieces began to fall into place until the light-bulb moment: the number of available homes exceeded the number of animals in shelters. The movement had gotten it backward. We could be a No Kill nation today.

I wrote Wayne Pacelle. I spoke to people at the ASPCA. I wanted to dialog about changing the status quo. Polite, private letters asking for their help. And I never received the courtesy of a reply. I think about that when people say I am divisive, when they say we should work together. I’ve tried. In fact, I’ve been writing to Pacelle for over 15 years trying to work together before I finally, thick-headedly realized he was not interested in saving lives. But I knew that the grassroots would be.

I knew what had happened in San Francisco and I knew what had happened in Tompkins County and I was committed to spreading the model that the “leadership” of the movement had no interest in, even though it held the key to ending the tragic and wholly unnecessary killing of millions of animals every year.

I wrote the book because I looked around and saw a movement devoid of true leaders. Wayne Pacelle was making a fortune on the backs of animals his organization was condemning to death. Ed Sayres had destroyed the San Francisco SPCA and appeared committed to mediocrity at the ASPCA. No one at Best Friends had a plan for actual No Kill success and refused to acknowledge our ability to end it today (they still speak the old and dead language of “pet overpopulation”). And even Richard Avanzino who experienced firsthand during his tenure at the SF/SPCA how dishonest and enemy-seeking the status quo was and how they refused to collaborate with rescue groups and animal advocates to effect change in our communities; even he had embraced the Asilomar Accords, agreeing to sacrifice the term “No Kill”—the powerful, revolutionary, life-affirming term No Kill—for vague promises of transparency in return (which ultimately, and predictably, never materialized).

I realized that the No Kill movement had to be waged by the grassroots and if I could not appeal to leaders, I would try to change the climate of public opinion in which they had to operate. Immediately after Redemption was published, I went on the road. Borrowing $20,000, I went on a 20-plus city coast-to-coast book tour, appearing in Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Indianapolis, Portland, and more. At the time, there were a small number of people I could have a knowing conversation with about the myth of pet overpopulation, about how utterly needless the killing was, about the very real ability to end it today. And so as I prepared to stand up in front of people, I was not sure how people would respond to my telling them that the God of Pet Overpopulation did not exist. That we were living in Plato’s cave, convincing ourselves that killing was a necessary evil, when it was simply evil, period.

The first city I visited (outside of the friendly turf in Ithaca) was just outside of Boston in Lexington. I spoke at a museum that stood on the very site of the first battle of the American Revolution. I was nervous about how they would react to what I had to say. I was going to tell them that everything they thought was true was a lie. I stood up in front of a crowd and I told them they should stop using the term “euthanasia” to describe shelter killing, that they should stop using the term “pet overpopulation” when it does not exist, that they should stop portraying the problem as the fault of the public, stop seeking laws that empower animal control to impound and kill more animals, and stop portraying the problem as insurmountable and not in the direct control of shelter managers. My faith in my fellow rescuers was not misplaced. They responded like they did in Indianapolis, in Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Austin, San Antonio, Naples, and more: with enthusiasm. And the crowds kept getting bigger and bigger. By the end of the tour, I was speaking to standing room only crowds.

But I also knew the ASPCA, HSUS, PETA, and others I called to account in Redemption would attack back, calling me divisive, corrupt, shrill, harmful to the cause. In fact, I have been called all of those things by them and more. But the response I received during that six-week book tour showed me the mood of the nation had shifted and that even if they did not know it, Pacelle and company were speaking a now dead language. And despite the attacks from the so-called “leaders” of the movement, mail and e-mail brought something very important to me: the proof of Redemption’s impact on my true constituency, the everyday animal lover with a troubled heart, the rescuer who has to pretend to be friends with the cruel and corrupt shelter manager because they hold animals hostage, the shelter volunteer forced to look away from abuse for fear of being barred from the facility. It kept me going. It still keeps me going in moments of exhaustion.

When I recently called out Best Friends Animal Society for betraying the animals of New York for corporate profit, the rescue community condemned them with a ferocity that has them reeling to this day. And when they tried to attack me, using pages from the Wayne Pacelle playbook (No Kill equals hoarding, rescue groups can’t be trusted, saving lives is a burden on shelters, Nathan is divisive), they got attacked even more. Redemption changed the movement landscape, an allegiance not to institutions, but to ideals. The killing of animals that Best Friends joined the ASPCA in defending was—as my friends at No Kill Nation clearly articulate—“immoral, unacceptable, and unnecessary” and anyone who championed it, as Best Friends is doing, was an enemy of the animals, regardless of their tired, cliché-ridden rhetoric.

When it was first published, nearly 100 copies of Redemption were being sold every day. It climbed to the top 500 at Barnes & Noble and became the best selling animal rights book in the country. And then came something else. The letters and e-mails from shelter directors and government administrators who wrote that Redemption turned them around. And they, in turn, turned their shelters around. One spoke of how she used to look for reasons to kill animals in her shelter and, after Redemption, she now finds ways to save them. Another spoke of taking a shelter with a 20-year reign of killing under his watch to No Kill overnight. To be sure, many are still digging in their heels, but there were some who, as one shelter manager wrote, “were brainwashed” to believe that killing was the only way.

As I wrote in the foreword of the second edition,

The Humane Society of the United States’ (HSUS) favorite misnomer “euthanasia” has lost its cache. Rescue groups and animal advocates have stopped using it and other HSUS euphemisms such as “putting them to sleep” to describe the abhorrent practice of systematic shelter killing. People are more aware of widespread mistreatment of animals in shelters. And they are less tolerant of the poor care and the killing, the excuses built up over the decades to justify it, and the legitimacy that groups like HSUS give to it. This has put the large national humane groups on the defensive, trying to take credit for the decline in killing nationally even as they opposed and in some cases continue to oppose the programs responsible for it, and by softening their anti-No Kill positions.

Redemption debunks the myth of pet overpopulation and puts the blame for the killing where it belongs: on the shoulders of the very shelter directors who find killing easier than doing what is necessary to stop it, on the local governments who continue to underfund their shelters or place them under the regressive oversight of health and police departments (and even under sanitation!), and on shelter managers who protect uncaring and even cruel staff members at the expense of the animals.

More than all of that, average people are now aware that shelters kill. And they are aware that there are some shelters and communities that do not kill. After reading the book, one animal lover in Los Angeles, California, told me: “At least now we know what—or more accurately, who—the problem is.” We also know how to make them stop. And in more communities nationwide, we have.

The No Kill movement in New Zealand is born of that book. It is the basis for emerging success in Australia. From North America to Europe, Redemption is saving lives and putting No Kill on the agenda of communities around the world. Not only did it spark a worldwide movement, it is directly responsible for the achievement of No Kill communities across the globe.

By contrast, Maddie’s Fund has not created a single No Kill community despite 12 years and $300,000,000. The ASPCA with its $120,000,000 a year has none. The Humane Society of the United States with its $100,000,000+ per year budget: none. Best Friends Animal Society which raises $40,000,000 a year and only takes in about 600 or so animals a year: zero. It is not the absence of money that prevents No Kill communities from flourishing. It is the absence of integrity. All the money in the world will not change the status quo in shelters without people committed to a culture of lifesaving. In other words, the biggest factor in achieving No Kill success is not the size of the coffers, but the decisions made by those who run shelters and, quite simply, how big their hearts are.

That is why New York City, despite having the richest SPCA in the country, and over $20,000,000 in Maddie’s Fund support, promised the City would be No Kill by 2008, but failed; promised it would be No Kill by 2012, and realized it wasn’t going to happen; and has now, for the third time, set a new date of 2015. Five years. It is always five years away, as if five is a magic number which will make all the neglect, abuse, rampant uncaring, and self-serving power grabs somehow vanish on December 31. Lack of integrity doesn’t disappear at the stroke of midnight.

On the other hand, when truly caring people read Redemption, it gives them hope. They follow the model it advocates. And they achieve No Kill overnight. The lives saved rather than killed in places as diverse as Kentucky, Indiana, Nevada, Minnesota, and elsewhere are a living testament to the power of the pen, and the compassion of most people.

Three years later, we are now harvesting the seeds it planted. Killing shelters and the national organizations that legitimize them are on the defensive. Governments are passing laws demanding reform. Communities are increasingly embracing the No Kill paradigm. And it comes down to all of you.

On Redemption‘s third anniversary, I want to thank all the animal lovers, all the true and uncompromising animal advocates, all the shelter reformers, and animal rescuers, those running shelters with integrity and heart, for believing in the message of Redemption and vindicating what we all knew in our hearts to be true even before its publication, but perhaps did not have the words or experience to articulate.

I’ve not done much blogging lately as I have been focused on writing another book. And it doesn’t matter because you are carrying the torch: bloggers, reformers, and activists across the globe. You are calling killing killing, challenging the status quo, championing lifesaving, and holding the opposition’s feet to the fire. For me, it is a dream come true.

They may call you “divisive.” They may accuse you of “bash and trash.” They may say you are “harming the cause.” They may libel you as “hoarders in disguise.” But the No Kill movement’s success is your success. You are doing it without their millions, without their media reach, without their political power and you are doing it in spite of them—in spite of HSUS’ cowardly neutrality, in spite of the ASPCA’s opposition, in spite of Best Friends putting one arm around you and stabbing you in the back with the other. You are succeeding and the animals increasingly going out the front door in the loving arms of families, instead of out the back in body bags, are a living testament to your ideals.

It seems everywhere I turn; there is yet another reason to celebrate. Austin embraces the No Kill Equation in a 7-0 vote by the City Council. Delaware unanimously passes shelter reform legislation. A Kentucky community celebrates its second No Kill year. A Canadian community reduces killing by 70%. A New Zealand animal control shelter finishes the year with a 96% rate of lifesaving. Another in Australia surpasses even that. Unthinkable, a few short years ago. And it is now happening all the time, all over the world. 

No Kill is within our reach.
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In celebration of Redemption‘s anniversary, The No Kill Nation and I will be giving out one free copy every day of September. Go to the No Kill Nation’s Facebook page to find out more.

NYCACC to Volunteers: Pay Up & Shut Up

August 31 Update: New York State Assembly Member Micah Kellner has called on the Mayor and Health Commissioner to rescind the policy of intimidation. You can read a copy of his letter and the No Kill Advocacy Center’s response by clicking here.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: Ed Sayres, Julie Bank, & Jane Hoffman continue to pursue policies that advance their own power at the expense of the animals.

They already donate their time, doing what they do to help animals out of sheer love and against both difficult odds and a hostile working environment. They do the job the staff is supposed to do: clean cages, provide food and water, socialize and otherwise care for the animals. And they don’t get paid. Now, New York City’s Animal Care & Control (NYCACC) is asking volunteers to pay for the privilege and check their constitutional rights at the door.

Several months ago, the city pound suspended the volunteer program at the height of the busy summer season, when intakes were at their highest and the animals needed them the most. As a result, animals were left to languish in their cages, go extended periods of time without food and water, wallow in their own waste, and in some cases, remain in pain untreated. In one cases, a dog ate off half his own tail. Why? Those who truly care, those who go to the one place that is the hardest for them to go to, a neglectful pound that allows animals to suffer, were not there in sufficient numbers to be the eyes and ears (and hands) of the animals. And, if they spoke the truth in order to help the animals, they were fired.

Despite the neglect, NYCACC promised the community they would reinstate the program after they developed new policies (there was no rationale why they couldn’t implement the existing program and adjust when the new policies were written). In a recent series of meetings with volunteers, the new policies were unveiled and they demonstrate that conscience, independent thought, constructive criticism, and compassion for animals will not be tolerated. It also defines the killing of healthy and treatable animals as a service to those animals, and threatens to expel any person who disagrees with that, or any of NYCACC “philosophies.”

Moreover, new volunteers—who already work for free and do the job paid staff is supposed to do—will also have to pay for the privilege of doing so. A fee of $25 is now required for new volunteers (NYCACC promises a t-shirt in return).

Among the highlights of the new program:

• Volunteers who disagree with any action taken by NYCACC will be terminated.
• Volunteers must illegally waive their First Amendment rights by agreeing not to say anything about NYCACC without permission.
• Any photographs taken by volunteers are the property of NYCACC.

These new policies are not only regressive and draconian, designed to ensure that NYCACC operates without any accountability, but they are illegal and expose NYCACC, its officers, and City taxpayers to a Section 1983 lawsuit for violating the civil rights of volunteers if they are terminated for petitioning their government for a redress of grievances or exercising their First Amendment rights. The fiction that NYCACC is a private-not-profit, rather than a city agency, will not shield it from liability.

While the Big Three—Ed Sayres of the ASPCA, Jane Hoffman of the Mayor’s Alliance, and Julie Bank of NYCACC—continue their charade that New York City is a national model of compassionate care, things continue to go from bad to worse for the animals.

As reported earlier, in addition to claiming they do not have enough food to feed the animals right down the street from the nation’s wealthiest SPCA (the ASPCA took in over $120,000,000 in one year alone), cats and kittens in the “maternity wards” are left without food or water, animals are left wallowing in their own waste, animals are not getting any socialization, and sick animals are not getting the care they need. In fact, the shelter is withholding pain medications from injured animals.

Hundreds of millions of dollars flow into the coffers of New York City’s large “animal protection” organizations, including the ASPCA.  Yet the neediest animals in New York City’s badly mismanaged pound:

• Go without basic care;
• Languish in filth;
• Are being denied needed medical treatment;
• Healthy and treatable animals are put to death; and,
• The shelter has warned it is running out of food to feed them.

And those who want to do something about it are prevented from doing so: anyone who expresses concern about conditions is summarily terminated.

Welcome to New York City (ACC) volunteers: Now pay up and shut up, or go home.

Building a No Kill Nation (Florida Edition)

On October 9, I will be joined in South Florida by some of the leading names in the No Kill movement for a seminar on building a No Kill community, including:

• Bonney Brown and Mitch Schneider. Washoe County, NV takes in seven times the per capita rate of animals of New York City, four times the Los Angeles rate, and over two times the national average, but they are returning 65% of stray animals to their homes, adopting out over 1,000 animals per month, and saving 92% of animals year to date. Learn how they do it.
• Mike Fry and Dr. Linda Wolf. Under Fry’s leadership, Prescott, Wisconsin and Hastings, Minnesota have become No Kill communities. Fry will talk about saving community cats and Wolf, Animal Ark’s dog behavior expert, will focus on saving dogs.

The day-long conference includes brunch. Copies of my books will be available for purchase and signing. For more information and/or to register, click here.

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P.S. After three years of traveling (Over 50 communities across the U.S., as well as New Zealand and Australia), I am going to take some time off the road. There are only four dates left on the Building a No Kill Community tour. Please join me either in Austin, TX, Raleigh, NC, Farmington, NM, or Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Click here for more information.

Building a No Kill Nation

If you missed the national No Kill Conference in Washington D.C., you still have an opportunity to hear some of the speakers. On September 28, they will join me for a day-long conference on building No Kill communities in Austin, Texas including:

• Bonney Brown and Mitch Schneider. Washoe County, NV takes in seven times the per capita rate of animals of New York City, four times the Los Angeles rate, and over two times the national average, but they are returning 65% of stray animals to their homes, adopting out over 1,000 animals per month, and saving 92% of animals year to date. Learn how they do it.
• Michael Mountain. Mountain took a small sanctuary in the Utah desert and made it one of the best-funded organizations in the nation, with revenues of tens of millions per year. Learn how to talk to donors and raise needed revenues.
• Mike Fry and Dr. Linda Wolf. Under Fry’s leadership, Prescott, Wisconsin and Hastings, Minnesota have become No Kill communities. Fry will talk about saving community cats and Wolf, Animal Ark’s dog behavior expert, will focus on saving dogs.
• Dr. Ellen Jefferson. Under her leadership, Austin Pets Alive is helping lead a lifesaving initiative that has reduced deaths to all-time lows. She’ll show you how to implement creative outside the shelter adoption programs that save lives.
• Susanne Kogut. Kogut runs the Charlottesville SPCA, animal control for Charlottesville and Albemarle County in Virginia. Charlottesville has been a No Kill community for over four years under her leadership. Kogut and her team foster over 1,700 animals per year. She’ll show you how you can too.

The day-long conference includes lunch and one-on-one time with the speakers at the No Host Bar reception following the presentations. In addition, all attendees will receive a free signed copy of Irreconcilable Differences: The Battle for the Heart and Soul of America’s Animal Shelters; as well as the No Kill Advocacy Center’s Building a No Kill Community packet CD which includes roughly 200 documents including policies and procedures, animal care guidelines, how-to guides, and more to help you succeed.*

The next 20 people who register will also received a signed copy of Redemption’s new edition, the award-winning book that has helped revolutionize sheltering around the world.*

The day-long conference is almost sold-out so register soon by clicking here.

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* Must be present to receive.

The Amazing Kenny

He was found on the streets of Oakland by himself, at barely ten days old. He is at my house, sleeping snugly, and will be available for adoption in about eight weeks through the Feral Cat Foundation.

And though we have fostered hundreds of “bottle feeders” over the years, the singletons just really get to me. And his name (thanks to my daughter) reflects it. Ladies & gentlemen, meet “The Amazing Kenny”:

The Amazing Kenny sleeping.

The Amazing Kenny waking up.

Who wants the baba? The Amazing Kenny does.

The Amazing Kenny says “All you need is love, bottle feeding, and a heating pad.”

The Empire Strikes Back

FixAustin’s recent blog describes the “desperate last stand of Austin’s status quo,” a dishonest effort to undermine the recently enacted No Kill plan in Austin which has led to a significant increase in adoptions and a corresponding decline in killing at Town Lake Animal Center, Austin’s pound. The most recent salvo was fired this week when the Austin Humane Society announced that “No Kill” is responsible for killing kittens, a malicious and false claim that is contradicted by the facts: 48% more cats and kittens are being adopted and 59% more are going to rescue groups. In fact, Austin is safer now for kittens than it has been in its history.

The second salvo is expected to come later this week, and was put into motion during the last few months of Dorinda Pulliam’s tenure as the director of TLAC. Although the writing on the wall was clear—that the killing paradigm she embraced was coming to an end—Pulliam was not going down without a fight. And she enlisted the help of the ASPCA to do so. At the behest of Pulliam, the ASPCA has hired Dr. Sandra Newbury to do an assessment of TLAC. As much as Austin’s animal lovers want to forget Pulliam, it is hard to do so. Pulliam is the disgraced, forcibly-removed director who:

• Killed over 100,000 animals during her tenure, one animal every 12 minutes the shelter was open to the public;
• Did not want a foster care program, choosing to kill kittens and other animals instead;
• Killed despite empty cages (over 100 on any given day);
• Complained she and her staff did not have time to do adoptions because they were apparently busy killing the animals in the back; and,
• Allowed her staff veterinarian not to immunize animals on intake (and in some cases, at all), causing them to get severely sick;

After the City Council had had enough and voted unanimously to put a moratorium on killing healthy and treatable animals when there were empty cages available for them, she failed to provide care to sick cats causing them to suffer, and thus allow her and the ASPCA to falsely claim that No Kill equals hoarding. It was that final act that cost Pulliam her job, a loss that has meant a world of difference for the animals: Adoptions are increasing and deaths are declining.

Austin has never been safer for homeless dogs and cats than it is today. So why does the ASPCA appear intent on undermining that? After all, even if ASPCA leadership doesn’t care about the animals, they can (and mark my words, will) take credit for that success by claiming it was their dysfunctional “Mission: Orange” program that is responsible, even as they fought those reforms every step of the way.

Long Standing Problems

For years, the ASPCA refused to do an assessment of the shelter when requested (naively) by No Kill advocates saying they did not do them. In reality, to do so would have—to the extent they were honest—led to findings of poor and hostile treatment of the animals by the Pulliam team, along with dilapidated conditions and needless killing. But now that Pulliam is gone, the ASPCA is “assessing” the shelter and they apparently have contacted the press to set up a discussion of their “findings” even before the “findings” are completed or presented to the City for review. Some reform advocates are concerned that Newbury’s “assessment” is part of a larger game plan of attack concocted by her employer, the ASPCA. The target: the No Kill plan which includes a moratorium on convenience killing. And they have a right to be concerned: Aside from Pulliam, the biggest roadblock to No Kill in Austin has been the ASPCA. And Newbury’s history suggests she is philosophically aligned with their way of thinking.

There is little doubt that there are problems at TLAC; they have been festering for as long as Pulliam was the director. The physical shelter is in a state of disrepair, disinfection is difficult due to crumbling infrastructure, and staff is both ignorant of and fails to follow proper medical protocols, leading to disease and killing. In fact, these are exactly the conditions shelter reformers have long complained about. But as long as Pulliam was in charge, the ASPCA was content to look the other way and, in fact, attacked anyone who criticized those conditions. Any talk of poor care, of needless killing, of criticism of the status quo got you kicked out of the coalition and barred you from receiving the ASPCA’s largesse.

There is also little doubt that Pulliam’s legacy of poor and hostile treatment and dilapidated conditions will take some time to undo, unless a new director (the search continues) is given the authority and latitude to fix the problems which includes firing any holdouts from the underperforming, kill-oriented team she left behind.

But to blame the No Kill plan, which seeks to ensure that animals are vaccinated on intake, that rescue groups are given full access to the animals, that prohibits convenience killing, that puts a premium on adoption, and after being given an additional $800,000 in funding to an already generous budget by comparative standards (when most cities in America are looking to cut expenses) to further save lives, is not only dishonest, it is nothing short of reprehensible. But that has not stopped Pulliam, the Austin Humane Society, and of course, the ASPCA from doing so.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

As I said, there is no doubt that there are long-standing problems at the shelter and they need to be fixed. The million dollar question is whether Newbury will state what the problems inherited from Pulliam are in an objective manner; Or, as she has done in other places, whether she will use those long-standing problems to attack the No Kill philosophy, thus blaming years-old problems in Austin on a No Kill plan that was recently approved by the City Council and which was designed to fix those problems.

And that depends on which Newbury emerges. The one who recommends that:

• Foster care programs be curtailed by suggesting that it needlessly turns shelters into sanctuaries (decrying what she calls a “sanctuary rate”);
• Every other cage be kept empty (arguing in the past that this was necessary for disease control in a shelter that had never experienced a serious disease outbreak);
• The number of animals who should be made available for adoption be limited (fear mongering about too much consumer choice and a “market saturation index”);
• Healthy and treatable animals be killed by blaming the “irresponsible public” (her “community overpopulation index”); and,
• No Kill leads to suffering in shelters (“hoarding”).

Or, the one who sticks to medicine and identifies problems in an objective manner and suggests medical protocols to fix them, without getting into large policy and philosophical discussions she is grossly biased against? In other words, will we get a report from Mr. Hyde or from Dr. Jekyll?

She is capable of both. Her assessment of the neglectful and abusive King County Animal Care & Control was an example of the latter, focusing on medicine and medical protocols, a welcome departure from other shelters and other cities where her “analysis and recommendations” were more policy driven by an anti-No Kill political agenda with disastrous outcomes.

Read an expose called “Better Off Dead?” by a Madison newspaper about her regressive recommendations which caused cats to lose their lives at the Dane County Humane Society and reversed a multi-year decline in killing by clicking here.

Then read my 2007 blog that describes her other attacks against No Kill which appears below.

The ASPCA’s Last Stand?

Regardless of which Newbury emerges, the third and most vicious salvo by the ASPCA may yet be to come. And that one involves the influence on city officials by the ASPCA’s Karen Medicus, an anti-No Kill crusader who has been one of the biggest roadblocks to the emerging success in Austin. Medicus is the former director of the Austin Humane Society who once promised Austinites lifesaving success but failed miserably, despite a multi-million dollar Maddie’s Fund grant. Since that time, she has argued for the relocation of TLAC away from its central location conducive to adoptions to an out-of-sight, out-of-mind remote location in order to give shelter administrators bigger offices, even while curtailing available kennel and cage space for the animals.

Medicus claimed the shelter’s location did not matter, and that having adequate cages and kennels was irrelevent, arguing that “the problem is not getting adopters to the shelter, but rather, having enough desirable and placeable animals to choose from.” According to Medicus, why would you need more cages and kennels when the animals are not desirable? In other words, Pulliam’s failure to save more lives was not because TLAC failed to utilize the proven programs of the No Kill Equation, but because the animals themselves were not “desirable” or “placeable.” Unfortunately, Medicus’ relationship with city officials responsible for hiring TLAC’s next director has the potential to derail efforts to make Austin a model City of caring and compassion.

Leadership is the most important element of the No Kill Equation, without which all other efforts may fail. What TLAC needs is a hard working, passionate animal control director who is not content to continue killing, while regurgitating tired clichés about public irresponsibility and/or the myth of too many animals and not enough homes. It is the defining issue which largely determines whether lifesaving succeeds or fails in a community.

Will the ASPCA allow the will of the people determined to end the killing in Austin to reign supreme? Or will they try to use their influence to sabotage the hiring of a progressive director committed to saving lives and in the process sacrifice the animals to their own nefarious political agenda of power, greed, and control?

If history is any guide, the Austin Humane Society’s despicable claim that No Kill is killing kittens and the Newbury report may be nothing more than an effort by the ASPCA to soften the ground for the real fight over the next director that they seem determined to bring to Austin; compassion, democracy, good government, taxpayer accountability, and the lives of the animals be damned.

♦♦♦

Can You Kill Your Way to No Kill?

Dr. Hurley, Dr. Newbury, Dr. Semmelweis, and Death at a Midwest Humane Society

In February 2007, the Lied Animal Shelter in Las Vegas was forcibly closed down due to filthy conditions and dreadful treatment of animals. According to reports, sick animals were left to die in their cages, disease was rampant, and dogs were starving because of lack of food. The animals were not vaccinated on intake, sick animals were not treated, healthy animals were subsequently made sick, there was no isolation for sick animals, and there was a complete breakdown of basic principles of animal care and husbandry. The Lied Animal Shelter is a story of incompetent leadership, uncaring staff, a board of directors which failed to meet its oversight mandate, and a system which refused to put in place the programs and services that save the lives of animals. What happened at Lied Animal Shelter is one side of the worst kinds of animal sheltering.

The other side of the same coin (uncaring, incompetent shelter directors who oversee an equally uncaring and incompetent staff) are shelters that recklessly kill the vast majority of animals in their care in the face of responsible, proven lifesaving alternatives which they refuse to implement—In other words, run-of-the-mill high kill shelters such as those that can be found in many cities and towns across America. While the mechanics are different—Lied didn’t kill but left the animals to suffer and die on their own, the others simply kill them out of expediency—the underlying dynamic is the same: both shelters are outdated relics that refuse to modernize and put into place progressive programs and services which allow sheltering to be done humanely, responsibly, while saving the vast majority of dogs and cats. That the Lied Animal Shelter claimed it was “No Kill” is irrelevant. In the final analysis, it had more in common with high kill shelters and the leadership and staff who run them.

The Lied Animal Shelter—comprised of starving dogs, rampant disease, filth, animals suffering with no care—is not what the No Kill movement represents. In fact, No Kill is the opposite of hoarding, filth, and lack of veterinary care. The philosophical underpinning of the No Kill movement is to put actions behind the words of every shelter’s mission statement: “All life is precious.” No Kill is about valuing animals, which not only means saving their lives, but means good quality care. It means vaccination on intake, nutritious food, daily socialization and exercise, fresh and clean water, medical care, and a system built to find them all loving, new homes as soon as possible.

No Kill does not mean business as usual (poor care, hostile and abusive treatment of animals, warehousing) minus the intentional killing. It means modernizing shelter operations so that animals are well cared for and keep moving through the system efficiently and effectively and into loving, new homes. At the open admission No Kill shelter I ran, the average length of stay for animals was eight days, we had a return rate of approximately 2%, we reduced the disease rate by nearly 90% from the prior administration, we reduced the intentional killing rate by 75%, no animal ever celebrated an anniversary in the facility, and we saved 93% of all impounded animals. In short, from 2001-2004, we brought sheltering into the 21st Century.

Personal Agendas

But there are those who have seized upon the Lied Animal Shelter fiasco to promote their own agenda of defending an antiquated model of sheltering developed in the 19th Century which is based on killing, sweeping animals under the rug (more accurately, into the back room to be killed), based on archaic notions of “adoptability,” turning volunteers away and other regressive and obsolete practices. They are using the Lied Animal Shelter to denounce the No Kill paradigm by intimating—sometimes directly, more often indirectly—that Lied is the natural outcome of trying to end the killing of savable dogs and cats in shelters today. And two of the leading voices of this point of view are Dr. Kate Hurley and Dr. Sandra Newbury, veterinarians for the University of California at Davis Shelter Medicine program.

This is a betrayal of the worst kind. Even the Humane Society of the United States called Lied “one of the worst its ever seen.” It was extreme even in the eyes of an agency which accepts staggering high levels of killing as the norm. Therefore, using such an extreme situation as an example of No Kill, of what the natural alternative to ending the killing today would be, is egregious.

By denigrating No Kill as akin to warehousing and ignoring the protocols of shelters which have truly achieved No Kill, Drs. Hurley and Newbury appear to be arguing for nothing more than a nation of shelters firmly grounded in killing—a defeatist mentality that is inherently unethical and antithetical to animal welfare. To imply that No Kill means warehousing, therefore, is a cynicism which has only one purpose: to defend those who are failing at saving lives from public criticism and public accountability by painting a picture of the alternative as even darker.

At the Las Vegas shelter, a wholly incompetent and uncaring shelter director refused to vaccinate animals on intake, failed to practice basic husbandry, refused to treat sick animals, failed to isolate sick from healthy animals, failed to clean and sanitize, allowed animals to languish with illnesses and injuries, and failed to put in place the programs and procedures which vastly increase adoptions and lifesaving. This is not No Kill. This is animal cruelty, but HSUS—with Drs. Hurley and Newbury in tow—came in with needles blazing and oversaw the killing of 1,000 animals. (The Lied Animal Shelter is now killing dogs and cats after only 72 hours and officials there claim they are doing so based on the recommendation of the HSUS team. This not only replaces one “evil” with another, it even violates HSUS’ own longstanding recommendation that shelters should hold animals for at least five days.)

But if the No Kill model should be rejected, what do they recommend? For Dr. Newbury, the answer is simple and can be found right in the shelter of her hometown of Madison, Wisconsin—at the Dane County Humane Society (where both she and Dr. Hurley used to work, a shelter she currently consults with, and where her own model of sheltering is currently being practiced). Let’s see what the Newbury model means for the cats of the Dane County Humane Society.

Life and Death at the Dane County Humane Society

This year, over a period of several weeks, one by one, seventy-three cats were taken off of the adoption floor of the Dane County Humane Society in Madison, WI, to a room outside of public view. One by one, each was injected with poison from a bottle marked “fatal-plus” (or similar barbiturate). One by one, their bodies went limp and slumped to the table. One by one, each was put to death. Why were these 73 cats killed?

They were killed, according to recent reports, because the shelter decided it was going to keep every other cage empty and curtail other lifesaving programs, reducing the number of cages on its adoption floor by half. But since cats occupied those cages or were under the “care” of those other programs, they needed to be slaughtered first. This was necessary in order to “save more cats.” That’s right. According to shelter bureaucrats, by killing cats, by cutting the capacity of the shelter in half, they were professing the Orwellian logic that more cats would be saved…

At this shelter, every other cage is intentionally kept empty despite the fact that disease can be reduced by fostering sick animals, by isolating sick animals, by reducing disease rates through vaccination, proper handling, good cleaning and sanitizing protocols, and by reducing animal stress through daily interaction and socialization by volunteers. At the same time that the number of cages was reduced by half, however, the shelter restricted adoption hours and eviscerated its foster care program.

In response to a public backlash, the architect of this mass carnage claimed: “I am not in any way advocating for more euthanasia,” which is more double-speak since this is exactly what is being advocated. What else is the option when the number of cages is reduced by half, while the shelter is scaling back other opportunities—like adoption days and foster care programs—to save them?

According to Dr. Newbury, by killing the cats and then intentionally cutting shelter capacity in half, more animals will be saved over the course of the year or the next. If your head is spinning from the lack of logic, you are not alone. This argument was also lost on a reporter who noted that in fact, by killing more cats and cutting shelter capacity in half, more cats are likely to die, a fact confirmed by the rising death toll for cats at Dane County Humane Society. Since Dr. Newbury started with the Dane County Humane Society in 2003, the death toll for cats has been steadily rising. In 2003, the year she began, the cat save rate was on a mult-year rise culminating at about 80%. It has been declining every year since. Even while the Society is getting richer (its revenue is growing by the millions), it is killing more cats than in recent history.

According to a recently published report, the Dane County Humane Society’s “[killing] rate for cats reached 40% in October of this year, up from 29% in October 2006,” and this, despite falling intake rates. Despite the promise of more lifesaving, in fact:

The [kill] rate has not gone down. The shelter still kills about one-third of the nearly 7,000 animals it receives annually. And the numbers for cats are the worst. The shelter is actually taking in fewer felines – 3,000 so far this year, compared to 3,800 in 2006 – but is killing more of them. In 2003, the Humane Society [killed] 600 cats a year. By 2006, it was killing more than 1,200. And it’s on track to kill an even higher number this year.

On top of this, the Dane County Humane Society’s new rules:

Decreed that old or sick cats–even those with treatable conditions–would be [killed]. Kittens that arrive needing to be bottle fed would also generally be killed, since the Humane Society limited the number of foster families available to care for them to just 10.

As more progressive shelters have demonstrated, disease can be reduced by more adoptions (which is undermined when Dane County cuts back adoption hours), sending animals to foster care (which is undermined when Dane County emasculates the program), using volunteers to socialize the animals (which is undermined when volunteers are turned away or leave in frustration), and practicing good husbandry (vaccination on intake, careful handling, thorough sanitizing and cleaning protocols).

This has not been lost on the cat loving public. According to volunteers, any respiratory infections at the shelter were not the result of having cats in all the cages, it was the result of shelter staff “ignoring basic protocols, like washing their hands in-between handling animals.” Moreover, the shelter’s director publicly admitted under a reporter’s questioning that they have never had an epidemic of a serious disease!

Rejecting the Status Quo

While Drs. Hurley and Newbury continue to dig trenches to the past, the rest of us are building bridges to our inevitable No Kill future—A future that promises more life, more compassion, more success, more programs to save the lives of animals. In doing so, we are rejecting the consensus of killing and rejecting the “model” of empty cages, lack of foster care, and killing because the animals do not meet draconian definitions of objective beauty or based on regressive and obsolete notions of “adoptability.”

For in the end, our movement is about more than seeking shelters which simply label themselves as “No Kill” and proceed with business as usual, as the Lied Animal Shelter did. Our movement is about action and results, not mere words and promises. What we seek is a modernization and transformation of our shelters, exchanging century-old obsolete forms of doing business which recklessly embrace killing as a morally ethical means to an end, with shelters that uphold the life and welfare of animals as paramount, and adjust their operations accordingly.

What we demand, and what the animals deserve, are shelter directors and shelter “experts” who value life, and keep pace with progress and innovation, and with the new and exciting methods of animal shelter protocols developed over the last decade to keep animals clean, healthy, and well cared for, while finding homes for all but hopelessly vicious dogs and irremediably suffering animals. These are the only models which veterinarians at one of the nation’s most prestigious veterinary college should be using to train the next generation of veterinarians and to guide the current generation of shelter directors forward.

As a university and as a training ground for new veterinarians, the U.C. Davis program should be at the forefront of progressive shelter practices and of the dynamic and exciting changes occurring in the field of animal sheltering as a result of the No Kill movement. Instead, Drs. Hurley and Newbury irresponsibly cling to the past by promoting methods of sheltering that are antiquated, inhumane, and lead to unnecessary killing. This would be the equivalent of a medical school continuing to teach its students that leeches, bloodletting and magical incantations are a valid treatment for pneumonia, in the face of proven alternatives like antibiotics, fluid therapy and rest. It is nothing short of bad medicine—and a textbook example of the “Semmelweis Reflex,” the reaction so-called “experts” often exhibit when the status quo, which they represent, is challenged.

The Semmelweis Reflex

Historians have coined the term the “Semmelweis Reflex” to describe “mob behavior in which a discovery of important scientific fact is punished rather than rewarded.” In the nineteenth century, Dr. Ignac Semmelweis observed a higher incidence of deaths due to puerperal fever in maternity wards associated with teaching hospitals than in births attended by midwives. In trying to figure out why puerperal fever was a hazard of giving birth in a hospital rather than at home, Semmelweis opined that students and doctors might be carrying the diseases from autopsies they performed, while midwives who did not perform such procedures were not. Semmelweis also found that rigorous instrument cleaning and hand washing could bring the fever rate down to zero. Had doctors known at the time that germs caused disease, this finding would have been unremarkable.

Unfortunately, Semmelweis’ discovery predated the germ theory of disease. At the time, no one knew that asepsis was important. According to Semmelweis’ critics, hand washing wasn’t needed when they could clearly see that their hands had nothing on them. And, tragically, they ignored his recommendations and continued with business as usual, with deadly results for their patients. Once germ theory became known and established, however, Semmelweis was vindicated for his foresight. Of course, sterility through instrument cleaning and hand washing has since become the norm.

The housing, socialization, adoption, foster care, cleaning and vaccination protocols, medical and behavior rehabilitation and other efforts pioneered in communities like San Francisco and copied elsewhere provide a life-affirming model of sheltering which provides high quality care, reduced disease rates, even while keeping cages and kennels full as necessary and in foster care, while finding the vast majority of shelter animals loving new homes. These models were developed by caring and compassionate individuals, professionals, and in conjunction with veterinary institutions like Cornell University.

Rather than attack Semmelweis, doctors should have simply washed their hands, since Semmelweis pointed out that this eliminated deaths, even though, at the time, no one could explain why. Similarly, rather than attack the methods of sheltering which allow the vast majority of animals to be saved, even while operating at capacity-plus fostering, shelter administrators likewise should copy its precepts because it has been shown to work in other communities. But the vast majority of shelter directors refuse to innovate in this way.

But something more nefarious was at work in Semmelweis’ time than a failure of understanding about germs, and it is the same “Reflex” which is at work in sheltering today. In fact, what occurred was that Semmelweis was fired because doctors felt he was criticizing the superiority of hospital births over home births, something that threatened their position in the social hierarchy. And therein lies the rub. The archaic voices of tradition in sheltering are acting the same way as the doctors who put their own positions above their patients. They refuse to innovate and modernize precisely because they are threatened by the growing hegemony of the No Kill movement and what this means for their own stature in this movement.

As a movement and as a nation, we have a choice. We can embrace the No Kill philosophy, and the programs and services which make it possible, and end the unnecessary killing of 4.5 of the five million dogs and cats slaughtered each year in our nation’s dog and cat pounds. Or we can adopt the model that will perpetuate it. The same model that caused 73 cats at the Dane County Humane Society to be killed for one reason and one reason only: They happened to enter a shelter, run by a director, who erroneously believed that sheltering “experts” like Dr. Hurley and Dr. Newbury actually had something to teach her.

Happy Birthday to the No Kill Advocacy Center

Dear Friends,

Please consider a small gift to my favorite charity: The No Kill Advocacy Center. A lot of hard, important work has been done, and a lot of hard, important work lies ahead.

Nathan

We’re celebrating a birthday…. Ours!

This month, the No Kill Advocacy Center turns six. In many ways, we are still a young, new organization. But as the only national organization actually staffed by people who have succeeded in creating a No Kill community and working solely to end the systematic killing of animals in U.S. shelters, we have accomplished a lot in a very short period of time.

Despite a fraction of the budget of the large national organizations, we have done what they have not: ended the killing in communities across the country. In fact, we are the only national organization that has successfully done that. We helped Reno, NV achieve No Kill. We helped Charlottesville, VA achieve No Kill. We helped Shelby County, KY achieve No Kill. Using our model, communities and shelters in California, Indiana, Kansas, Utah, Virginia, New York, Kentucky and elsewhere achieved No Kill. In fact, our efforts have helped create No Kill communities as far away as New Zealand, with Canadian, Australian, and other U.S. shelters working to do the same.

We have written pioneering model legislation that sets the standard for humane care: The Companion Animal Protection Act; model legislation that resulted in the most progressive shelter reform legislation being passed in the state of Delaware and efforts to legislate similar reforms in New York, California, and Arizona.

Our No Kill Conference, the only national conference that says we can end the killing and we can do it today, brings together people from all the U.S. and world to learn how to create No Kill communities in their own communities, and our ground-breaking studies eliminate the excuses regressive shelters and their large national allies use to continue killing.

We have filed lawsuits demanding humane care and treatment for animals in shelters. Indeed, wherever animals are harmed in shelters, the No Kill Advocacy Center is there to intervene. And we are winning. But there is more to do and we cannot do it without your help.

Help us build an alternative consensus to traditional sheltering models—one which is oriented toward promoting and preserving life; an alternative which seeks to create a future where every animal will be respected and cherished, and where every individual life will be protected and revered.

A No Kill nation is within our reach—and you can help us make it happen.

Please consider a birthday gift to the No Kill Advocacy Center today. In celebration of our sixth birthday, we are asking for just six dollars.

Of course, we’d be ecstatic with sixteen dollars, sixty dollars, or six hundred dollars. But if you can spare six dollars, we’ll put it to use saving lives today. Without you, the animals don’t stand a chance.

To make a donation in any amount, click here.

If you prefer to mail a check, please send to:

The No Kill Advocacy Center
6114 La Salle Ave. #837
Oakland CA 94611

Desperation Aboard the RMS Mancuso

Judie Mancuso and her ilk, the failed Los Angeles-based architects behind many attempts to legislate mandatory spay/neuter in California, have gone on the offensive, attacking me for what they claim is a “web of corruption.” (The allegations are silly and hardly worth an answer, but they are here for the overly curious.)

Their latest salvo is the result of the appointment of Brenda Barnette, a successful shelter director committed to the No Kill philosophy and opposed to mandatory sterilization, as the new General Manager of Los Angeles Animal Services. This appointment means Mancuso and her acolytes will no longer have access to the halls of power or an ally for their failed agenda. It threatens to end any hope of mandatory sterilization becoming California law because to the extent Barnette is forthright (compared to her predecessor, Mancuso ally Ed Boks, who was not), she will have no choice but to disclose just what a failure it has been in Los Angeles: more impounds, more killing, more backyard breeding as I discuss below. And this threatens them to their core.

These are the last surviving passengers of a rapidly sinking ship. Their latest attempts to denigrate No Kill and salvage their failed agenda of killing apologia and mandatory spay/neuter by attacking me looks, smells, and feels about four years too late. The whole country has realized that the Titanic of Mandatory Sterilization and its sister ship the RMS Opposition to No Kill weren’t even sea worthy, let alone unsinkable, despite their continued assurances to the contrary.

As the ASPCA and HSUS who once captained those vessels jump into lifeboats, Mancuso and others like her sit on the deck clinging to life with the same level of self-deception that the medieval Church clung to an Earth-As-The-Center-Of-The-Universe theory even as moons orbiting Jupiter could be seen with clarity through the end of Galileo’s telescope. In the latest salvo, they have even created a silly website that asks people to condemn “Winograd’s No Kill agenda” because I am allegedly caught in a “web of corruption.”

They can attack me all they want, accuse me of all the corruption they want, but it doesn’t make a bit of difference. The No Kill movement is much bigger than me. It is no longer about personalities, but about a set of principles that transcends any of us individually. That was one of the central lessons from the No Kill Conference this past weekend.

No Kill Conference 2010 was an army of lawyers, legislators, members of the media, rescuers, shelter directors, and other professionals—a multi-headed hydra for good that cannot be stopped by anyone or by any means. Cut my head off, and ten more are there to replace me, in communities across the U.S. and countries around the world, with the same powerful message and commitment to the future of lifesaving; all of them preaching a sanctity of life and the tools to preserve it.

No one understands this better than the three blind mice that drove Best Friends headlong into a brick wall. Gregory Castle, Julie Castle, and Francis Battista thought they were invincible. They thought Best Friends was deified. And they thought they could sacrifice the animals of New York State in order to gain access to the dollars of New York City by opposing Oreo’s Law and no one would hold them accountable. After all, they were the revered leaders of the revered Best Friends. How monumentally they learned otherwise when they took a severe beating from the rescue community after it was revealed that they betrayed the animals for personal relationships and naked self-interest. Almost everyone who learned what they did put allegiance to the animals first, rather than to an insular, out-of-touch trio in the middle of the Utah desert. What once was adoration is now vilification and it is fully deserved: 25,000 animals a year were sacrificed on the altar of ego, greed, and power.

As the No Kill movement continues to spread, as new leaders emerge, as communities across the United States and world end the killing of healthy and treatable animals in places people have never heard of, by shelter directors people don’t know, any attempts to attack me will have no impact on the widening success of our movement. I am not the No Kill movement and the No Kill movement is not me. And that is a welcome turning point. As Ryan Clinton pointed out during his presentation at the No Kill Conference, you know you are winning when the movement you helped foster becomes bigger than you are.

Attack me and Mancuso and company gain nothing. It only serves to show how desperate they have become. Why do people think Wayne Pacelle is now claiming HSUS always supported No Kill and is in fact the leader of the No Kill movement? Even he has seen the writing on the wall, has seen where the future is heading, and hopes to rewrite history in a way that makes him a hero, and not the villain he has been. Yet while Pacelle and others like him escape the rapidly sinking ship, Mancuso and her ilk cling to the driftwood of their old ideologies, even while the animals they claim to want to save are put to death because of them.

In fact, if you are poor and have a companion animal who is not spayed because you cannot afford it, their solution is to have the pound kill the animal, even though they claim that they are for saving lives. And they know it because their own community in Los Angeles enacted their legislation resulting in an increase in killing in Los Angeles City shelters for the first time in a decade. Almost immediately, even before the ordinance took effect, LAAS officers threatened poor people with citations if they did not turn over the pets to be killed at LAAS, and that is exactly what occurred. For the first time in a decade, impounds and killing increased—dog deaths increased 24%, while cat deaths increased 35%. Last year, it went up again for dogs, and is still higher than pre-legislation levels for cats. In the process, they also fed the backyard breeding market for more (unaltered) animals.

Despite public claims of success and the touting of the L.A. law in a bid to pass the law statewide, recently released e-mails show that they knew their much touted mandatory sterilization law was harmful to animals for another reason. According to the e-mails, after the mandatory sterilization law went into effect, veterinarians across the City of Los Angeles sought to exploit the captive market by raising their prices. Veterinarians wanted a windfall, even though cost was—and is—the primary barrier to spay/neuter. The end result was that while spay/neuter was now the law, the effect of the price increases in response to the law put sterilization increasingly out of reach for those at the bottom rung of the economic latter, forcing them to surrender their animals, which the shelters she supported put to death.

So how do they respond to the increased killing in Los Angeles they helped bring about? How do they respond to the No Kill communities achieving success all over the U.S. and indeed the world by following the No Kill Advocacy Center’s No Kill Equation model? By reevaluating their approach? By working for implementation of the No Kill Equation? By fighting for more progressive leadership? Of course not. That is how ethical people dedicated to saving lives would respond. They instead choose to spend their time by claiming I am caught in a “web of corruption.”

It is always the same, in every movement, no matter what the issue. But, as anyone who reads history knows, the “controversy” created by those who demand change is quickly forgotten once their goals are realized. As the biography of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, All on Fire, states, “The tension created by significant social movements is always resisted and condemned during the struggle and invariably forgotten afterward.” We are now all abolitionists. We are now all suffragists. Soon, we will all be No Kill advocates. And no one will care or remember the final desperate death rattle of the opposition, except perhaps to marvel at the depths of their self-delusion. “Web of corruption,” indeed.

As the RMS Mancuso sinks beneath the waves, as their pro-killing agenda is increasingly seen for what it is, as No Kill communities explode all over the world, no one can stop the forward march by attacking me. I am increasingly irrelevant to the widening success of this movement. As the No Kill movement increases, my importance diminishes. And do you know how that makes me feel? It makes me feel like celebrating.

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Update: Mandatory spay/neuter has just been reactivated in the California Legislature. That is why Mancuso and her cronies have started websites and twitter accounts to falsely attack me and try to undermine my credibility. Why can’t they just stick to the truth? Because they would surely lose.

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