“Pet Overpopulation”: Meme, Zeitgeist and Myth

CONTINUED...

PART TWO

While those figures are compelling, they are not the end of the story. The same study found that there are reasons people do not adopt animals from shelters or rescue groups. These reasons include, but are not limited to the following:

• Shelters are often located in inconvenient places, far from where people live, work and play.

• Many shelters are not open during after work hours.

• Adoption criteria at shelters and rescue organizations are often overly restrictive and complicated.

• Shelters are often perceived as dirty, smelly and depressing places that people do not want to visit.

For these and other reasons people end up acquiring their pets from other sources. In other words, deaths in shelters are not so much a problem relating to the quantity of animals in the community; there is a problem with the marketing and availability of homeless pets.

If shelters take animals in faster than they adopt them, a SHELTER overpopulation problem occurs. Shelter overpopulation can be exacerbated if shelters are also “rescuing” animals that do not need rescue, which, it turns out, is common practice.

Throughout much of the metro area surrounding Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, for example, allowing domestic cats to roam outside unconfined is legal. In spite of this fact, people who call shelters in the area after having found a free-roaming feline are frequently encouraged to catch the cats and bring them to their local humane society. These shelters have kill rates of more than 50% for felines, yet they continue to encourage people to bring them more cats, even if the cats don’t really need “rescue”. Policies like that result in a lot of unnecessary killing, according to a growing number of animal welfare advocates.

Failed leadership at animal shelters is to blame for high kill rates according to Nathan Winograd, founder of the No Kill Advocacy Center and author of the book Redemption: the Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America. According to Winograd, there are 10 basic programs shelters can implement to end the killing of healthy, adoptable companion animals. Furthermore, he says the change can happen almost overnight, so long as the shelters embrace the services he calls “The No Kill Equation”.

Winograd is more than an armchair advocate. He served as the operations director at the San Francisco SPCA when their city was considered the safest in the nation for homeless pets. From California, Winograd took the programs to upstate, rural New York and implemented them in the open-admission Tompkins County SPCA. Immediately they surpassed the achievement of San Francisco and saved all healthy and adoptable pet and all pets that had treatable or manageable behavior or medical issues as well.

Under Winograd’s leadership, Tompkins County went from killing large numbers of healthy companion animals to killing zero. For more than seven years shelters there have maintained a live release rate in excess of 90%.

After Tompkins County, Winograd did it again and again in communities all over the United States. Duplicating the results in San Francisco and Tompkins County, shelters in places like Reno, Nevada and Charlottesville, Virginia simply stopped killing healthy animals.

Winograd said, “All communities are uniform. They face the same problems. If they implement the programs that I call the No Kill Equation, they will achieve success.” The programs even work in communities that suffer from the worst social problems, he says.

"They are drunk, uneducated and poor, but even they can achieve no kill." That could be the title of the story of Reno, Nevada. With a historically tourism-based economy, Reno has been especially hard-hit by the current economic downturn. Snow-covered tent cities have popped up to house the growing homeless human population in the city. The community ranks low in education, high in public drunkenness and is suffering from a host of other human social problems. Per capita, animal shelters in Reno take in about 3 times the national average.

If ever there were a place where killing pets due to pet overpopulation were necessary, Reno could be it. However, on the contrary and much to the dismay of people who have excused killing in animal shelters as a “necessary evil”, Reno has one of the highest save rates for homeless pets in the nation. It has not always been that way.

Not many years ago shelters in Reno and its surrounding Washoe County could have been described as blood baths. That changed when a new leader took the helm of the Nevada Humane Society and embraced Winograd’s paradigm.

Contrast the Reno story with that of the Twin Cities, Minnesota, which has not been as negatively impacted by the economic downturn:

The “Land of 10,000 Lakes” consistently rates high in terms of economic stability, education and “livability”. Additionally, animal shelters in the Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis take in half the national average of animals per capita. Add to this equation the fact that people in Minnesota donate generously to animal shelters, giving, per capita, more than most communities in the nation. The Twin Cities metro area is home to one of the wealthiest animal shelters in the country, with an annual budget of more than $10 million and net reserves in excess of $20 million.

If ever there was a place that could end the killing of healthy pets in shelters, it should be the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Save rates in the community, however, are a paltry 50% when compared to these other places.

“When looking at the factors that bring about successful shelter outcomes,” said Winograd, “the most important one is a passionate leader at the animal shelter that is dedicated to life-saving rather than maintaining the status quo.”

“For too long poor performing shelter directors have gotten away with blaming their failures on the boogeyman of pet overpopulation,” he added. “It is long past time for them to be held accountable for their outcomes.”

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