Humane Alliance promotion for early-age s/n.
“While nothing is final at this point, we intend to merge with Humane Alliance”
ASHEVILLE, N.C.; NEW YORK, N.Y.––The American SPCA, the oldest animal advocacy organization in the U.S., and the Humane Alliance, the largest facilitator of nonprofit spay/neuter surgery, are exploring the possibility of a merger.
“While nothing is final at this point, we intend to merge with Humane Alliance,” affirmed ASPCA president Matthew Bershadker to ANIMALS 24-7 on February 18, 2015. “We hope to receive the necessary approvals (regulatory, etc.) this summer to make this happen.
“Our relationship with Humane Alliance is wide and deep, spanning more than 10 years,” Bershadker added. “We’ve granted the Humane Alliance more than $6 million in funding over the years and many of our s/n experts are Humane Alliance-trained. We have tremendous appreciation for what they have accomplished––from their sophisticated techniques and processes to their network of 141 clinics.
ASPCA president Matthew Bershadker (ASPCA photo)
“When this union comes to fruition,” Bershadker said, “we hope that our added resources will help the Humane Alliance to extend what they already do so well in the dissemination of high-quality, high-volume spay/neuter techniques, and that together, we will expand our collective reach and impact on animals.”
The merger would return the ASPCA to the leading role in promoting dog and cat sterilization that it had five decades ago, when it became the second national animal charity to provide spay/neuter surgery on a nonprofit basis. The first, Friends of Animals, opened a low-cost spay/neuter clinic in Neptune, New Jersey, in 1957.
Eleven years elapsed before Lloyd Tait, DVM opened the first ASPCA spay/neuter clinic in Brooklyn. As of 1968, the New York City shelters, then managed by the ASPCA, had killed a quarter of a million homeless animals six years in a row. The toll since 1968 has fallen in almost every year, dropping to just 5,095 in 2014.
Joseph Lloyd Tait, DVM
The Humane Alliance, with an annual budget of about $3 million and $3.7 million in assets, is not even 10% of the size of the ASPCA’s $35 million per year animal health program. Founded in 1866, the ASPCA as a whole is a $171 million per year organization, with $198 million in assets.
But the Humane Alliance has enjoyed extraordinary success since 1994, under founder William McKelvy and Quita Mazzina, part of the program since inception, promoted to executive director in 2000.
McKelvy formed the Humane Alliance after learning that the North Carolina rate of shelter killing was more than twice the U.S. norm. At peak, circa 1970, when shelter killing for the U.S. as a whole reached 115 dogs and cats per 1,000 humans, Justice for Animals founder Nancy Rich surveyed shelters to discover that North Carolina was killing 238 per 1,000 humans.
Quita Mazzina & friend. (Humane Alliance photo)
The introduction of smaller low-cost dog and cat sterilization programs lowered the toll markedly during the next 25 years. But according to research done by SpayUSA volunteer Peter Marsh, North Carolina shelters were still killing 35 animals killed per 1,000 humans, still twice as many as the national average, when the Humane Alliance debuted.
Marsh, engineer of the subsidized s/n program that had already made New Hampshire in effect a no-kill state, inspired McKelvy and Mazzina to rapidly expand from serving just the Asheville area to sterilizing animals for more than 40 humane societies and animal control agencies within a 100-mile radius.
The Humane Alliance had already sterilized 48,000 dogs and cats in five years, but was only beginning to build momentum.
Funding from the ASPCA and PetSmart Charities in June 2008 enabled the Humane Alliance to opened an expanded clinic and training center in Asheville. After this proved successful, the ASPCA and PetSmart Charities funded an even larger clinic and s/n training center opened in July 2014. The Humane Alliance had by then performed more than 362,000 s/n surgeries itself, and had trained personnel for clinics that had performed 4.8 million s/n surgeries.
Humane Alliance logo
The Humane Alliance has also become a national leader in promoting early-age sterilization. After finding in a survey of 704 veterinarians that only 19% then sterilized female dogs and cats before their first heat cycles, the Humane Alliance in mid-2013 introduced a national campaign to encourage sterilization at four months, a goal now also promoted by SpayUSA founder Esther Mechler through the Maine-based organization Marian’s Dream.
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Those deplorable sterilization findings are the reason that ASPCA and HSUS should put their mega-millions into direct veterinary competition in the open market. Do you know which vets will provide the services which are best for animals? The ones on OUR payrolls. Direct, free market competition is the best way to help animals and the floundering vet industry as a whole. Matthew and Wayne, call me, we can walk you through it…..
Why wouldn’t you support a program like the low cost spay/neuter agencies that help prevent unwanted births of cats and dogs? In Central Florida, vets charge over $250 to spay a female cat. Very few vets will work with rescue groups to provide low cost spay/neuter to control the problem of community cats breeding. Your statements make no sense and I’m trying to understand what you mean “Matthew and Wayne, call me, we can walk you through it…..”
Sharing to social media, with trepidation, but also with hope.
I do wish ASPCA would get back on track with focusing on S/N, rather than wasting so much time on the futile task of trying to rebrand pit bulls.
I hope this is a sign of good things to come.
It has been a tragedy that breeder infiltration of No Kill took the emphasis away from spay neuter and spay neuter education, or completely denied it.
If the root of the problem isn’t solved, the suffering continues or even gets worse, because if people tell them there is no overpopulation problem, then the public just thinks they don’t need to spay and neuter and that other people will magically take care of the problem.
A tragedy going on are some of these transport ‘”rescue” dealers shipping cute puppies from places like Alabama to places like New England, but doing nothing about setting up low cost spay neuter programs and above all, education, at the source of these pups. They are only making the problem worse, and are little more than a different kind of pet store or broker.
Sometimes they are just another outlet for puppy mills.
When transport programs started, many of those who set them up also concurrently set up programs to at least spay the mother dogs. Those have often just disappeared in the zeal to ship and sell.
It has not only been “breeder infiltration” which has diminished the constant mantra of spay neuter in parts of the nation. It’s the fact that there are effectively no puppies dying in shelters in huge swaths of the nation, it’s young adult and older dogs largely with mild to moderate health and behavioral problems facing the needle. The entrance into general veterinary medicine, which is the logical next step for organizations already vetted up for spay/neuter work, is a means of getting even these animals saved. Then you hit the problem increasing numbers of communities are now hitting- next to no dogs of any age, period. The exception being the most behaviorally challenged (i.e. unsafe) and breeds people don’t want in the numbers available (i.e. pit bulls). The only place to turn when we can no longer supply the market is to a breeder, back yard, puppy store, puppy mill, or otherwise.
Merritt mentioned a workshop a couple years ago about trends in animal welfare in an earlier piece. Among the most notable discussions in that workshop was the discussion of “humane” breeding programs which would provide the public with the breeds they want at the age they want them, functionally displacing the market we don’t like rather than destroying it. After all, our spay/neuter mantra has a logical disconnect: If we were granted our wish of every pet sterilized today, we’d live through the last generation of pets within twenty years. Perhaps we should become the “or otherwise” option for the public as they seek out their Labrador puppy even as we also offer and incentivize sterilization services.
Sorry, Karel.
There are a diminished number of unwanted puppies and kittens in only some parts of the country, mostly the more affluent communities with stricter animal control laws and breeder regulation.
In much of the rest of the country there is still a vast number of unwanted puppies and kittens, and many of them never even make it to a shelter or pound to be counted. They are abandoned to die in a number of ways or killed inhumanely.
Your fears of “running out of dogs” are nowhere close to reality, and also have been used as a weapon opposing spay neuter measures by the breeding industry that relies on an ever increasing number of breeding to keep up profits.
The “trend” of humane breeding programs may be a dream for the future, but isn’t even close now or for the foreseeable future.
There still is overall a noticeable lack of spay/neuter education, a lack of accessible low-cost spay neuter services especially to the very poor who have no transportation, a lot of myths still being perpetuated, a breeding industry which overproduces as a model, and a problem nationwide with UNAFFORDABILITY of spay neuter services to much of the public, perpetuated by a veterinary profession riddled with ethical and other issues.
No Kill, which started out so promisingly seeking answers to these problems, was intentionally sidetracked and derailed by a breeding industry that planned its infiltration for its own financial interests. For example, even advocating placing animals that aren’t spayed or neutered to perpetuate the problem in some cases, or refusing to take in animals who then reproduce and increase the problem.
Perhaps if you had been present during some of the planning sessions in the breeder community by some of their leaders and lobbyists you might be more aware of this intended crumbling of humane services, especially the spay neuter aspect.
Maybe if the breeding interests had not been allowed to poison some of No Kill, then we might be able to discuss humane breeding programs today or even yesterday.
Except for pit bulls and Chihuahuas, there are very few puppies entering shelters in any part of the U.S., and not all that many adult dogs, either. This is why the breeders of all of the other widely recognized breeds and breed types are able to tap a lucrative market. Some regions have more mixed-breed hounds and beagles than others; some have more mixed-breed reservation dogs. In general, though, where there are still surplus puppies, the surplus tends to be a breed-specific problem.
And in much of the NE US we do not even see those entering shelters. The argument should be for exactly the downward pressure that has been successful in this region, in large part because of the greater economic levels- although we have seen it in Reading, which is one of the poorest cities in the nation. The general “gentrification” of pets, which increases the costs while facilitating access to services required by pet owners means fewer animals owned and less turnover.
I think the fact that one group or the other co-opts messaging and engages in deceitful activities is a given, whether in politics or animal welfare (and the definition of what that is varies depending on the side). The problems of some parts of the nation also does not mean that the portions without those problems don’t have to deal with their own. Twenty years ago, the NE had the same problems. I predict that in 20 more years, the positive impacts will spread to even more of the US.
Kool aid anyone? As long as you have people on this planet there will not be a shortage of cats and dogs, despite concentrated effort to effectuate low cost spay/neuter programs. Your logic is the same as the one promoted by misguided folks who say if two cats breed and have a litter in seven years, there will be 750,000 cats. That is based on the false premise of the female cat having a litter of four kittens three-four times a year, all of the kittens surviving, the kittens then breeding and so on. The reality is that most likely one or two kittens may survive and the numbers are a lot lower. The day I see the Humane societies of our country involved in a breeding program will be a sad day indeed.
The No Kill community has also been terribly distracted and sometimes terribly misled by a constant changing cast of entrepreneur “consultants” who have often distracted away from goals rather than help achieve them, and in the cases of some, created dissension and quarrels and reversed the direction of progress, or even had ulterior motives in the cases of a few of them from the past
There needs to be more emphasis on team accomplishment and shared planning that address many issues and have a multitude of ideas and experiences, and less on leader charisma that has nearly destroyed No Kill.
“Panelist, “Raising the Bar in Large-Scale Breeding Kennels”
National Animal Interest Alliance National Conference
2011″
Karel Minor, I think you should be disclosing liasions like this, as Patti Strand, the president and founder of NAIA and an AKC board member, initiated the puppy mill or “large volume breeder” program in the AKC, and has received much criticism from other breeders for her continued lobbying for these mills and protecting them from anti-cruelty laws.
Patti was also instrumental in spreading the “overpopulation is a myth” mantra used to great harm by the breeding industry and spread into aspects of No Kill for less than ethical interests.
Her organization NAIA is also affiliated with factory farm lobbies like Center for Consumer Freedom.
That is only the beginning, based on even the quickest of looks into background for that organization and its leader.
Known in recent years for opposition to adoption transport and especially to international animal adoption programs, the National Animal Interest Alliance was, as the poster indicated, founded in 1993 by Portland dog breeder Patti Strand, author of a 1992 book called The Hijacking of the Humane Movement. The NAIA annual conferences have mostly featured such speakers as tuna fishing and fur trade representative Teresa Platt; Joan Berosini, wife of former Las Vegas orangutan trainer Bobby Berosini; Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council attorney Marshall Meyer; and biomedical researcher Adrian Morrison. Each has been a NAIA board member.
However, the NAIA conferences have also from time to time featured speakers usually heard at mainstream humane conferences. The 2007 roster, for example, included Alliance for Contraception of Dogs & Cats president Joyce Briggs; University of California at Davis professor of veterinary law Jerrold Tannenbaum; former American Veterinary Medical Association president Bonnie Beaver; and Gary Patronek, who headed the Tufts University Center for Animals & Public Policy, 1997-2003, and in January 2007 became director of animal welfare and protection for the Animal Rescue League of Boston. Beaver and Patronek, as outspoken pit bull advocates and opponents of breed-specific legislation, have clearly aligned themselves with breeder interests, but Briggs, who began her career in humane work by founding The Spayed Club, most certainly has not.
“I remember reading The Hijacking of the Humane Movement years ago with amazement and distress,” Briggs told me.
“It seemed to misrepresent most things I believed to be just and true. And I have followed their campaign against dog transport
programs. I decided to accept the invitation to speak because I seldom get invitations to speak about animal welfare issues and
approaches outside the ‘choir.’ Hopefully there is an opportunity to be a change agent.”
Disclose? Why would I need to, anyone can Google. If you were at that gathering (and why would you? I was only there because they asked me to speak on the panel and it was driving distance from my house and they paid me- oh, wait, nothing. It was even my gas.) you know I was supposed to be the sacrificial lamb from the Humane World. My portion of the talk consisted of me telling them to find new jobs because we were going to crush their industry in PA through the new puppy mill law and we’d move on to taking over their market share and driving them either out of business or into the arms of the animal welfare community who would force massive change on them. I was not well received by most, if politely received by a couple. Then everyone got to witness me going at it with the do nothing Dog Law Director at the time in the lobby. As a side note, the puppy mill bill, which I played a bit part in getting through because of our somewhat strategic legislative location, shut down the majority of commercial kennels in PA, so I was correct. Interestingly, they briefly asked me to do a point/counterpoint blog exchange for them and I agreed provided I could say whatever I chose with no edits. Somehow, the invitation dried up.
Jesslyn, if you’ve never gone into the belly of the beast to proselytize for the work you do- whether it’s on the street with dog fighters, in back yards and puppy mills with breeders, in vet offices with vets, or even in the club houses of those who are the enemies off our work (and sometimes even the friends of our work), I’d be surprised. I’ve done all of that, I imagine Merritt has, too. That doesn’t “align” me with any of them and I have no intention to align myself in that way. Now, maybe if they offer me what they offered Ed Sayers to pretend I was naïve, maybe…..nah, even for that much money, I couldn’t do it- I have a moral compass. But that doesn’t mean that in a county where the only source for puppies is a pet store or puppy mill I’m not also going to ask if there isn’t an alternative that gets someone the Labrador puppy they want instead of the adult pit bull they don’t.
And while I’m on my high horse I should say that when we talk about infighting and sidetracking, I’d count this sort of nonsense at top of the list. Merritt and I have gone around on specifics- just today in fact- but he’s never accused me of being a shill for the puppy millers and I’ve never accused him of much other than being imprecise with language at times. Argument and discussion is fine and I’ll defend my beliefs and positions openly in a way many in our industry won’t, whether anyone likes them or not, and when they have changed over time, I acknowledge that, too. That seems to be something Merritt is also willing to do, as well, so good on him.
Fine and dandy. Yet there are huge swaths of this Nation where animals are killed at 3-4 times the national average – where the communities are too poor to set up low cost S/N clinics.
Where innocents pay the price of being born in a poor and ignorant county.
What about them????
I told Merritt I was swearing off comments but I’m still getting the notices so I’ll do what I should have earlier. Anyone who is confused by our organization’s reasoning on the above or simply disagrees and wants to set me straight, call me: 610-750-6100. You may still disagree with either our approach or vision of the future, but you won’t do so based on misinterpretation of a couple snippets in a comment string. I look for forward to speaking with you! Or look me up at EXPO and I’m happy to talk to anyone there. I’ll even buy you a drink (you can decide you want Kool-Aid).