U.S. shelter killing is up, despite & actually because of emphasis on “no kill” instead of s/n.
PHUKET, Thailand; ATLANTA, Georgia––“Today, I am overjoyed to share the news that the millionth stray animal has passed through Soi Dog Foundation’s spay/neuter program,” Soi Dog Foundation cofounder John Dalley exulted on September 8, 2023.
“This is the first time in history that this number of stray animals has been neutered and vaccinated by a single organization,” Dalley declared, “and I could not be more proud to say that organization is Soi Dog!”
A million spay/neuter surgeries completed by one organization, ANIMALS 24-7 can confirm, after exhaustively researching the matter, is indeed globally unprecedented.
Spay/USA founder Esther Mechler; Japanese high volume, low-cost spay/neuter pioneer Hiro Yamasaki; and Jeff Young , DVM, in 2005.
Fixing a million would take top two s/n surgeons 100 years
To put the Soi Dog Foundation accomplishment into perspective, probably the two most prolific spay/neuter veterinarians in world history are Marvin Mackie, DVM, now retired, of Los Angeles, and Jeff Young, DVM, founder of Planned Pethood Plus in Denver, Colorado.
(See Pet Overpopulation and the 70% Rule, by Marvin Mackie, DVM, and We cannot adopt, warehouse or rescue our way out of dog & cat overpopulation!, by Jeff Young, DVM.)
To achieve a million spay/neuter surgeries, either Mackey or Young would have to have sustained their peak pace of performing spay/neuter operations for approximately 200 years.
Working together, Mackey and Young, who trained under Mackey, might have done it in only 100 years.
North Shore Animal League has facilitated a millon-plus s/n surgeries
There are two organizations other than Soi Dog that can claim to have facilitated more than a million spay/neuter surgeries: the North Shore Animal League America and Friends of Animals.
The North Shore Animal League America appears to have performed spay/neuter surgery at its own facilities on as many as half a million dogs and cats.
Over the past 33 years the North Shore Animal League America has also funded at least as many spay/neuter surgeries done by other animal sheltering organizations.
Further, the North Shore Animal League America hosts the national SpayUSA referral network. Founded by Esther Mechler, who now heads the United Spay Alliance and the Feline Fix by Five program, SpayUSA may have helped to arrange another million spay/neuter surgeries.
Friends of Animals claims to have helped pay for 2.8 million s/n surgeries
Mechler came to North Shore, indirectly, after helping to manage the Friends of Animals spay/neuter program.
“Friends of Animals,” says the FoA web site, “was founded in 1957 to end pet homelessness by helping to make spaying and neutering more affordable through our low-cost certificates,” sold to pet owners to be presented to veterinarians participating in the program in exchange for a discount on spay/neuter surgery. The participating veterinarians then redeem the coupons for partial matching payments from FoA.
“Our certificates have helped to alter more than 2.8 million dogs and cats,” Friends of Animals claims.
Friends of Animals initially operated a spay/neuter clinic in Neptune, New Jersey, adding a second spay/neuter clinic later in Miami, Florida. Those two clinics, however, both closed more than 30 years ago. They probably accounted for fewer than 300,000 spay/neuter operations between them.
Soi Dog Foundation started with Leone Cosens
The Soi Dog Foundation success story began with a New Zealander, Leone Cosens, who moved with her husband Tim Cosens Jr. to Phuket, Thailand, in 1992. There they operated a guesthouse at Yanui Beach, near Laem Phromthep.
Leone Cosens also cofounded and for a time directed the Phuket Animal Welfare Society, but according to Dutch expatriate Margo Homburg in 2005, “was fired because she was treating and sterilizing too many dogs.”
Leone Cosens and Homburg then started the Soi Dog Foundation to do spay/neuter of street dogs, assisted by British expatriate volunteers Gillian and John Dalley.
Married in Phuket and frequent visitors to Phuket for several years afterward, Gillian and John Dalley were a bank employee and a chemical engineer, respectively, in Yorkshire, England.
(Facebook photo)
Gill & John Dalley gave up golf & scuba to fix dogs
The Dalleys retired together to Phuket in 2003, bought a home near a newly built country club within a short walk of the ocean, and as they often told media, expected to spend the rest of their lives golfing and scuba diving.
John Dalley acknowledged going diving just once. Neither Dalley ever swung a golf club. Instead, they discovered streets full of homeless dogs, and became acquainted with fellow dog rescuers Leone Cosens and Margot Homburg.
As the Soi Dog Foundation recalls in a free download entitled The Road To A Million, “Gill, John, and Margot set up spay/neuter clinics throughout the island. They became the rescue officers and vet nurses. The neutering operations themselves were carried out by volunteer vets from overseas. In their first three months of operation in 2003, they spayed or neutered 175 animals.”
The Soi Dog Foundation team ramped this up to 1,237 animals spayed or neutered in 2004, including 4,300 dogs and 2,027 dogs.
(Soi Dog Foundation photo)
Double catastrophe
Then double catastrophe struck.
Late in 2004, The Road To A Million recounts, “while rescuing a tranquilized dog who had run into a flooded buffalo field, Gill contracted a rare form of septicemia. She was airlifted to Bangkok,” the capital city of Thailand, 525 miles north, “and was in a coma for several weeks.”
Gill Dalley lost both of her legs from the knees down. She had barely begun to learn to use prosthetic legs two months later when the Indian Ocean tsunami struck on December 26, 2004, killing at least 225,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.
Bounced back from both disasters
Leone Cosens was among the victims. Responding to a call from nine British guests that water was flooding into the guesthouse she operated with her husband, and unaware that the high water was the result of a tsunami, Leone Cosens apparently ran right into the highest wave.
Her father-in-law, visiting from Slidell, Louisiana, found her remains in a nearby rice field the following day.
Gill Dailey took over the Soi Dog Foundation office work. John Dalley led animal rescue operations around Phuket for weeks after the tsunami.
Margo Homburg, newly divorced, returned to the Netherlands, but the Soi Dog Foundation built a new spay/neuter clinic in Phuket and accomplished 6,327 surgeries by year’s end.
(Facebook photo)
Did Costa Rica info help?
On August 8, 2005, John Dalley requested from ANIMALS 24-7, and was promptly sent, How Animal Birth Control Programs Benefit Dogs, Cats, and Veterinarians.
This was a keynote address that ANIMALS 24-7 delivered twice to separate sessions of the Costa Rican annual Congress of the National College of Veterinarians on October 25 and October 26, 2001, first to the general membership and then to veterinary students.
Exactly how it helped in Thailand, or if helped, John Dalley never explained, but he requested a resend five years later, following four years of plateaued performance.
Since the resend, the Soi Dog Foundation has enjoyed thirteen years of annually increased spay/neuter performance––which may or may not be entirely coincidental.
Dogs Trust helped
Directing mobile clinic operations beginning in 2006, Gill Dalley went on to become, in 2008, the first non-Asian by birth to be named an Asian of the year by Channel News Asia Singapore, and the first winner of the Canine Hero of the Year award at the 2011 Animals for Asia conference in Chengdu, China
“Perseverance meant that by 2012, almost 90% of the stray dog population in Phuket had been neutered, and Soi Dog was able to turn its attention to Bangkok,” The Road To A Million says.
“In 2016, having supported Soi Dog’s neutering efforts in Phuket some years earlier,” The Road To A Million continues, “Dogs Trust Worldwide – the international arm of the United Kingdom’s oldest dog charity, Dogs Trust – began funding half of the Bangkok mobile program. Their support remains influential in the growth of spay/neuter in Thailand to this day.”
“I am not one of those people who go to the grave thinking ‘What if?'”
Like the national spay/neuter programs in effect in India, Costa Rica, and Turkey, the Soi Dog Foundation chiefly practices neuter/release and anti-rabies vaccination of street dogs and feral cats, who already have adequate food sources and unless sterilized, would soon breed up to the maximum carrying capacity of their habitat.
Gill Dalley died of cancer on February 13, 2017.
“I don’t think too many people achieve their goals, their aims, their dreams,” she said. “I don’t think I am one of those people who is going to go to the grave thinking ‘What if ?’”
The Soi Dog Foundation scarcely slowed down.
(Soi Dog photo from video)
Reached a quarter million animals fixed in 2018
“In 2018,” The Road To A Million recounts, “the [cumulative] figure of a quarter-of-a-million animals was reached. In the same year, though, an exaggerated rabies scare in northeastern Thailand led to thousands of animals being rounded up and even pets being surrendered by their owners, highlighting not only the dangers of misinformation and the fear surrounding rabies, but the reinforcing of the need for large-scale vaccination, an integral part of our program.
“2019 saw the launch of two more mobile sterilization teams, taking the total to seven.”
The Soi Dog Foundation in 2019 reached 100,000 animals spayed or neutered in a calendar year for the first time, actually falling just short of 120,000.
Hit half a million in 2020
Adding an eighth mobile team, sterilizing and vaccinating 78,653 animals in Bangkok alone, the Soi Dog Foundation had cumulatively treated half-a-million animals by the end of 2020.
Beginning operations in Thailand’s three largest provinces – Nakhon Si Thammarat, Surat Thani and Chiang Mai––and “supporting a spay/neuter project with Animal Rescue Cambodia in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh,” The Road To A Million mentions, the Soi Dog Foundation closed 2022 having cumulatively spayed or neutered and vaccinated 849,557 animals.
In 2023, now with 15 mobile clinics, each served by nine full-time staff, the Soi Dog Foundation is on pace to serve more than 200,000 animals in a year for the first time.
Along the way, the Soi Dog Foundation has almost eradicated rabies from Thailand. Thailand had one reported human rabies death in 2020, three in 2021, and only one again in 2022.
(Beth Clifton photo/ collage)
Lessons for the U.S.
The U.S. animal welfare community could take more than just a few lessons from the Soi Dog Foundation, beginning with re-emphasizing providing easy access to low-cost and free spay/neuter and vaccination in the many under-served and chronically low-income parts of the country.
The central focus of animal welfare work during the several decades when U.S. animal shelter intakes and population control plummeted, providing low-cost and free spay/neuter and vaccination services have fallen out of favor in the second and third decades of the 21st century amid a frantic rush by most animal shelters to achieve “no kill” status by achieving a 90% “save rate.”
(See Casualties of the “save rate”: 40,000 animals at failed no-kill shelters & rescues, New Best Friends & HSUS execs flunk economic logic that dogs understand, and Impoundments from hoarding cases down 90% in six years––why?)
“Starting in 2021, shelters began filling back up”
Wrote Kenny Torella for Vox on August 16, 2023, “Lonely and stuck at home, millions of Americans turned to animals for comfort in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, adopting and fostering cats and dogs from shelters at record rates.
“But starting in 2021, shelters began filling back up, as there were more animals entering than leaving, and now many are packed to the brim. From Rhode Island to Seattle and everywhere in between, shelters are reporting they’re at capacity, forcing an increase in the number of dogs killed due to space constraints. Earlier this year, almost half of shelters surveyed reported an increase in euthanized dogs, while only 10% reported a decrease.
“Shelters are screaming from the rooftops”
“By and large, shelters are screaming from the rooftops that they’ve been in crisis for a while, and it’s not letting up,” warned Stephanie Filer, a pit bull advocate and executive director of Shelter Animals Count, of Atlanta, Georgia, introduced by Torella as “an organization that since 2012 collects and publishes data from thousands of animal shelters.”
This was a job that ANIMALS 24-7 did from 1993 to 2014, but quit doing after national organizations unhappy with our findings, chiefly about the disproportionately huge numbers of pit bulls entering shelters, occupying cage space, and being euthanized for dangerous behavior, began throwing around half a million dollars per year to Shelter Animals Count to discover essentially the same information in a much more complicated and convoluted manner, not indicting pit bull overpopulation.
(See Record low shelter killing raises both hopes & questions.)
The numbers
“The trend [of increased shelter intakes and killing] threatens the immense progress that animal shelters have made to reduce the number of animals put down since the 1970s,” Torella wrote, “when 13.5 million of the 65 million dogs and cats in the U.S. — more than one-fifth — were euthanized. In 2019, fewer than a million dogs and cats, about 0.7 percent of the country’s 135 million, were put down.”
Actually, ANIMALS 24-7 learned from retrospective review of published data, the animal killing toll circa 1970 was up to 23.4 million.
Continued Torella, “In 2020, when people were adopting shelter animals at record rates, 2% more animals left shelters than came in over the course of the year, according to Shelter Animals Count. But in 2021, that figure reversed — 2% more animals entered shelters than left, either as strays or surrendered by their owners. In 2022, the trend worsened: 4% more animals entered shelters than left. That may not seem like much, but each percentage point amounts to tens of thousands of animals.
“Shelter Animals Count projects that by the end of 2023, the population gap will tick up to 5%,” Torella added.
“Why so many are coming in off the streets is a bit of a mystery” to whom?
“Many of the animals currently entering shelters are strays,” Torella noted. “While owner surrender rates have fallen in recent years,” largely because shelters trying to achieve a 90% “save rate” are refusing to take in unadoptable pit bulls, “there has been an 8% increase in stray intakes from January to June 2023, compared to the same time period in 2022, and a 26% increase compared to the same period in 2021.
“But why so many are coming in off the streets is a bit of a mystery,” Torella suggested, instead of mentioning the obvious: when shelters refuse to accept animals, many of the animals are simply dumped.
Get a clue from bully rescue
Adam Pinsker of WISH television in Indianapolis offered a clue on August 25, 2023.
“Hundreds of unwanted and abused pit bull dogs and American Bully breeds are filling up shelters and nonprofits,” Pinsker reported.
Laurie Collins, founder of Lucci’s House Bully Rescue in Indianapolis, “provides shelter for more than 100 pit bulls and American Bully breeds,” Pinsker continued. “She gets dozens of calls a day from people who find abandoned dogs.
“Pit bulls and American Bullies often yield from 12 to 14 puppies per litter,” Pinsker explained, “and many breeders or dog owners can’t handle so many puppies. They often end up in shelters where they are euthanized or sold into dogfighting rings.”
(Beth Clifton photo)
Kibble in their ears
ANIMALS 24-7 warned about that in a keynote address to the very first national No Kill conference, in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1995, pointing out that pit bull proliferation and the feral cat population would have to be brought under control through spay/neuter before authentic no-kill sheltering could become reality.
Thanks to widespread use of neuter/return, the U.S. feral cat population is now a fraction of what it was then.
(See Why we cannot adopt our way out of shelter killing and D.C. Cat Count confirms low feral cat population, lots of free-roaming pets.)
Pit bull advocates in the audience, unfortunately, including the founding executive directors of the no-kill advocacy organizations Maddie’s Fund and the Best Friends Animal Society, apparently had kibble in their ears.
Discrepancy of 542,000 in ASPCA & Best Friends shelter killing estimates
Updated Kelly Burch of Business Insider on September 12, 2023, also citing Stephanie Filer of Shelter Animals Count, “So far this year, 8.5% of animals that enter the shelter system have been euthanized. That’s nearly 2% more than compared to 2021.”
“The total number of cats and dogs coming into shelters is up 7.6% so far this year,” Burch wrote, “compared to 2021, while the number of animals leaving shelters has only increased 4.6%.
“The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals estimates more than 920,000 shelter animals are euthanized each year,” Burch finished, “whereas the Best Friends Animal Society, which works toward no-kill policies, estimated the number was closer to 378,000 dogs and cats in 2022.”
The discrepancy of 542,000 is wider than the any of the annual fluctuations in numbers that ANIMALS 24-7 discovered from 1992 to 2014.
It also, coincidentally, is 59% of the ASPCA total, and is comparable to the current percentage of pit bulls in the U.S. animal shelter dog inventory.
(See How many doggies are in the window? Dog breed census 2023.)
(Soi Dog Foundation photo)
The answer is blowing in the wind from Thailand
Whatever accounts for the gap between the ASPCA and the Best Friends Animal Society shelter killing estimates, and the ASPCA is also a pit bull-pushing organization, the answer is blowing in the wind from Thailand.
There pit bulls, though often smuggled in by dogfighters, have been banned since 1991, and are not legally bred, sold, or rehomed to pass along problems instead of addressing them. The Thai national pit bull population, fighting dogs included, is currently estimated at about 1,000, compared with about 5.5 million in the U.S.
In Thailand also, the Soi Dog Foundation is demonstrating how to do high-volume, high-quality, low cost and free sterilization and vaccination at a rate that makes a visible difference.
The U.S. animal advocacy community once knew how to do that too, but now needs to learn again, targeting the animal populations at greatest risk.
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Waiting for Godot & a good, cheap non-surgical alternative to s/n surgery
A truly fantastic achievement! In spite of being the pioneers in the world for ABC for street dogs, the Blue Cross of India has done less than a quarter of a million spay/neuters in 59 years!!
My sincere respect to John Dalley and Soi Dog Foundation.
Thank you so much for highlighting this amazing achievement (and pointing out why other programs don’t work). It is inspirational and keeps me thinking about what I can try to do better. Anyone who has been involved in this type of activity knows how much hard work it must have been over the years, and how many challenges were faced and overcome. John has responded to my emails over the years when I reached out and I am grateful for his time — and to Animals 24-7 for connecting us with so many valuable resources.
These people are my greatest heroes and all of us who care about animals owe them a massive debt of gratitude.
Hoping and praying the US wakes up and gets back on track to truly achieve no killing of healthy cats and others. Spay/neuter and humane education advocating adopting for life have always been, and will always be, the way to do that. We of course also need to pass BSL legislation and stop the proliferation of pitbulls and pitbull mixes.
Sharing with gratitude and hope.
So many tragedies along the way and yet, these folks have accomplished so much. One can only hope that common sense will finally help guide our efforts in the U.S.
Sadly what we are seeing across the US is a push to keep animals out of public shelters through managed admission and community cats. Few if any are bothering to check if these animals being denied admission had previously been sterilized before turning them away. Nowhere is this more detrimental than in the population of cats and bully breed type dogs that suffer disproportionality in and out of our shelter system.
In too many areas of this country there is no spay/neuter at all in the local public shelter. At the same time the public has been conditioned to point to these inappropriately labeled high kill shelters with disdain. The more enlightened might ask why all these animals can’t just go to a no kill.
No Kill, too many don’t understand has pitted organizations that pick and choose what animals they want against Open Admission public shelters that must take all animals from their jurisdictions. LA shelters took in 30,000 animals in fiscal year 2022/23 by edict. In contrast the largest self professed no kill sanctuary took in 3,679 by choice in the same jurisdiction https://bestfriends.org/no-kill-2025/our-impact/data-transparency .
If Socially Conscious Sheltering had been pushed instead of so called No Kill we’d IMO be much further down the road to less death and suffering. Instead No Kill has sucked resources and adopters from the animals actually at the most risk of euthanasia.
This leads back to the lack of access of free and low cost spay/neuter in much of this country. Mass S/N would require our national animal welfare organizations to write more than token checks instead of cashing big ones that come from continued no kill rhetoric.
Healthy animals should not be put to sleep.however,it’s because of people,their greed&ignorance this happens.thankfully,these creatures are now with God,their creator,so please find grieve for them,focus on those that need our compassion.
Hi meant to say please dont grieve for animals put to sleep in shelters,humanity should be ashamed of the way it treats God’s creatures!!