How much real progress toward eradicating cat & dog overpopulation has been lost through a focus on the wrong bottom line?
(Gerry Childs, now retired from a long career in sales in many different parts of the U.S., recently celebrated 50 years of volunteering at every stop for animal shelters, spay/neuter projects, and feral cat neuter/return programs.)
I have been troubled for some time about the squishy numbers we now get for shelter intakes and euthanasia. The stats cited by the Best Friends Animal Society and Maddie’s Fund are questionable at best––and they are calling the shots and organizing the data.
Intake statistics from many shelters are skewed because so many shelters now routinely turn away found cats and dogs, and refuse to accept potentially dangerous owner-surrendered dogs in particular, so that they don’t have to kill them.
What becomes of the turned-away animals, & how many more do they breed?
My huge question is what happens to those turned away, how many are there, and if unneutered, how many offspring will these turned-away animals produce?
The acknowledged number of euthanasias is way down because the shelters just won’t take in more animals than they think they can adopt out. But we have no clue as to where the “invisible” turned-away animals end up.
Back in 1990 there were about 12 million dogs and cats euthanized per year in U.S. shelters, according to the annual American Humane Association postcard surveys done from 1986 to 1993, but the numbers were falling fast.
ANIMALS 24-7 did more comprehensive data collection for the years 1992 and 1997 through 2014 that showed a steady decline down to 2.7 million, but then quit doing annual surveys of animal shelter euthanasias because so much of the data that shelters reported had become glaringly suspect due to the advent of “return-to-field” of found cats, refusals to accept owner-surrendered pit bulls, and careless turnovers of impounded animals to shelterless rescues furnishing no accountability data.
(See Record low shelter killing raises both hopes & questions.)
Lost focus on lowering the numbers
There was a huge amount of activity to increase spay/neuter rates during the 1990-2010 time frame, including conferences both regional and national, generous grants from the Petco Foundation and PetSmart Charities, and inspiring stories of people organizing successful spay/neuter programs even in the most remote, impoverished, and educationally backward areas.
High volume spay/neuter clinics were built, mobile clinics covered large rural areas. People such as Ruth Steinberger developed unique models like her “in-clinic clinics,” which used regular veterinary clinic facilities to host spay/neuter clinics serving the pets of means-tested low income people on weekends, when those clinics would otherwise have been closed.
No progress on non-surgical contraception
There also appeared to be significant progress made in developing non-surgical approaches to dog and cat contraception. The Alliance for Dog & Cat Contraception emerged, and medical industry entrepreneur Gary Michelson offered incentives of $75 million toward producing dog and cat contraceptives meeting a set of strict but necessary criteria for efficacy.
Recently the only significant advances on that front appear to be coming from the afore-mentioned Ruth Steinberger, and she is not yet ready to make any big announcements.
Most of the talk about non-surgical dog and cat contraception these days consists of implausible claims made in fundraising appeals by Alex Pacheco. His big idea, if he ever had one, originated with others who, unlike Pacheco, actually had legitimate scientific credentials. Those others presented it to the Michelson team, who rejected it as unsafe and unviable more than 15 years ago.
COVID-19 is an excuse, not a reason
Many ardent no-killers blame COVID-19 for the current spay/neuter backlog, a deficit of millions just to get back to pre-COVID spay/neuter rates.
To be sure, there are not nearly enough vets now working to get kittens and pups ‘fixed’ before they reach puberty.
(See “Spay/neuter deficit” of 8 million run up in COVID crisis: is there a fix?, We need to open up spay/neuter – now!, by Bryan Kortis, and COVID-19: animal shelter “experts” circle back toward pet overpopulation, by Ruth Steinberger.)
Burden is on the shelters, not the vets
But a bigger factor which those blaming COVID always ignore is that no-kill shelters have turned away unneutered animals by the tens of thousands. These cats and dogs go “out there” and procreate just as much as they did in the past, before the birth prevention movement took hold.
The no-kill folks, in their zeal to reach a high Live Release Rate, give animals to people who can ill afford to feed them, let alone spay them and give them vet care. That burden is on the shelters, not the vets!
Adoption screening went from reformed to abandoned
The goal really should be to treat cat and dog adoptions as we treat human adoptions. That should be the model.
And for decades it was, in theory, when the American Humane Association distributed to shelters an adoption screening form adapted directly from the form previously used by AHA-supervised orphanages, consisting of more than 100 questions.
Unfortunately this questionnaire was so unwieldy that it tended to screen out many well-qualified would-be adopters, at a time when so many cats and dogs were entering shelters that nine out of ten were euthanized, nationwide.
The North Shore Animal League on Long Island and the Helen Woodward Animal Center near San Diego managed to reduce that old clumsy screening process down to just 20 questions plus a quick credit check. As their techniques spread, cat and dog adoptions soared nationally to between four and five million per year––and then leveled off, after spay/neuter steeply reduced the numbers of accidental litters coming to shelters.
Double standard
The majority of animals coming to shelters came to be feral cats and owner-surrendered problematic and often dangerous dogs: much harder to rehome and often inappropriate for any rehoming.
(See Why we cannot adopt our way out of shelter killing.)
Instead of re-orienting spay/neuter programs to target the unadoptable animal populations, many shelters stopped enforcing any adoption criteria whatever.
Social workers would never give a child to just anyone who said they ‘wanted that child’!
Nor would they neglect to follow up to see how things were going in that new home.
Why cannot companion animals be given the same respect? Is that not what animal welfare is about?
We now have a bad double-standard: the cat or dog can be adopted out anywhere, no matter how bad, as long as he or she is out of the shelter.
Where can we get the true story?
There needs to be a call for improved standards as a best practice. But that would mean fewer adoptions, so would be a really hard sell in this climate.
The bottom line: can we measure how things are going at grassroots-level shelters and rescues?
Not from some high mountain far from the dingy allies and dumps of the cities, but to get the true story?
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Working 365 days a year in cat advocacy promoting adoptions from shelters, I am very well aware of what has taken place since the beginning of COVID (and the subsequent change in policy of the Surgeon General, at that time an avid hunter,from prioritizing spay/neuter to declaring it “elective,” and making PPE required by veterinarians very difficult to obtain as its use for human health care was prioritized over that for veterinary care).
All of our hard work was showing very positive results, but this reversed during COVID and shows little signs of turning around as veterinarians continue leaving their careers and not being replaced, veterinary appointments continuing to be difficult to get in many places, and spay/neuter no longer being prioritized.
A few years ago, the numbers of cats (and kittens) in shelters I was involved with would have been quite low by this time of year. Now, they are as high as they would have been in normal summers just prior to COVID.
We have a lot of work to do. But we can’t and we won’t give up.
Gee, you have not been to San Antonio lately. The management of the Animal Care Services (ACS) was not great before COVID-19, as the Live Release Rate had plateaued in 2017 at 90%, and the city erroneously declared No-Kill. Then the management at ACS seemed to stagnate. The LRR stayed around 90% for the next 4 years.
Then in 2020 everything dropped: intake, adoptions, rescues, fosters, AND spay/neuters. The Live Release Rate stayed near 90% for the next two years because the intake was so low. Then, in 2022, it decreased substantially, and in 2023, it dropped to 81.7.
At the same time, after a tragic death from a dog attack in February, the intake increased, as did the killing of healthy and treatable dogs for space. Now, they have even dropped their Live Release Rate goal from 90% to 82%.
Meanwhile, city-involved spay/neuters dropped from 44,000 to 25,000. So they are not releasing dogs to the streets. They are impounding and killing them for space.
Actually, John, ANIMALS 24-7 pays quite close attention to the San Antonio data, and has for more than 30 years.
Thirty years ago, San Antonio was conspicuous as the last major U.S. city which still had street dogs at approximately the level of the mid-20th century, when street dogs made up approximately a third of the total U.S. dog population.
Efforts to eradicate the San Antonio street dog population through catch-and-kill instead of spay/neuter peaked in 1999, to the extent that available data documents the numbers, when the city-funded shelter killed a combined total of 43,661 dogs and cats. Energetic spay/neuter work cut that total to 5,980 by 2013, including 3,546 dogs, but then, under ill-informed and misguided activist pressure, the city embarked upon a grossly premature attempt to achieve a 90% live release rate.
As early as 2015, San Antonio Animal Care Services came under scrutiny for jeopardizing public health and safety by rehoming dangerous dogs and failing to respond promptly to calls about dangerous dogs running at large. See Audit hits San Antonio Animal Care Services for neglect of public safety and Why San Antonio Animal Care Services did not promptly impound a gunshot-wounded mastiff found running in a pack.
By 2019––a year before COVID-19 hit––dog bite cases were still soaring, while “turnaway” incidents resulting in dogs who were refused admission to the San Antonio city shelter being released on the streets at last began to attract media attention.
As of October 31, 2023, according to Mariza Mendoza of WOAI-TV News in San Antonio, more than 3,000 dog bite cases have been reported this year, more than a third of them by free-roaming pit bulls––euphemistically called “pit bull look-alikes”––and free-roaming pit bulls have killed two people, Ramon Najera on February 24, 2023, and Paul Anthony Striegl, who was attacked by two pit bulls on September 5, 2023, but survived his injuries until October 1, 2023. (See Pit bull mauling death of Ramon Najera, 81, shocks San Antonio.)
The circumstances suggest that San Antonio Animal Care Services, rather than “killing them for space,” may finally be learning that “Live Release Rate” is the worst possible metric for measuring animal care and control success, since it encourages turning away and/or rehoming the most dangerous and therefore hard-to-place dogs, while neglecting the duty of maintaining public safety that is the primary reason why taxpayers fund animal control agencies.
Obviously spay/neuter numbers need to be ramped up again, as well. Then, once both the dangerous dog situation is brought in hand and the intake numbers are substantially reduced without an increase in the free-roaming dog population, the longtime pipe dream of achieving authentic “no-kill” animal control may be at last a tangible possibility.
Good article..In the end it always come down to money and perception..The unethical no-kill crowd have made hoarding commonplace and have sucked up so much of the money pie it has made it very hard for smaller groups..I’am almost to the point that they care less about the animals and more about bringing in the money and maintaining the status quo..Only when the public figures this out and demands more and gives to the groups really making a difference will things change..I have dedicated my life to stopping over population and helping animals and as a non-profit we are barely making it..the hundreds of millions of dollars the big groups are setting on should be going to building low cost, high volume hospitals so the average american has some options, other than surrender or euthanasia..
Truth, unvarnished – from a straight-shooter.