OUT THE FRONT DOOR

West Coast – Washington, Oregon, California Upper Rockies – Idaho, Montana, Wyoming Middle Rockies – Nevada, Utah, Colorado Lower Southwest – Arizona, New Mexico Non-Contiguous – Hawaii, Alaska The western United States, like most other regions of the country, has a mixture of very good and very bad shelter systems, with a lot in between. Some parts of the western United States are as good at No Kill as you can find anywhere in the country, but at least two states in the region are among the worst for No Kill. The West Coast area has several cities that are models for No Kill. Seattle and its metro area, including Kitsap County, do not provide consolidated statistics, but the area certainly appears to be No Kill. The Portland metro area, consisting of four counties that have formed a coalition, is saving more than 90% in its population area of over 2 million people. Oregon is also home to the city of Eugene, which is No Kill. In Northern California, the city of San Francisco has had a consolidated live release rate of over 90% since 2013. The San Francisco SPCA partners with the city of Stockton to help them increase their save rate. Sacramento, which has faced a lot of challenges, had a 78% save rate in 2015 with intake of almost 11,000. Sacramento apparently includes died/lost in their live release rate calculation, so with the standard calculation they might be over 80%. Chico, California, is notable for the stunning success it has had with the new community cats paradigms. Its shelter reduced cat intake from 2,839 to 442 and cat euthanasia from 1273 to 88 after it implemented a community cat program. This success story was featured in the March/April 2015 issue of the HSUS Animal Sheltering magazine. Southern California is rapidly improving. Best Friends is helping with a massive effort in Los Angeles that is paying off in substantially increased lifesaving. The San Diego coalition reported that it has reached 90%. Ventura County has also reported reaching No Kill. The Upper Rockies have a lot in common with the Western Midwest – both are areas where we do not have much information about how No Kill is doing. My impression is that these states are making progress, though. There is a correlation between mountainous terrain and cold weather and No Kill. And these states are becoming more progressive and have many resort areas, both of which also correlate with No Kill. There are several small No Kill communities in Montana and Wyoming. I have heard reports of shelters that are doing well in Idaho, although I have not researched those shelters. The Middle Rockies states are amazing. Colorado is a No Kill state, as measured by the state’s shelter reporting system. Best Friends has had a project to make Utah a No Kill state ongoing for several years now, and they have been very successful, with the Salt Late City metro area and a double-digit number of smaller cities and counties with live release rates of 90% or more. The giant Humane Society of Utah, which is open admission for owner surrenders and pulls lots of animals from public shelters, recently announced that it had a 90%+ live release rate in 2015. Nevada is home to Washoe County, where the shelter system has been No Kill for years. The Nevada Humane Society, which has been a crucial partner to Washoe County and the cities of Reno and Sparks, is now working on making Carson City No Kill. Las Vegas has a serious No Kill effort underway in which a large local No Kill group, No Kill Las Vegas, is participating. It is great to see a terrific No Kill group like NKLV assisting the local shelter to succeed. Unfortunately, there is less good news in the remaining regions of the west. The Lower Southwest has some areas where reported stray numbers are high and kill rates are high. This part of the country, like Houston, Dallas, and Detroit, seems stuck back in the 1970s, with a large number of homeless animals roaming the streets. There have been sporadic efforts to improve save rates, as with Albuquerque’s cat project. Pima County, Arizona, has been making an effort. One bright spot is the Yavapai Humane Society, which has contracts in the Prescott, Arizona, area, and has reported 90%+ save rates for several years now. In general, though, Arizona and New Mexico do not seem like good places to be a homeless pet. It may be that a major intervention in low-cost spay neuter is needed in the area to get the stray problem under control. Animals in the Non-Continguous states of Hawaii and Alaska were in the news in 2015, and not in a good way. The Kauai Humane Society received heavy criticism of its practices and kill rate. In Alaska there are persistent reports of mistreatment of sled dogs. Working sled dogs get a lot of exercise, which can be a good thing, but it appears that they typically spend most of their non-working time chained outdoors or in small kennels. The Iditarod race is the focus of concern about cruelty to sled dogs, but the Iditarod happens only once per year and the year-round treatment of sled dogs deserves attention too. Conclusion Both the Middle Rockies and the West Coast get a B+. They are doing splendidly well, closing in on New England (and a lot more transparent than New England). I’m going to give the Upper Rockies a C, but it is possible that if we had more data it would reveal them to rank a little higher. The Lower Southwest unfortunately gets a D-, the lowest grade of any region in the United States. The Non-Continguous states get a D.

This post looks at how No Kill did in the central part of the United States in 2015. We can break the area down into four regions: Upper Midwest – Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota Lower Midwest – Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa Western Midwest – North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas South Central – Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana The Upper Midwest, consisting of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, has been doing very well at No Kill. All three of these states are destination states for dog transports. We have numerous No Kill communities in this region, many of them with very high save rates. No Kill success seems to correlate with cold temperatures, and we certainly have that in these states. In Minnesota we have Duluth and St. Paul as stand-outs. In Wisconsin, the communities of Brown County, Brookfield, and Dane County are noteworthy. Michigan has over a dozen public shelters serving over 20 communities that have a 90% or better live release rate. Michigan is also one of the small number of states that has a requirement that shelters report their statistics to the state. The state has all the statistics posted online, going back several years. There seems to be a correlation between states collecting shelter statistics and posting them online and how well the states rank at lifesaving. It may be that when shelters know they have to report and that anyone can read their reports at the click of a mouse, they do better. Detroit remains a problem, though. The Lower Midwest states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Iowa have historically had high kill rates, but we are seeing signs of progress. Kansas City Pet Project (KCPP) in Kansas City, Missouri, is proof that communities in this region can do a very good job of saving shelter pets. KCPP is a good example of an increasingly common trend, which is ordinary citizens forming a non-profit to bid on and take over animal control and sheltering. Terre Haute (Indiana), and Ames (Iowa), are additional bright spots in this region. No Kill efforts in Chicago have been ongoing for a long time and the city shelter has been making slow progress. Their main problem at the present time seems to be a high kill rate for pit-bull-type dogs. Ohio has an interesting scheme that could potentially be turned to good advantage for No Kill. State law provides that each county must have an appointed dog warden, who is responsible for dog licensing and control. The potential for this system is that in Ohio we know who is responsible for dog control, so efforts to make each dog warden’s operation No Kill would be easy to coordinate and standardize. The historical distinction in Ohio between dog sheltering and cat sheltering should also make it easier to set up return-to-field programs for community cats. The western area of the Midwest, consisting of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, is kind of a black hole for No Kill, in the sense that we just do not have much data on these states. I would expect the Dakotas to have relatively small stray populations due to their brutal weather. The region is sparsely populated, with all four states together having a human population of only about 6.5 million. The South Central region of the United States, consisting of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, is a very mixed bag. There is little data available on Oklahoma. In Arkansas, the progressive city of Fayetteville would seem to be a likely venue for No Kill, but the city shelter is not a model. A quick check of their Facebook page showed that they were closed on the MLK holiday, for example. Baton Rouge in Louisiana has been working on No Kill for several years, but is running at only about a 65% save rate. Texas is where the No Kill action is in the South Central region, but Texas, of all the states in the union, probably has the highest highs and the lowest lows. Austin, the progressive capital of the state, has had high save rates for five years now. Austin has a cooperative model for No Kill that is often cited as an example for other cities. Just north of Austin is Williamson County, which has also been No Kill for five years. San Antonio, about an hour’s drive southwest of Austin, has struggled up into the 80% range. Waco has made an impressive turnaround. But the dark side of things in Texas is very dark. There are consistent reports of high numbers of stray dogs in Houston and Dallas. Shelter intake numbers in Houston are mind-boggling, and the Dallas shelter is under intense pressure to make sweeps to take in (and kill) more stray dogs. As far as I can tell, no national organization has rallied to help the Dallas shelter in this crisis by transporting dogs out of the state. In most parts of the United States spay-neuter efforts that started back in the 1970s have resulted in the vast majority of owned pets being sterilized today. Houston and Dallas apparently never got that memo. They need intervention, and they need it badly. Conclusion The Upper Midwest gets a solid B. Without Detroit it would be a B+. The Lower Midwest gets a C. If there were more information about the Lower Midwest it might get a C+. There is not enough information available about the Western Midwest to even guess at a grade. The South Central region gets a D. The few bright spots in Texas, bright as they are, do not outweigh the serious problems in the rest of the region. If it were not for Austin, Williamson County, and San Antonio the South Central region would get an F.

This post looks at how No Kill did in the Southeast in 2015. We can break the area down into two regions: Upper Southeast – Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina Deep South – South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi The surprising thing about the southeast in 2015 was that the most inspiring stories came from the Deep South – an area that we have traditionally thought of as terrible for shelter animals. For many years the only real hope for homeless dogs in the Deep South was to be transported to northern shelters, and the only real hope for cats was to avoid being caught by animal control at all. Today, we have communities in the Deep South, including some large cities, that are on the cutting edge of new No Kill techniques. I had the privilege of visiting LifeLine Animal Project’s two open admission county shelters serving the city of Atlanta this past year. LifeLine took over the shelters in 2013, and both are now running at about an 85% live release rate. That’s up very sharply since they took over – a true reversal of what went before. They have all the problems of big-city shelters, including a high intake of pit bulls, and they have very little outside help. LifeLine is an example of what No Kill can do even with few resources. Jacksonville, Florida, is another phenomenal story. They have a great coalition of three partners working together in harmony – the city shelter, the Jacksonville Humane Society, and First Coast No More Homeless Pets. That’s very nice to see because there are so many other cities where egos get in the way of cooperation and people go around with a chip on their shoulder. Scott Trebatoski, who managed the city shelter in Jacksonville before being lured away to Hillsborough County, Florida (where the city of Tampa is located), has been making great strides in a place that was previously a death knell to No Kill attempts. The shelter there has been running at a save rate of over 80%. Another big story of 2015 was Miami, which is now reporting that it was over 90% for the year. Miami is getting a new shelter this year, which should help with even better lifesaving for the almost 30,000 dogs and cats they take in annually. There are success stories in smaller cities in the Deep South too. Gainesville, Florida, has been making steady progress. I don’t think Gainesville is quite to No Kill yet, but one bright spot is the Maddie’s Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where Dr. Julie Levy has been doing great research on TNR and RTF. Huntsville, Alabama (yes, Alabama!) has been running at over 90% lately. Southern Pines Animal Shelter in Mississippi is over 90% (they need donations to shore up their shelter building against a landslide emergency). Columbia, South Carolina, has already cut its kill rate by half, and wants to go the rest of the way to No Kill. A committee has proposed a promising plan, with the exception of mandatory spay-neuter for pit bulls. Hopefully that idea will not make it into the final plan. The upper Southeast did not have the kind of big headline No Kill stories last year that the Deep South had, but progress is being made. Virginia has more and more communities that are No Kill. Three of its communities are examples of the best in No Kill – Richmond, Lynchburg, and Charlottesville. Lynchburg is one of my favorite No Kill stories. The city’s median household income is below average for Virginia and for the United States as a whole, and yet the Lynchburg Humane Society has not only been No Kill for years now, it also opened a state-of-the-art new shelter in 2015. The city of Asheville, in North Carolina, seems to be ramping up to become a No Kill powerhouse. The Foothills Humane Society in Polk County, North Carolina, has reportedly been No Kill for some time now. West Virginia has made it onto the board with the Charleston shelter. Tennessee has a few towns that are doing well, as does Kentucky. But North Carolina, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky have few bright spots. It’s interesting to speculate on why the Deep South has all these cities that are making such fast progress toward No Kill. Whatever the reasons behind the groundswell of progress in the region, though, it’s a great thing to see. One possible problem for the future is that northern shelters may lose their supply of dogs transported from the south. That’s a good problem to have, because it means that northern shelters will be able to start reaching out to more dogs in need, perhaps from overseas. Conclusion I would give the Upper Southeast a D, with the Deep South getting a C-. I would love to give the deep South a higher grade to recognize the rapid progress that is being made, but the majority of shelters there have not joined the bandwagon – yet.

This is the first in a series of posts on the regions of the United States and how each one is doing at No Kill as we begin 2016. These posts are impressionistic to some extent, because we do not have very much hard data on shelter statistics. And there is lots of variation within each region. Even so, there are some things we can say about the different regions of the country. Today’s post is on the Northeast. For analyzing No Kill success, we can break the Northeast down into two regions: New England – Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island Mid-Atlantic – New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia New England New England overall is probably the most successful region of the country at No Kill. If the entire United States was like New England we would be very close to being a No Kill nation. New Hampshire is No Kill and has been for a while. The word is that Maine is No Kill and that seems likely to be true, although data for the state is not available. New England, as well as the northeast in general, is a destination region for transports. I don’t know how many animals are transported into the Northeast each year, but my guess would be 20,000 or more. If I were going to find a fault with New England (and, to some extent, with the entire Northeast region), it would be that many of the organizations there could do even better if they were more willing to be creative and transparent. I think this is, in large part, because of the way animal sheltering developed in the Northeast. In the years from 1866 to the end of the Progressive Era around 1920, the United States saw the first wave of formation of humane societies and SPCAs. Since the northeast part of the country was the most settled at that time, a lot of the animal-welfare organizations in that region today trace their roots back into the 1800s and early 1900s. Many of these organizations seemed to be shaped and constrained by the weight of their own history. The mere knowledge that they have been in existence for 100 years or more makes them conservative and unwilling to risk their legacies by breaking with tradition. And one tradition is not being transparent with the public. In a sense you cannot blame them, because there is much downside and not a lot of upside in posting statistics. Another reason they may not be very concerned with posting statistics is that they feel like they are doing quite well and there is no reason for the public to be concerned. There is a whiff of paternalism about some of these legacy organizations. But again, New England is doing extremely well, and if the only problem we have there is a little ossification in the legacy humane societies, we are in good shape. Why does New England do so well? The director of one humane society told me she thinks it is because people in New England have been pushing spay-neuter and owner responsibility for 40 years now, longer than other areas of the country, and they are reaping the rewards of all that work that went before. I think that analysis is probably correct, but I would add that in general people in New England tend to have more education than average and higher household income, which means they are less likely to have to give up a pet. They are also less likely to put up with cruel or incompetent shelter management. The climate and terrain may also play a part, since high shelter save rates seem to correlate with cold weather, snow, and rocky terrain. Mid-Atlantic The Mid-Atlantic region is a really mixed bag for No Kill, with many successful cities and counties and many that are not doing so well. Over all I would rate these states as better than average, but there is a lot of room for improvement. Some rural areas of New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, and some parts of New Jersey, present big problems. New York City, the District of Columbia, and Baltimore have all reported 80% or better live release rates, although Baltimore’s rate had not been sustained for a year as of the end of 2014. It is worth asking the question why these cities seem to be able to achieve 80%+ but then have trouble getting to 90% or above (although I would not be surprised if DC hit 90% in 2015). One possibility might be that in a large city you get a different population of shelter animals than you have in a small town. Another might be that in a city you will have a wide spectrum of household income and education levels, whereas many of the communities with 90%+ live release rates have a concentration of wealthy and educated residents. Another possibility is simply that with very large intake numbers it may be inefficient for one organization to have to do it all. Two large cities that are excellent examples of sustained live release rates over 90% — Jacksonville and Austin — both have large non-profit partners that pull a substantial percentage of the city shelter’s intake. And they both have organizations that do TNR/RTF for feral cats. One Mid-Atlantic state to watch in 2016 is Delaware. The state took over animal control as of the first of the year, and contracted out animal sheltering to a private organization, the Chester County SPCA. The Chester County SPCA seems to be thoroughly committed to No Kill, and I think it is very possible that the entire state of Delaware may finish 2016 with a live release rate of 90% or better. Conclusion Overall, I would give the Northeast region a B, with New England getting an A- and the Mid-Atlantic getting a C+. The region deserves a great deal of credit for the large numbers of animals it transports in.

UPDATE Jan. 6, 2016: The city council meeting set for January 12, 2016 to discuss the ABC letter has been cancelled. At this time the mayor and city council do not appear to have any further action scheduled on the ABC letter. The Feral Freedom program in Jacksonville, Florida, is one of the exceptional success stories of No Kill. Feral Freedom is an initiative of First Coast No More Homeless Pets (FCNMHP) in collaboration with the city shelter and with the support of Best Friends. It was an indispensable component in Jacksonville reaching No Kill two years ago. Feral Freedom developed a revolutionary approach to saving community cats that has done as much as any other initiative to reduce shelter killing of cats, not just in Jacksonville but as an inspiration to communities across the nation. Feral Freedom is not the only great thing about Jacksonville. I’ve been blogging about No Kill communities for five years now, and if I had to pick out one community to serve as an example of what is right with No Kill, it might very well be Jacksonville. Jacksonville is a large southern city, which is about the toughest venue for No Kill. It is not a progressive city like Austin or Charlottesville. It overcomes all its challenges by the organizations in the city, including the Animal Care & Protective Services Division (ACPSD), the Jacksonville Humane Society (JHS), and FCNMHP working together with terrific harmony. In Jacksonville, they can truthfully say “yes we can all just get along.” As Denise Deisler told me: “In Jacksonville among the partners, we have few boundaries . . . we are flying in formation towards the same goal.” The combined statistics for ACPSD and JHS for the year ending in September 2015 showed a live release rate, by the standard calculation, of 96%. That’s one of the highest live release rates that I’m aware of for any major city, ever. For a rate like that to be achieved in a non-progressive southern city is little short of a miracle. And the Jacksonville organizations do not just work in the city – they also reach out to help their neighboring jurisdictions get to No Kill too. But today this great success story is under imminent threat from outside. There is a strong effort being made to shut down the Feral Freedom program. This would not only cripple No Kill in Jacksonville, it is a threat to No Kill in every other city in the United States. I wrote a few days ago about the stunning success of the Million Cat Challenge, which has saved almost 400,000 shelter cats in the last two years. One of the core initiatives of the Million Cat Challenge is return-to-field, which was pioneered by Feral Freedom. The attack on Feral Freedom, if it succeeds, might set a precedent that would endanger the success of the Million Cat Challenge and the 300+ shelters enrolled in its program. It could also potentially endanger independent TNR programs throughout the United States. So what is this threat? It is a campaign by the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) to get the Jacksonville city council to end the city’s relationship with Feral Freedom. In a December 3, 2015, letter to the mayor and the council, the ABC argues that TNR does not control the number of feral cats, that feral cat colonies are a threat to public health, and that feral cats are an invasive species that “impose severe ecological damage” on wildlife. The ABC letter, which is four pages long including footnotes, has only one sentence on the issue of what it thinks should replace Feral Freedom. That sentence says: “The City would be better served by treating cats like dogs, actively and effectively removing these feral animals, and/or completely enclosing every feral cat colony.” The suggestion to enclose feral cat colonies is not a serious proposal, and is probably included only to make ABC’s preferred solution seem not quite so harsh. What ABC is really recommending is that: (1) the city should force all cat owners to keep their cats indoors or under control at all times under penalty of law, and (2) all feral cats should be captured and killed. This is the program that ABC is putting forward as better than Feral Freedom. Let’s take a moment to think about what would happen if the Jacksonville city council adopted the ABC proposal. First of all, they would probably be voted out of office at the next election, but in addition to that, the ABC program would be ineffective. As to trying to force people to keep cats indoors, we should know by now that draconian anti-pet provisions never work. Good policy today is to work with people as they are, not to try to force them to do things they don’t want to do. Instead of mandatory spay-neuter we offer low-cost and free spay-neuter and targeted outreach. Instead of breed bans, we look at the behavior of individual dogs. We have learned that criminalizing people’s pets just results in people going underground, and tuning out the official message. As to catching and killing all the feral cats in the city, I cannot understand why anyone would think that this is a better approach than Feral Freedom. Not only is it cruel, and not only would it sweep up lots of people’s pets, it wouldn’t even work. The great majority of the real estate in any city is private property, and the great majority of feral cat colonies are located on private property. The city has no right to come onto private property willy nilly and take people’s cats. Even if we were to assume that the city was able to enact some kind of draconian ordinance that allowed them to legally come onto private property and take cats, that would simply mean that people would hide the cats. In order for a catch-and-kill program to work, the city would have to catch at least 70% of the free-roaming cats in the city and then they would have to repeat this vast catch-and-kill program every couple of years. Good luck with that. And in the meantime, with TNR shut down, there would be no way to slow down cat reproduction. TNR has gained such wide acceptance not because it is a perfect method, but because it is the best of the methods that are actually possible to implement. We live in a complicated world, and simplistic solutions like “catch and kill all the cats” won’t work. The ABC is failing to consider the following factors: (1) the citizens will not support what ABC wants to do, (2) feral cat caregivers and humane advocates will work as hard as they can to thwart any mass killing plan that the city might adopt, (3) you can’t force people to keep their cats indoors if they don’t want to, unless you plan to hire a lot more police officers, and (4) a catch-and-kill program, unlike TNR, would not be staffed by volunteers or funded by donations – the burden would fall on the taxpayers, and it would be expensive. This is getting to be a long blog post and I have not even touched on the issue of whether the ABC’s arguments that cats are bad have any validity. There is an awful lot that could be said on that issue too, because the peer-reviewed literature on feral cats has so many yawning gaps that you cannot draw many conclusions from those studies one way or the other. For example, the “Smithsonian” study, which many bird conservationists cite as definitive proof of harm to wildlife from feral cats, admitted that no studies had been done on feral cat populations in the United States. The authors of the study then proceeded to guess what they thought the feral cat population might be. I can understand why someone might make a guess in the absence of data – but to recommend killing millions of animals, including people’s pets, on the basis of your guess – that’s chutzpah. I’d like to end this post by presenting some actual data – the statistics for what the Feral Freedom program has done in Jacksonville since it was founded. Unlike the ABC with its guesses and assumptions, the fall in cat intake at the city shelter is a fact. According to statistics going back to 2003, cat intake at the city shelter reached a high of around 13,000 per year in the years before Feral Freedom was founded in 2008. In fiscal year 2009-2010, the numbers began to fall. By fiscal year 2014-2015, cat intake at the city shelter was half what it was at its peak. During this time FCNMHP was taking in anywhere from 2000+ to 5000+ cats per year from the city shelter. Those cats were sterilized, which is why cat intake at the shelter fell. Community cat programs do work. Jacksonville mayor and city council – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Today, on the first day of the new year, it’s time to take a look at how No Kill is doing nationally. I can’t tell the story of every successful program in 2015 because there were far too many of them. There is one national campaign that stood out, though, because in sheer numbers it is on pace to rival some of the greatest No Kill accomplishments ever. Like Mike Arms’ Home 4 the Holidays event, which has racked up over 1.2 million adoptions since it started in 1999. And Petfinder, established by Betsy Banks Saul and Jared Saul in 1996, which is currently instrumental in some 1.5 million adoptions every year. The campaign that is rivalling those great accomplishments is the Million Cat Challenge.* The Million Cat Challenge was launched on December 10, 2014 by two well-known shelter veterinarians, Dr. Kate Hurley and Dr. Julie Levy. Both have been very involved in the development of the underlying programs that became part of the Challenge. When Kate and Julie presented their ideas for cat management at a plenary session at the 2013 HSUS Expo, the groundswell of positive reaction was so great that they were inspired to start the Challenge to capture that momentum. The Challenge is set to run for five years, from the beginning of 2014 to the end of 2018, and the goal is to save 1,000,000 cats who otherwise would be killed in shelters. The animal shelter organizations that have signed on to the Million Cat Challenge have been responsible for saving almost 400,000 lives in the program’s first two years.** The Challenge had a very good year in 2015, with over 265,000 lives saved by its member organizations and 180 new shelters enrolled. And the program is growing fast, so we can expect the next three years to be even bigger – perhaps exponentially bigger. That rate of lifesaving compares well with the early years of Home 4 the Holidays and the early days of Petfinder, and it puts the Million Cat Challenge in the ballpark with the most exceptional No Kill efforts thus far. The Million Cat Challenge has five key initiatives, but it is perhaps best known for its return-to-field (RTF) program for community cats. RTF was a key concept in Rick DuCharme’s Feral Freedom program in Jacksonville, where it first gained national attention. It has also been a part of Dr. Levy’s Operation Catnip at the University of Florida for many years and was used by other programs as well. RTF is often thought of as similar to trap-neuter-return (TNR) for feral cats, but it is a broader concept. The typical situation for TNR is where a feral cat caregiver traps some or all of the members of a feral cat colony and takes them to a clinic where they are given a health check, vaccinated, sterilized, and then returned to their colony. RTF, by contrast, can apply to cats who are brought to a shelter by animal control, or by an individual for any reason. The question is not whether a cat is feral or tame, but whether, after vaccinations and sterilization, it can safely be returned to where it was found. The RTF concept recognizes the unique nature of cats and how they live in communities. RTF gives the shelter an additional way of saving the lives of cats, to go along with TNR for feral cats and traditional adoption/transfer for tame cats. The Million Cat Challenge has other very important programs too, including managed admission, alternatives to admission, managing capacity, and removing barriers to adoption. One of the advantages of the Challenge is that the participants are free to adopt as few or as many of the key initiatives as they want. And the initiatives themselves are things that do not require a lot of skills or money. The way the Challenge works is that a shelter signs up and agrees to report its statistics in the first quarter of each year. The report has two parts. One part is actual statistics from the previous year. The second part of the report, the “challenge,” asks shelters to pledge the number of additional lives that will be saved in the current year. The calculation of the lives saved by the Challenge for any given year is the comparison of lives saved to the baseline year of 2012. The ticker of lives saved that is on the Challenge website shows the confirmed increases from previous years as well as the estimated numbers of additional, program-based saves for the current year. The breakout, paradigm-changing success of the Million Cat Challenge helped make 2015 a very good year for No Kill. Getting huge numbers of cats safely out of shelters is good for dogs, bunnies, and other homeless pets too, because it means that shelters have more time and space to work on getting their remaining animals adopted. And four of the Challenge’s five key initiatives can have application to all animals in the shelter, not just cats. With programs like the Challenge doing so well, we can confidently say that the state of No Kill as we start 2016 is good. *The Million Cat Challenge is a joint program of the UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program and Maddie’s Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Florida. **As of January 1, 2015 there were 143 shelters enrolled in the Challenge, with pledges to save 118,020 cats. As of December 28, 2015, there were 323 shelters enrolled, with actual saves for 2014 and pledged saves for 2015 totaling 384,784 cats.

During the last two weeks of the year I’m going to re-run my three-part series on the coming shelter dog shortage and the future of animal shelters. Those posts were by far the most popular this year, with many thousands of readers each. Rather than re-run them on the blog I will post them on Facebook. Please visit the blog’s Facebook page at: http://tinyurl.com/jam9kvm

One key to the new possibilities is Maggie Asbury, who was elected to the county Board of Supervisors recently. She is animal-friendly and is serious about helping the shelter to change. There are other people on the Board who may be interested as well, but cost is a limiting factor. One commissioner told Rhonda that he would like to see positive changes at the shelter, but he cannot support any increase in funding. The county is currently losing population and its economic situation is not good. On the one hand, the lack of any additional money from the county is a big handicap because the shelter is in an old, dysfunctional building and the current funding for the shelter was reported to Rhonda as being under $200,000 per year. That is an exceedingly small amount of money to operate a shelter that takes in over 2,000 animals per year. On the other hand, No Kill people are used to working around government funding restrictions by raising money in the private sector, so Rhonda is going to concentrate on showing the commissioners some ideas that can be implemented at no cost to the county. One of the most exciting developments in the last two weeks is that a No Kill consultant has offered to help. The consultant is going to make a presentation to county officials and find out if there is enough common ground for their team to be able to work with the county and make a difference. This would be a huge plus for Tazewell County if it proves to be feasible. Rhonda hopes to have her list of free resources available at the meeting as well. The meeting is being planned for later this month or early next month. Particularly important, and one thing that will be a high priority, is having low-cost spay-neuter programs as a centerpiece of efforts in Tazewell County. A few people have contacted Rhonda with some interesting ideas about how this could be done. She has also e-mailed with Matthew Gray of HSUS, the Virginia state representative, about the Pets For Life program, but is still trying to set up a time to speak to him. Another very exciting development is that local shelters in Virginia are making offers of help to pull animals from the county shelter. Rhonda has been contacted by the Richmond SPCA and by Debra Griggs of the Virginia Federation of Humane Societies. This would be huge, because one of Rhonda’s biggest problems in facilitating transports out of state are the associated costs. Transporting animals in state, to shelters that are well equipped to do their own quarantine, would be much cheaper as well as easier on the animals. Tazewell County has a large number of puppies that Rhonda has had difficulty in helping because of the expenses associated with puppies. Help from shelters within Virginia could save many of these puppies as well as the older dogs. A wild card in all this is that management at the shelter is in flux since the former shelter director retired. Rhonda is hopeful that new shelter management will embrace outside help and be enthusiastic about increasing the live release rate. Several other things have happened. One No Kill leader suggested to Rhonda that it would be worthwhile for her to start attending the HSUS Expo or Best Friends national conferences. She would love to attend both, but will have to see if finances will allow. In the meantime she will be able to attend the Virginia Federation conference next spring in Charlottesville.  She is continuing to work to place dogs that her rescue group, Tazewell ARC, has in their shelter. She also recently had a breakthrough in getting local teenagers interested in volunteering for the rescue. She sees young people as the key to changing attitudes about animals in the community. One thing that is becoming clear to Rhonda is that there is far more help available, at both the state and national level, to a public shelter than to a rescue. This is not surprising, since the organizations and grant agencies that support No Kill naturally see the public shelter as the most important piece of the puzzle in lifesaving. Rhonda is trying to maintain a balance between her focus on the shelter and her work with Tazewell ARC rescue. The photo above is a montage of over 100 dogs that Tazewell ARC has helped so far this year, and Rhonda hopes there will be many more in the future.

During the 12 years that she worked with J.P. Morgan she was also volunteering for animal welfare issues. For many years she was president of the board of a large private humane society and helped shepherd it through a rapid growth phase and the building of a new shelter. In 2009, when the Great Recession hit and the financial world was thrown into chaos, Teresa’s position with J.P. Morgan was one of the casualties. Rather than look around for another job in finance, Teresa decided to use the opportunity to do what she really wanted to do, which was help animals. She took a job as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at a local organization called Animal Haven. She was there for two years, during which time Animal Haven merged with a spay-neuter clinic and became the Great Plains SPCA. Then in 2011 Teresa’s career took yet another turn. The public shelter in Kansas City, which was run by the city through a contractor, was high-kill. Local animal welfare activists had worked for years to change that, and with their help the city shelter had increased its live release rate from 34% in 2006 to 68% in 2011. In early 2011, a scandal involving allegations of poor animal care by the contractor running the shelter led the city to terminate the contract. The city put out a request for bids for a new contractor, but it got no responses. This was a crisis for the future of Kansas City pets because it threatened the momentum for change at the shelter. A small group of No Kill advocates reacted by deciding to take matters into their own hands. With little lead time, the group filed incorporation papers for a new non-profit, the Kansas City Pet Project (KCPP), planning to bid on the contract to run the shelter themselves. Two of the four incorporators were Brent Toellner and Michelle Davis, who had been active in animal welfare issues in Kansas City for years. Today Brent is president of the corporation and Michelle is vice-president. The Articles of Incorporation of KCPP stated: “We are an open admission shelter focused on optimal lifesaving and creating a No Kill Community in the Kansas City Metro.” Early in November of 2011, after negotiations over financing, the city council approved KCPP’s bid on the shelter contract. The start date was January 1, 2012. The small group of people who had taken this audacious step had less than two months to prepare to run an open admission city shelter that at that time was taking in about 6,000 animals per year. KCPP hired Kim Staton as Executive Director and Teresa as COO. Teresa spent the month of December 2011 hiring people to work at the shelter. The city had run the shelter using a combination of animal control officers, employees of the previous contractor, and a handful of permanent employees. Animal control was moving to another building and the previous contract agreement with the city was expiring, so Teresa was able to hire a team of new people. She went for a non-traditional work force. In fact, the new hires were so non-traditional that Teresa was the only one who had ever actually worked in an animal shelter. Although the first day of the new contract was the New Years Day holiday, KCPP decided to have their grand opening that day as a symbol that it would not be business as usual with them. It was a huge success, with crowds of people visiting. Opening for most holidays is now a tradition for the shelter, which is open every day of the year except for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Then, to complicate things, Kim Staton left KCPP after four months on the job. Teresa became interim director and eventually was selected as the new Executive Director. It was a challenging transition period with an organization that was still getting its feet on the ground. As Teresa says: “I don’t think we really realized what we were in for.” They were spectacularly successful, though, reaching a 90% live release rate within six months of their start date. One of Teresa’s first priorities was to establish an offsite adoption venue. The city shelter was housed in a 40-year-old building near the landfill, behind two sports stadiums, in an area with no visibility to potential adopters. Teresa went big, finding a large, central space  in Zona Rosa, a high-end retail center that is across town from the shelter’s location. She found a donor who paid the first year’s lease. She negotiated with a local supplier to get the center outfitted. When all was said and done, she had a premier retail space to feature the shelter’s pets at a minimal cost. The Zona Rosa site recently had its 3-year anniversary, with over 5,000 adoptions to its credit. KCPP has also opened a second large offsite adoption venue in a Petco store. Teresa improved the main shelter building by making it less institutional and more welcoming. They got rid of the bulletproof glass in the lobby, and volunteers landscaped the property. Once inside the shelter, prospective adopters experience an open, dialogue-based approach to matching them with a compatible pet. Teresa wants to give people lots of reasons to come to the shelter, so they have adoption specials and fee-waived events. There has been discussion with the city about replacing the old shelter but nothing definitive has been done yet. KCPP’s contract is administered by Animal Control. There is no ordinance preventing cats from being free-roaming, but Animal Control will pick up stray or feral cats when they get a complaint. These nuisance complaints have caused some problems between the city and feral cat colony caregivers. KCPP is trying to work with Animal Control and the city to get them to embrace TNR, but in the meantime all the feral cats that Animal Control brings to the shelter have to be relocated. They never euthanize a cat for being feral. One of the most amazing things in the amazing story of KCPP is that they have been able to maintain a high live release rate even as their intake has climbed each year. Last year their intake was almost 9500 dogs and cats. In spite of having to place so many more animals, they have continued to have a 92-93% live release rate each year. The high intake means that Teresa and her team must concentrate on keeping animals moving. In addition to their adoption efforts they have two full-time foster coordinators and a rescue transport placement coordinator. Their total payroll is about 90 people, up from 20 on the day they started. When KCPP took over the city shelter they inherited a tiny veterinary clinic that, at about 400 square feet, did not have anywhere near the capacity needed for a large No Kill shelter. With financial assistance from Petco Foundation and the community, they opened a modern veterinary clinic on the shelter property a few weeks ago. This allows KCPP to treat the injured and ill animals brought in by Animal Control in-house rather than having to outsource veterinary care. The situation in Kansas City is similar to the situation in Atlanta in some respects. In each case a non-profit formed by No Kill advocates took over the city shelter and dramatically increased shelter lifesaving, without the benefit of the type of local coalition we have seen in cities like Austin, Jacksonville, and Richmond. In both Kansas City and Atlanta shelter managers are also dealing with badly outdated buildings in out-of-the-way locations. In Kansas City the shelter has had to deal with the additional problem of intake that has grown rapidly. Teresa enjoys the challenges and the fast pace of the work. The KCPP team’s motto is “solutions not excuses.” An example of this motto in action was their approach to saving parvo puppies before the new veterinary clinic was opened. They converted a narrow old locker room into a parvo ward and saved 90% of puppies with parvo. KCPP is now winding up its fourth full year of running the city shelter. Congratulations to Teresa and the entire KCPP team for taking a big risk and making an outstanding success of it.

Big dogs are a challenge for many animal shelters. In my conversations with shelter directors, whether the shelter is large or small, urban or rural, public or private, No Kill or still striving for No Kill, one thing I hear a lot is that large dogs are the toughest group to get out the door alive. Why is that? I hear several reasons. One is that people will more readily adopt what Rich Avanzino calls the “cutes and cuddlies.” A different way of saying this is that there is a disproportionate number of big dogs coming into shelters relative to the demand for them. Another issue with big dogs is that the stakes are a lot higher in temperament testing with a large dog than a tiny one. And finally, most pits and pit mixes (so called) are medium or large dogs, and there is still a lot of prejudice against blocky-headed, muscular, short-coated dogs. Several shelters that I’ve followed on the blog as they transitioned to No Kill seemed to hit a wall, or at least a slowdown, when they reached an 80-85% live release rate for dogs. In some cases this slowdown has resulted in local advocates becoming frustrated with the shelter, and the relationship between advocates and the shelter has deteriorated. Even shelters that are saving over 90% of dogs may be sharply criticized by local advocates due to the shelter’s performance in placing large dogs. Many times when a shelter makes a decision to euthanize a large dog, the deciding factor is temperament. The concern with large dogs is especially acute because of their ability to inflict more damage. In the old days 20 years ago or more, when shelters were saving only a small percentage of their animals, the temperament of shelter dogs was not a big issue because any dog with an even slightly questionable temperament was simply killed. As we have saved a higher and higher percentage of shelter dogs, the issue of temperament evaluation is looming ever larger. Any time you have a group of shelter directors together, one of the most popular topics of discussion will likely be how to decide if a dog is safe to adopt out. Dr. Emily Weiss is a behavior expert who has written extensively about dog temperament evaluation in the shelter environment. Dr. Weiss is associated with the SAFER test, which is, to say the least, not popular among many No Kill advocates. SAFER as it was originally developed was just intended to be one tool in assessments. A few days ago the ASPCA announced that it would no longer certify people for SAFER use. My impression in reading the announcement is that ASPCA officials are frustrated with people not using the assessment consistently in the way it was intended. Beyond the SAFER controversy, Dr. Weiss has written many thoughtful blog posts on issues of temperament testing for shelter dogs. She recently wrote a blog post that summed up the current state of behavior evaluations for shelter dogs. In the blog, titled “Taking Risks,” she notes that even among experts “there is little agreement as to where to draw the line” between a dog that is safe to adopt out and one that is not. As she says, the stakes in making these decisions are very high – err on one side and an adoptable dog loses its life. Err on the other side and a dog that is a danger to people or other animals is adopted out into the community. There is no easy answer to this dilemma, because dog behavior will never be straightforward to predict and because the circumstances that dogs face are so variable. The situation is not hopeless, though, and people continue to press forward with new ways to get at the problem. In Dr. Weiss’s most recent blog post she mentioned an experiment done at the county shelter in Fairfax County, Virginia, which gathered some very interesting data. The experiment was overseen by Kristen Auerbach, who is now at Austin. In this program, shelter dogs with issues including fear aggression, kennel stress, barrier reactivity, and resource guarding were placed in selected foster homes. The outcomes were great, with many of the dogs showing different behaviors outside of the shelter. Over 90% of these problem dogs were able to be adopted out successfully and safely. A similar program was in effect at the Austin city shelter when Auerbach arrived earlier this year, and she hopes to collect data from that program as well and to publicize it to a wider audience. Studies like this are important because they quantify what happens with dogs under standardized conditions. The data collected by Auerbach also has implications for the importance of properly designed shelter buildings. How much of the temperament problems we see in dogs is simply due to the unnatural conditions of the typical shelter? If the fearful and stressed dogs could be given their own, homelike quiet space within the shelter and if the barrier-reactive dogs could be housed without the type of barrier that causes the reaction, perhaps those problems could be successfully dealt with inside the shelter. And of course a good shelter design facilitates activities for dogs who need to burn off energy and gain social skills, as with Aimee Sadler’s Playing for Life program. No Kill is only a little more than 20 years old at this point, and we are still learning. The issue of safe placement of dogs who show problematic behavior in the shelter, particularly large dogs, is difficult, but a lot of talented people are working on the issue and progress is being made.

Out the Front Door is now on Twitter! Handle is @outthefrontdoor. The Twitter feed will have the blogs of course, but also No Kill news and events.

Is No Kill possible everywhere? I think the answer to that question is “yes.” That said, we have a problem that I have not seen discussed very much, and that problem is becoming more and more evident as No Kill sweeps the country. I’m talking about pet overpopulation. Now I know that saying “pet overpopulation” to some No Kill advocates is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, so let me explain. I do not think we have a nationwide pet overpopulation problem. If we could evenly spread out our homeless animals across the United States we would be able to find homes for all of them. The problem is that our homeless animals are not spread out evenly – in some places we have too many and in some places we have too few for the local adoption demand. In reporting on No Kill now for almost 5 years, my impression is that there are two things that most communities that get to No Kill have – a substrate and a trigger. The “substrate” is made up of all the conditions that exist in the community that will make No Kill easier to achieve. Those conditions may include a population that is more educated, wealthier, and more responsible than average. It may include terrain and climate that keeps down the number of strays. It may include the availability of a large veterinary school with a shelter medicine program. It may include a forward-thinking local government. It may include local non-profit animal welfare agencies. If I were going to use one word to describe a community that has a good substrate for No Kill, that word would be “progressive” – not in a political sense but in the sense of being forward-thinking and competent. The “trigger” for No Kill is a group of people who are able to use the substrate available in the community to increase shelter lifesaving. No Kill is not a one-person show. There is simply too much work involved for one person to do it alone, even in very small communities. But one person or a small group can provide the leadership that serves as the trigger. People who can serve as the trigger seem to be much more common in places that have a good substrate to start with. That is not surprising, because the talents needed to be a good trigger include what we see with very successful professionals, and that type of person is much more commonly found in progressive communities. Conversely, communities that are poor in resources tend to be poor in talent. And those poor communities have a poor record when it comes to No Kill. No Kill is not the first animal-welfare movement that poor communities have missed due to a lack of resources. In the 1970s we had a serious pet overpopulation problem nationwide. Back then it was common to see homeless animals in the street in most American communities. But around 1970 the humane movement embarked on a huge push for spay-neuter. Private veterinarians got on board and began recommending spay-neuter as a routine part of pet health care. Progressive communities embraced the spay-neuter message, and as the sterilization rate for owned pets soared in those communities the number of homeless animals in the street tanked. Some poor communities missed the boat, though, and those places continued to have large numbers of intact animals roaming the streets. In those communities today, the number of homeless animals on the street makes it look like 1970. From 1970 to 2000, as the number of homeless pets declined, shelter intake fell by about two-thirds even though the number of owned pets more than doubled during that time. It is hard to overstate how important the disappearance of stray animals from the environment, with the accompanying plunge in shelter intake, was for No Kill. It was this sharp fall in shelter intake and in the number of homeless animals in the environment that allowed No Kill to become possible. Shelters were able to have more “market share” because they were no longer competing for homes with the neighbor who had a litter of puppies, or the strays hanging out in the alley. But in some less progressive communities intake is still very high, and shelters in those communities face an insuperable task in trying to rehome all their animals locally. There are solutions. Transports will save dogs. Return-to-field will save community cats, both tame and feral. But the problem is that implementing transports and the new cat paradigms requires resources and leadership – the very things that are lacking in the communities that need them most. Our poorer, less educated communities do not have the conditions or the leadership for progressive shelter programs. They struggle to implement the new cat paradigms, struggle to be able to pay for transports, and struggle to find resources for low-cost spay-neuter outreach. So, what to do? That’s a big question facing No Kill going forward, and there do not seem to be any easy answers. I’m starting a new series on the blog, following the efforts of a few people in one small, poor county in the Appalachian hills of Virginia who are trying to get their community to No Kill. This community is particularly interesting because, while it has a few advantages, overall it has a great many disadvantages that stand in the way of the effort to build No Kill. As No Kill becomes the standard model for animal sheltering, communities like this will be our last great problem. The community I will be following is Tazewell County, Virginia. It is located in the far southwestern portion of the state, along the border with West Virginia. Its population in the 2010 census was just over 45,000 people, but the population is estimated to have fallen to around 43,500 since then. The county is typical of Appalachia in that it is mountainous with “hollows” that have been cut out by rivers and streams. Median household income in the county is $36,000, compared to $64,000 for the state of Virginia as a whole. One in four of the residents of the county did not graduate from high school. The county is isolated, with the nearest big cities some 3 hours away. Local news is mostly about car crashes, crime, and sports. The Tazewell County Animal Shelter is run by the county. It is in an old building located next to the landfill. The shelter lacks quarantine capability, and disease is reported to be common. In the 5 years from 2010 to 2014, the shelter’s live release rate according to the state reporting system ranged from 37% to 56%. Shelter intake in those same years has averaged almost 60 animals per 1,000 people, which is astronomical. In 2012 the sheriff’s department took over animal control and tried to round up all the stray dogs in an effort to “clean up” the county. They quickly realized that task was impossible. Cats in Tazewell County are considered free-roaming and are not picked up by animal control. So even though shelter intake is shockingly high, it does not represent the true number of homeless animals in the community. There are a few bright spots. Just in the last few months an animal-friendly person was elected to the county Board of Supervisors. The old shelter director retired not long ago, and the new director, while not a No Kill advocate, does not appear at this point to be hostile to efforts to help the shelter save more lives. A new shelter building is being planned, although it will not be fancy. There are no local ordinances that forbid trap-neuter-return (TNR) or require stray cats to be impounded. And there are some people in the county who have organized to try to improve things at the shelter. One group of about a dozen people, headed by local rescuer Rhonda Kay, formed an organization called Tazewell Animal Rescue Coalition, or Tazewell ARC, in 2013.  Rhonda is also trying to get another group, the Appalachian Dog Project, off the ground to help a wider area. In an interview I had with Rhonda yesterday we discussed what she is up against in trying to save the area’s homeless animals. Rhonda concentrates primarily on dogs, since they make up most of the shelter’s intake and most of the animals killed, and her group does not have the resources to take on large-scale TNR. She told me that on the short trip from her house to the local grocery store she will see several homeless dogs. Her group does not need to pull dogs from the shelter because they get as many animals as they can take in from people who have stray dogs on their property. Rhonda’s group is certified to do stray-hold in Virginia, so they are able to take in these animals directly and try to find their owners. They use social media, and with the small size of their community they are able to return a good portion of the dogs to their owners. But many have no homes. State statistics show a surprisingly high adoption rate for the Tazewell County shelter of about 14 dogs and cats per 1,000 people. Rhonda says this is because, although the shelter takes in animals only from Tazewell County, people come from out of the county to adopt. But even with this high rate of adoption per 1,000 people, the numbers coming into the shelter are so large that the euthanasia numbers are even higher. Rhonda says trying to increase adoptions locally is not a viable strategy because most households in the area already have as many dogs as they can care for. Rhonda believes that low-cost spay-neuter is the ultimate answer to the problem in Tazewell County. She is currently waiting to hear from the Virginia representative for HSUS, because she is eager to discuss the HSUS Pets For Life targeted spay-neuter program with him. She realizes, though, that spay-neuter is a long-term solution, and to save the dogs right now her group is trying to do transports. I say “trying” because Rhonda has experienced a great deal of difficulty in raising funds for the vetting and transport expenses that her group has to pay. In recent years states have imposed requirements that animals being transported have to have health certificates, and that means that the animals must have shots, be wormed, and pass a veterinary examination before transport. Receiving rescues may impose additional requirements on top of the state requirements, including that the animals be spayed or neutered and clear of heartworm before being shipped. Many states that receive a lot of transported animals have imposed quarantine restrictions, and rescues in those states have to spend their money building and maintaining quarantine facilities, leaving less money for things like spay-neuter and heartworm treatment of incoming animals. These various state requirements, some of which are good and some of which are probably excessive, have raised the costs and slowed the momentum of transports. Rhonda has faced problems both with finding receiving rescues and with raising money for transports, but she says raising money is the worst problem. If she had enough money, she could find receiving rescues for 50 dogs per month, rather than the smaller number she is able transport now. That 600 dogs per year would go a long way toward helping solve the problem for dogs in Tazewell County. The shelter killed 443 dogs in 2014. If Rhonda could transport 50 dogs per month she could save many of the shelter dogs and also a good number of the free-roaming homeless dogs that are not picked up by the shelter. I asked Rhonda what she had done to try to raise money, and her efforts amazed me. She reeled off a long list of businesses she had contacted, businesses she had tried to partner with for promotions, various sales efforts the group had tried, social media appeals of several types, direct appeals to local donors, and grant applications to national agencies. She has had little success with these efforts, and Tazewell ARC’s budget is less than $12,000 per year. Rhonda says that there are many homeless puppies in Tazewell County, but puppies are even more expensive than adults to transport. Puppies coming from the shelter may have been exposed to disease, and a litter of puppies breaking with parvo can quickly deplete Tazewell ARC’s resources. They have had this happen in the past and managed to save the puppies, but they are reluctant to focus on puppies while their financial resources are so uncertain. Rhonda’s group does not practice “open adoptions,” at least not to the extent that most No Kill groups do today. Some people might disagree with some of the policies of Tazewell ARC, but they have chosen their policies based on their assessment of local conditions. In addition to working on low-cost spay-neuter and transports, Rhonda is hoping that the new county supervisor who is animal-friendly will take an interest in the shelter and have some ideas for making progress. She has a meeting scheduled with the supervisor soon. If that looks promising Rhonda wants to start trying to build bridges with the new shelter management. I asked Rhonda if she felt that her group had adequate leadership in areas that require some technical skills, such as business planning, marketing, customer service, and fundraising, and she said “no.” She would love to have help in those areas, but has been unable to find local people who have those skills and are interested in improving things for homeless animals. I asked if she had contacted successful No Kill leaders and shelter directors for their suggestions, and she named several people whom she had attempted to contact. Most had not answered her e-mail queries, and of the few that had, none had any suggestions that she had not already tried. In the next weeks and months I hope to follow Rhonda’s continuing efforts to help the homeless animals in Tazewell County. She herself will tell you that her skills might not be as good as the skills of someone with a professional background in marketing, customer service, business management, or law. But right now all that the animals in Tazewell County have is her and her group, and a few other people with a couple of other groups. I was very impressed with what Rhonda has been doing. She works hard and is open to trying anything that might help. I could tell in interviewing her that it is discouraging to have so little success, but in spite of the difficulty of what she is trying to do she remains upbeat about the possibilities. I do not know how this story will turn out. Will Rhonda and her group be able to start making some headway? Will the new county supervisor turn out to be a key to change? Will the new shelter director make a difference? Will the HSUS Pets For Life program be able to help? Will Rhonda be able to raise money to expand the transport program? Will she find some people who can provide effective mentoring? Or will things stay the same, and will Rhonda’s group burn out as they keep finding doors closed? Will their kennel capacity fill up with dogs for whom they cannot find either transport or local adoption? Stay tuned. And if you think you can help, please contact Rhonda through Tazewell Arc.