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No More Homeless Pets Forum
January 20, 2003 Will We Ever Achieve No More Homeless Pets? |
Will we ever really achieve no more homeless pets? Merritt Clifton, editor of ANIMAL PEOPLE newspaper, shares insights on how far we've come and what we need to achieve in the future.
Introduction from Merritt Clifton:
The latest U.S. data shows that shelter killing is down to 4.4 million a year -- the lowest toll on record. Anyone who knows where we've been and how far toward no-kill we've come can see that the goal is attainable. Getting there is just a matter of learning to cope with the difficulties and follow the example of those communities that have been successful.Questions
Humane societies giving up animal control contracts
How do you gather data from shelters and AC?
Categorizing types of animals killed
How many animals must be fixed per 1,000 people?
Hoarders masquerading as "rescuers"
Does low-income contribute most to homeless pets?
Dealing with internal friction in groups
How do we get media coverage for our efforts?
Reaching out to minorities
Figures on how many kitten/puppy births are prevented
Do cats suffer in the wild?
Is the public apathetic about animals?
Are more shelters the answer?
Some general comments
Humane societies giving up animal control contracts
Question from Lynne in IL:
What are your thoughts concerning the new trend of animal welfare non-profits giving up their animal control contracts in regards to ending euthanasia? What role should each entity play to be most effective in ending euthanasia?Response from Merritt:
To begin at the real beginning here, we are not out to end "euthanasia." When properly used, the term "euthanasia" refers to killing an animal to relieve immediate, incurable suffering.What we are out to end is population control killing: killing animals who should never have been born, just because there are more of them than anyone can handle.
Getting the terms straight is an essential first step.
The term "euthanasia" was introduced to humane work as a euphemism for population control killing more than 35 years ago by the late Phyllis Wright, the longtime director of companion animal programs for the Humane Society of the United States, whose goal was to abolish the use of decompression chambers and gas chambers in favor of killing animals by lethal injection. She promoted the notion that the best a humane worker could do for animals was kill them with the least pain possible.
This was before high-volume, low-cost dog and cat sterilization was readily available anywhere, in an era when shelters killed five times as many dogs and cats as today, even though the U.S. pet population was half what it is today, and there were only half as many shelters.
In Phyllis Wright's time, describing lethal injection as "euthanasia," in contrast to decompression and gassing, did serve a legitimate humane purpose. It no longer does, and the use of "euthanasia" to describe population control killing should no longer be accepted.
The next order of business, after clearly distinguishing population control killing from euthanasia, is to get humane societies out of doing population control killing. In practice, this usually requires getting out of doing animal control work.
Since 1878, when the Women's Humane Society of Philadelphia became the first humane society to take a dog catching contract, humane societies have used donated labor and funds to provide the essential public service of animal control--and have been taken for granted.
Invariably, municipal governments slash animal control funding whenever they can, in the belief that the people who care most about animals will pick up the tab. They have usually been right, but that must stop.
Most humane societies that do animal control work actually do it at a loss when the full cost is tabulated, including the cost to their fundraising and adoption promotion potential when they cannot attract visitors because no one wants to visit a death camp--and that makes putting money into saving animals' lives and preventing births extremely difficult.
Humane work and animal control are parallel pursuits requiring similar skills and facilities, yet serving different functions.
Animal control solves animal-related problems for taxpayers and voters. Humane societies promote the betterment of humanity through encouraging kindness.
Public institutions answer to the political majority. Humane societies answer to the most concerned minority.
To introduce progress, humane societies must proceed beyond the level of service that the average taxpayer will fund. They must inspire pursuit of an ideal beyond the acceptable minimum.
As former San Francisco SPCA president Richard Avanzino realized at the outset of his drive to end population control killing in San Francisco, they cannot inspire the public with a positive vision for animal care if they are known chiefly as death row for dogs and cats.
That image keeps many kindly people away from humane societies. Instead, the public may feed homeless cats; abandon animals they can't keep to "give them a chance"; become animal collectors; and miss the word that their well-meant deeds may be inhumane, since they are afraid to open mailings from humane societies lest they see pictures of horror.
Separating humane work from animal control is unpopular with many animal control people because they do not want to bear alone the stigma of doing population control killing.
Even recognizing that humane societies are better able to promote adoptions, screen adopters, do humane education, provide low-cost neutering and vaccination, and raise funds for such purposes, animal control staff are often reluctant to accept a division of duties that allows humane societies to be soft and cuddly while they become even more closely identified with killing.
We must not allow anyone to juxtapose humane societies and animal control as good guys and bad guys. Rather, they are different kinds of agency, with different jobs to do.
Animal control provides animal policing; humane societies provide animal social services. Animal control often does the hardest, dirtiest, and most dangerous work. Humane societies should make it easier, by redeeming and placing healthy animals, and preventing animals from becoming abused or homeless in the first place.
Every time a humane society places an animal picked up by animal control, it owes animal control a thank-you. Every press release a humane society issues publicizing successful adoptions should point toward the cooperation of animal control. Every year when animal control presents a budget, the humane society should help rally support for the allocation.
As pet overpopulation subsides, humane societies won't need as many cages. Humane outposts or storefront adoption facilities will become more practical for humane societies to run than large central shelters, which may be turned over to animal control.
The net effect of separating animal control from humane work is good for humane societies because it allows them to focus on the work that only a humane society can do; it's good for animal control agencies because the separation obliges the community to pay the full cost of doing the job, just as they pay for police and fire protection; and it's good for the animals, because the net funding pool for both humane work and animal control tends to increase between twofold and tenfold within a few years after the separation is fully achieved.
How do you gather data from shelters and AC?
Question from Marie in CT:
What steps were taken to generate the numbers you quoted for the communities listed? We would like to gather data like this for our state.Response from Merritt:
We calculate, collect, and publish the numbers, but we usually do not collect the primary data.The primary data comes to us from a huge number of local humane societies and animal control agencies, state animal control and humane associations, local and regional news media, and often from individual activists--whoever, in short, reports current data to us.
Some of these sources are able to identify all the shelters taking animals from the public or finding them at large in a city, county, or state, and then manage to contact them all and gather the intake and exit information.
Others only gather some of the numbers, and leave it to us to fill in the gaps--which we do as time permits, focusing on the most important and indicative areas.
To do a meaningful survey of this nature, you need to collect the shelter killing data from every shelter in a city, county, or state that receives significant numbers of animals directly from the public. What the data measures is the effectiveness of the total universe of dog and cat rescue organizations serving the community; it does not evaluate any one component by itself.
Getting the data from just the humane society or just the animal control agency can significantly skew the findings. You must tally up the performances of all the players to accurately record the score of the game. Some may contribute less than others, but it is their combined achievement that counts.
Some states already have animal control associations, humane federations, or state agencies that routinely collect the data. Others do not. Your starting point for any survey of this kind must begin by asking around to find out what data may already be available.
We find that data of up to three years old is fairly reliable. Data from three to five years old tends to be on the high side. Data older than five years is useful only for comparison with newer data to evaluate progress.
Categorizing types of animals killed
Question from Cyndi:
I have been trying to work with our local shelters and animal controls. One of the most frustrating things I have run up against is compiling figures. I find that everyone has an agenda for how they calculate them. One of the local high-kill shelters doesn't include feral cat kills, or ones that are sick (and sick can be a URI). They only show their kill number as "adoptables" that were killed. They have huge support in the community and don't want to lose it. Another animal control officer shows her figures WAY up because she wants her own shelter in her own community and an assistant. How are we ever going to REALLY see the whole "correct" picture to know what we are up against?Response from Merritt:
There is only one way that I assess the data, and that is total dogs and cats killed, all reasons combined, all shelters (or major shelters, anyway) within the metropolitan area or state.How the shelters classify the animals, i.e. "adoptable" vs. "unadoptable," is of no concern to me whatsoever, as that kind of evaluation is easily distorted.
I don't give a d*mn. I don't want to know. I don't care, because it does not tell me anything at all worth knowing. All that stuff may have some diagnostic value for the shelter, in deciding what it needs to target to make progress, but it means nothing whatsoever relative to overall performance.
What matters is the bottom line: how many are you killing?
If you get past population control killing, then you can start saving the lives of the more difficult cases. The bottom line is still: how many are you killing?
If you are not yet past population control killing, then you need to move your rear end to get there.
If all you kill are feral cats or URI cases or pit bull terriers who have just eaten their third little kid, the onus is still on you to develop and implement a better response--whether it is a TNR program, a much better shelter health maintenance program, or a maximum security care-for-life program to handle the child-eating pit bulls.
The operating principle should be the same: first, eliminate unwanted litters. That is the easiest source of shelter animals to address.
After that, address each of the other sources in order of difficulty, saving the hardest for last, when you will have the most resources available to deal with it. Don't try to save the child-eating pit bulls before you prevent the unwanted litters. Fix the feral cats and prevent the URI cases, as a matter of prioritizing to help the most animals relative to available resources, but don't decide you are doing a fine and dandy job before you have a way to help even the hardest cases.
Child-eating pit bulls may be the very last category of animals on your priority list to help, because they are the hardest, requiring the most resources per animal to save, but they still are animals, can suffer, and warrant a place on the list for attention as soon as you can work your way down to it.
Meanwhile, far too many shelters are still preoccupied with finding a way to excuse incompetence and lack of creativity, instead of with working their way down the list, through the easy cases, to deal with the really hard ones.
The National Council on Pet Population Study just came out with a major half-*ssed, half-witted report saying, in effect, "It isn't shelters' fault that we kill so many animals, because the public brings a lot of animals to us for euthanasia."
This report was given big play in the in-house publications of the Humane Society of the U.S. and several other organizations representing old-guard traditional shelters--which should have flushed it.
The only reason that the NCPPS finding would make an iota of difference in comparing findings from one part of the country to another would be if people in one region happened to be more likely to take a pet to a shelter for euthanasia than people elsewhere--and if you check into that, you find that people in some of the states, counties, and cities with the very lowest rates of killing dogs and cats per 1,000 humans, e.g. Massachusetts and San Francisco, are indeed more likely to take pets to shelters for euthanasia, because they trust their shelters.
In part, they trust their shelters to tell them whether or not the animal can be saved, and to help them save an animal if the only obstacle is money, because they know their shelters are not making all sorts of excuses for bumping off every critter who hobbles in the door.
The communities with piss-poor records do not provide the kind of lifesaving service that makes people trust them to do humane euthanasia, when it is really necessary, and would still have high shelter killing rates even if you eliminated all the instances of pets being brought to them for euthanasia completely from the totals.
Any shelter director who trots out that NCPPS study in defense of his/her piss-poor record, in short, ought to be made an ex-shelter director faster than it takes to sterilize a dog or cat.
Please note one further point:
I am not concerned with who actually does the killing in terms of moral judgment. Shelter killing is a community issue, and the whole community deserves the guilt or the praise.
In terms of who can do what, a humane society has a lot more opportunity to raise private funding and save animals' lives than an animal control agency, but if the animal control agency is killing a large volume of animals, the humane societies in the community deserve a large share of the blame, even if they are 100% pure no-kill, because even though they have more freedom to do what needs to be done, obviously, they are not effective in reducing the toll.
I often find in such situations, actually, that the animal control agencies are faster to make changes and advance progress than the humane organizations.
There are two ways to evaluate what the total number of dogs and cats killed means:
1) Look for changes in the gross numbers. This is the bottom line.
2) Look for changes relative to human population. This is also very important, because in some cases you have gross numbers showing very little change, despite all kinds of innovative sterilization and adoption programs, and shelter people freaking out over their perceived failure.
Inevitably, in those cases I find that the human population of the service radius is growing so rapidly that even as the programs succeed, their results are masked by the increased size of the human population served.
How many animals must be fixed per 1,000 people
Question from Josie in VA:
Any data on how many animals must get FIXED per thousand per year to have that nice 10% per year decrease New Hampshire saw? We increased our spay/neuter numbers from 100 to 400 last year, and I can almost taste the decrease in euthanasia...but am I being overly optimistic?Response from Merritt:
You cannot determine the number of animals whom you need to fix on a per-1,000 basis without knowing how many have already been fixed.What you need to do is get to 70% sterilized, minimum, to see any significant results at all. You will not see anything happen until you get to 70%, but will see your shelter intake and killing rates fall like a rock from 70% on.
I cannot overstate the importance of 70%. (Ed. note: see Merritt's article: 70% Spay/Neuter Threshold)
Sterilizing and vaccinating 70% of the street dog or feral cat population in any given locale is the minimum standard for success, but there is no "gentleman's C" in grading this kind of test.
Reach 70% and the effort earns an "A" for All's well, because then the odds that animals will meet who are capable of infecting or reproducing with each other drop to the vanishing point.
Fall short of 70%, however, and a sterilization and vaccination project will get a big "F" for fecund animals, fearful people fleeing dog packs, feline feces in gardens and children's sandboxes, and frothing-at-the-mouth critics flinging allegations of fraud.
Impatient politicians will re-institute the high-volume killing campaigns that have failed to lastingly reduce street dog and feral cat populations, despite more than 1,000 years of effort in some parts of the world. Years may pass before sterilization and vaccination get another chance--which will not be a fair chance until and unless the resources needed to reach 70% are available.
To avoid becoming entangled in unfair tests, advocates of sterilizing and vaccinating street dogs and feral cats need to learn to promise only what they can deliver. For example, sterilizing a lesser percentage of the animals at risk somewhere will not bring any visible reduction in numbers. Instead, the dogs or cats who have not been sterilized will have less competition for food and cover, and will be able to raise larger litters.
If the carrying capacity of the habitat has already been reached, the larger litters may experience higher mortality, through predation, starvation, or disease, and sterilizing only 10% or 20% of the street dogs or feral cats per year might over time produce the sum of 70% sterilized. But humans typically consider street dogs and feral cats intolerably abundant long before their populations ever approach carrying capacity.
Animal aid societies often introduce sterilization and vaccination programs on a limited scale, of economic necessity. Yet acceding to economic reality must not be confused with economic prudence, because sterilizing and vaccinating 70% can be done most economically by getting to 70% within a single breeding cycle.
Further, the most effective demonstration a small and poor group can make of the value of sterilization and vaccination is to concentrate the effort on a particular building, block, or neighborhood, within which 70% can be realized. Scattering efforts beyond that range usually will have little or no demonstrative value, because the results will be almost invisible.
Where did the figure 70% come from?
The late Paradise Animal Welfare Society cofounder Bob Plumb, a retired physics professor, initially derived the 70% figure from the math models for animal population growth or reduction developed by Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa, 1170-1240. Fibonacci was studying agricultural productivity, but more than six centuries later his work also furnished the 70% vaccination target recognized by Louis Pasteur (and most subsequent public health authorities) as the minimum necessary to prevent an epidemic of almost any contagious disease.
Sterilization is in effect surgically "vaccinating" animals against reproduction. The goal is to reduce the vulnerability of the potential host population to the condition, by reducing the possibility of transmission to odds so slim that the condition cannot replicate itself more rapidly than it dies out.
Christine and Jeremy Townend in 1999 collected data from the Help In Suffering street dog sterilization program in Jaipur, India, showing sterilization of 64% of the local street dogs as the actual point at which the population began to drop. Recent data from the Animal Birth Control program in Hyderabad, India, indicated that the street dog population there began to drop when 68% were sterilized.
In the U.S., the numbers of dogs killed by animal shelters began falling fast after the percentage of owned pet dogs who were sterilized reached 67%, in the late 1980s.
The numbers of cats killed by U.S. animal shelters began a rapid drop after 1991, when the percentage of owned cats who were sterilized reached about 85%, as indicated by studies done by Andrew Rowan of Tufts University, Carter Luke of the Massachusetts SPCA, and Karen Johnson of the National Pet Alliance. At that time, 85% of the pet cat population equaled about 60% of the estimated total U.S. cat population, including ferals.
Since then, the advent of neuter/return to control feral cat numbers and increasing human acceptance of responsibility for outdoor cats has blurred the statistical distinction between pets and ferals. Of the estimated 73 million "pet" cats in the U.S. now, 10 to 15 million may in truth be fed ferals, who a decade ago would not have been considered "owned."
The rapidly falling shelter intake of cats and the fast-rising volume of cats being sterilized--twice the rate of pet cat population growth during the past 10 years--indicate, however, that the feral cat population today is probably no more than half what it was in 1991.
An easy demonstration of the need to vaccinate and sterilize 70% of a street dog and/or feral cat population can be done with dice.
Throwing a pair of dice gives you 19 possible number combinations adding up to 11 possible totals. Designate the combinations adding up to 2-7 and 12 as "immune" or "sterile" (68%) and the rest as "vulnerable" to either disease or pregnancy.
Explain to your audience that you are now going to show them how far rabies can spread and how large the street dog and/or feral cat population can grow if 70% of the dogs are vaccinated. Ask for 10 volunteers to pretend to be 10 of the community's dogs and/or cats, to act out the demonstration as a skit.
Throw the dice 10 times, once for each person, to represent any random group of 10 dogs or cats who may be attacked by a rabid animal or may become pregnant.
If the dice show 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 12, the "dog" or "cat" is sterilized and vaccinated. She will neither get rabies nor become pregnant. Have those volunteers step back.
If the dice show 8, 9, 10, or 11, the "dog" or "cat" has a litter, gets rabies, and can spread it.
Each time you get 8, 9, 10, or 11, ask for another volunteer to step forward from the audience, to represent the surviving offspring from the litter who may also breed and/or get rabies, and throw the dice again. Continue until all of your volunteers have stepped back.
Results will vary, but almost always you will end "dog" and "cat" reproduction and halt the "rabies outbreak" within fewer than 10 throws after your initial 10-- which at the normal rate of street dog or feral cat mortality would be the replacement population level.
To check the results, you can decrease the numbers of "immune" combinations.
The importance of reaching 70% should soon manifest itself.
Dice. Don't leave home on a humane education mission without them.
Hoarders masquerading as rescuers
Question from Peg in MO:
I attended a meeting where this question was asked of the group: "How many of you think that there is little difference, or a very fine line between collector/hoarder and rescue?" Hands of the animal control people raised. Is this the common perception? If so, how do you change this perception?Response from Merritt:
1. Quit allowing hoarders to masquerade as rescuers.2. Quit allowing people to recite unchallenged the stereotype of the hoarder being a rescuer who just got in over his or her head.
The "hoarding" expert most often quoted by news media is Gary Patronek, of the Tufts University Center for Animals & Public Policy, whose work reaffirms the stereotype that animal hoarders are mainly older women living alone who "rescue" animals. Patronek uses a definition of "hoarder" which virtually excludes about three fourths of all the people who exhibit hoarding behavior--especially those who initially had an economic motive for obtaining the animals.
What we did in 1998 was more-or-less the opposite: I looked at cases of hoarding behavior first. Only then did I try to define who hoarders are.
We also crunched the numbers on more cases (688 involving 661 perpetrators) than all the other people who have looked at hoarding combined.
Here are the key numbers re: age and gender:
We found that females were the alleged perpetrators of 450 incidents (59%), and males of 338 (41%). Responsibility was shared between genders in exactly 100 cases (15%). Nearly two-thirds of the alleged perpetrators did live alone.
Lifestyles of alleged animal hoarders:
| F | Norm | M | Norm | |
| Living alone | 62% | 14% | 58% | 10% |
| With spouse | 15% | 52% | 25% | 56% |
| With relatives | 24% | 28% | 17% | 25% |
The ANIMAL PEOPLE data also found that male hoarders are almost twice as likely as women to get into trouble for hoarding animals early in life.
Ages of alleged animal hoarders:
| Age | Female | Male |
| Under 30 | 8% | 15% |
| 30 to 39 | 12% | 14% |
| 40 to 49 | 27% | 27% |
| 50 to 59 | 26% | 16% |
| 60 to 69 | 15% | 15% |
| 70 and up | 16% | 12% |
But the different pretexts that alleged hoarders have for keeping animals must be considered.
ANIMAL PEOPLE found that among 158 alleged hoarders (24%) who were identified as either pet breeders or former breeders, 55% were female.
Among 156 alleged hoarders (also 24%) who claimed to be animal rescuers, 77% were female.
By contrast, gender was evenly divided among 24 alleged hoarders who owned pet stores (4%). While among 125 alleged hoarders (19%), who claimed to be farmers, 65% were male.
Of the 307 alleged hoarders who kept animals for an economic pretext, 173 (55%) were male.
Since about 80% of all farmers are male, females might still appear disproportionately likely to hoard.
But the differing age skews by gender are also suggestive of the earlier average male age of death, especially among single people and depressive personalities.
It may be that fewer men are caught hoarding animals after age 50 only because fewer of those who might do so are still alive.
One might also speculate that women are better animal caretakers at most ages, tending to falter later, perhaps coinciding with the onset of physical and emotional stresses that afflict men sooner.
Finally, many female farmer/hoarders were either widows or daughters of deceased or incapacitated male farmers. Some defended themselves against allegations of neglect by asserting that they did their best, but were unable to keep up with heavy chores.
In short, there is a gender tilt, but the tilt seems to be explained by cultural factors (longevity and occupation), rather than by any inherent predisposition of hoarders to be female.
As to reasons why people have large numbers of animals to neglect, 76% were NOT rescuers, even by their own warped self-definitions.
Does low-income contribute most to homeless pets?
Question from Celeste in OR:
I've heard lots of quips about there being a great need to address the fact that those in the lowest income bracket contribute most to animal homelessness and euthanasia for the following 6 reasons:1. being especially transitory (giving up pets when they move)
2. having more pets than average
3. having a higher percentage of intact pets than average
4. bringing their pets in at older ages to be altered
5. giving up the highest percentage of their pets, or their pet's offspring, for the community to absorb or put down
6. not having the resources to address behavior/health problems, usually caused by their pets' intact status
Response from Merritt:
True. Very poor people also tend to leave their own children behind a lot with relatives or friends, as they struggle desperately to find secure jobs and housing. This tendency is getting worse now that government agencies are hell bent on kicking single mothers of low employable skills off of welfare, on the theory that they ought to be working, whether or not they are capable of earning enough money to support their children--or their pets.Also part of the mix is the terror of illegal aliens who flee in the middle of the night to evade deportation, often leaving a dog or cat behind because there is no way to take the animal along on the run.
I saw this happening first-hand more than 25 years ago in the Oakland inner city and the San Jose barrio. No one did much about it then and no one is doing anything much about it now. Parents and pet keepers who are trying to be responsible by going where the work is, under circumstances that are heavily stacked against them, are berated as "irresponsible" because they cannot relocate conveniently as intact families. They need help, and animal rescue groups could provide important help by fostering and otherwise assisting their animals, who often fill many needs in the families of transient low-income workers, including--all too often--serving as the emergency baby-sitters.
ANIMAL PEOPLE surveyed pet keepers, veterinarians, and humane societies in 1994, with sponsorship from the Spay/USA division of the North Shore Animal League America, to assess the validity of these beliefs.
We found that low-cost sterilization is clearly reaching a noteworthy percentage of animals who would not otherwise be sterilized.
Low-income people made up nearly half of the clientele of the low-cost sterilization programs then operating--and sterilized their animals at twice the rate one would expect from their numbers as a percentage of the general population when low-cost sterilization was available.
The value of low-cost sterilization was further evident from their pet ownership patterns, below. The columns headed "Pets" state the average number of each kind of animal kept. "Fixed" states the percentage who had been sterilized.
By way of further establishing the norms for sterilization, additional columns cite the findings of the 1992 MSPCA survey and a 1992 survey of residents of the Santa Clara Valley, in California, done for the National Pet Alliance.
| ANIMAL | PET OWNERS | LOW COST | MSPCA | NPA | ||||
| Pets | Fixed | Pets | Fixed | Pets | Fixed | Pets | Fixed | |
| Male Dogs | .56 | 66% | .58 | 45% | ||||
| Female Dogs | .70 | 73% | .54 | 62% | ||||
| ALL Dogs | 1.26 | 70% | 1.12 | 54% | 1.20 | 73% | ||
| Male Cats | .85 | 87% | 1.08 | 71% | ||||
| Female Cats | .79 | 80% | 1.24 | 65% | ||||
| ALL Cats | 1.64 | 86% | 2.32 | 68% | 1.60 | 87% | 1.20 | 86% |
The ANIMAL PEOPLE general population sample base reported almost exactly the same rate of sterilization as the MSPCA and the National Pet Alliance found. This was encouraging, since the ANIMAL PEOPLE sampling areas were picked to be representative of the whole U.S., whereas both greater Boston and the Santa Clara Valley were and are well above the U.S. norms in affluence and level of education, and therefore have been generally believed to have higher rates of sterilization.
It is possible, however, that the questionnaire sampling method we used tended to exclude response from the people least likely to neuter animals--the poorest and least educated.
The need for sterilization among low-cost clients was also obvious in the numbers. While low-cost clients were evidently aware of the need to sterilize pets, the percentage of their animals who actually were sterilized fell at least 11% below the national norms in every category.
The percentage of unneutered female cats owned by low-cost clients was of special concern, and should still be, given the extreme fecundity of felines and the high shelter-killing rate for homeless cats.
Note that low-cost clients owned 21% more male cats than the national norm; 36% more female cats; and 29% more cats overall. The greater rate of cat ownership may have directly reflected the lower level of sterilization.
We found that while low-income areas do produce the most animals found running at large by animal control, as practically any animal control officer will confirm, they do not produce unusually high numbers of animals surrendered to shelters by their caretakers.
Senior citizens were markedly less likely to drop animals off at shelters, adopt animals from shelters, and seek veterinary care of any kind, at any price. Since the lower involvement of senior citizens was consistent, not peculiar to sterilization, we surmised that senior citizens simply keep fewer pets--a consequence of fixed incomes, apartment living, the anti-pet rules at many retirement communities, and anxiety over the fate of the animals after the owner's death.
Afro-Americans both dropped off and adopted disproportionately few animals at shelters even though the number of Afro-Americans who used low-cost neutering indicated that they do not keep fewer pets.
ANIMAL PEOPLE explored the reasons for Afro-American under-involvement with shelters in our January/February 1993 issue, concluding that the most important is the lack of effort by many humane societies to attract Afro-Americans.
As anticipated, Afro-Americans were also under-represented among veterinary clients. The explanation here, however, would appear to be strictly economic, as Afro-American patronage of low-cost sterilization rose to the percentage of Afro-Americans in the general public.
Apparently, the will and desire to combat pet overpopulation are present among Afro-Americans as much as among any other group, even when the means to do so are restricted by low income and the lack of inner city veterinary clinics.
Hispanic Americans were under-involved with animal shelters, both dropping off and adopting somewhat fewer animals than their population would indicate, but were not significantly under-represented among veterinary patrons, either at full or discount prices.
Indeed, there was a hint that Hispanic Americans might be slightly more inclined than Caucasians to pay full price for veterinary care. This may suggest a greater latent concern for animal well-being among Hispanic people than is generally recognized by Caucasian activists, who tend to notice bullfighting, cockfighting, fiestas including ritual torment of animals, and charro rodeo, while overlooking the semi-vegetarian nature of Mexican cookery (albeit vegetarian perhaps mainly for economic reasons), the virtual non-participation of Hispanics in hunting and trapping, and the high regard for cats evident in many Hispanic communities.
Lower income people were more than twice as likely to abandon animals at shelters than middle or upper income people, and expectedly made up nearly half of the low-cost neutering clientele, but were not significantly under-represented among either adopters or patrons of veterinary clinics in general. The numbers clearly illustrated that lower income people both need access to discount neutering and make use of it when it is available.
There was a hint in the relatively high proportion of males who dropped animals off at shelters, together with the slight over-representation of Caucasians, that Caucasian males may account for a disproportionate share of excess pet breeding.
Thus it may be that Caucasian males, who also account for 97% of the licensed hunters and trappers in the U.S., are a key group to target for humane education. However, addressing female family members might be far more productive. Note that nearly three out of four people who adopt animals from shelters are women, and that women also seek veterinary care twice as often as men. This may not necessarily mean that men care less about pets; it may simply reflect the traditional female role as the family caregiver. A 1992 Massachusetts SPCA survey of 500 households in the Boston area found that "Female pet owners appear to be twice as likely as male pet owners to influence the spay/neuter decision for their pets (74% vs. 38%). This is especially true for cats (77% vs. 38%) and for all pets in low-income households (84% vs. 25%)." [The percentages overlap.]
We surveyed this too, and found that price resistance to veterinary procedures kicked in at virtually the same level among people in all income brackets. Poor people, in general, would pay the same prices as anyone else to help a pet, if they had the money, while many more affluent people would put off a non-essential veterinary procedure if the cost exceeded the equivalent, in 2003 dollars, of $100.
Dealing with internal friction in groups
Ed: Several people wrote with questions on how to deal with internal friction within humane groups and coalitions. Merritt shared with us his experience and thoughts:
Response from Merritt:
About five years ago, a relatively young, very dynamic, very successful humane society had a really nasty internal split underway. Some of the warring factions asked me to umpire a meeting that looked to me like setting the scene for a bloodbath.Ain't no way I was going to get caught in the crossfire. I could have ended up deaf with my eyes scratched out in about the first five minutes.
Instead of attending, I hijacked their e-mail list and sent all of them the following essay.
To my surprise, and theirs, instead of killing each other (plus anyone who got in the way), they actually used it as a blueprint to work out their differences. Nobody resigned, no one was fired, the friction was resolved, and the organization is bigger, stronger, and more effective than ever.
The founders and dominant personalities are under the illusion that I must be some kind of expert genius at human relations--whereas, my major accomplishment in that regard is usually to attract all the bricks that people had intended to throw at others.
The ladies themselves were the facilitators, communicators, and peacemakers. All I did is change the prism through which they viewed the situation, so that the lighting and the reflections were different, and among them they had the grace to do the rest.
Rather than dispel their illusion, though, I keep sending this mini-essay out to people in similar situations, all over the world, and keep hearing back from some of the most unlikely places that it has helped.
So--
Ego: I'm for it
One thing I always hear when investigating any kind of internal conflict within an organization is that someone claims the problem is someone else letting "ego" get in the way of the mission.
Typically voiced in discussions about how to resolve the conflicts within organizations is the admonition that "We should not let ego stand in the way of..." whatever the speaker recommends should be done.
That always pours gasoline on the embers.
Ego is a vital facet of human nature. It is ALWAYS going to be involved in leadership, in decision-making, and in feelings of being ignored, excluded, unfairly treated, etc., by dissident minorities--and ego cannot be successfully denigrated or invalidated.
When a person in a leadership role argues against "ego" in the activities of subordinates, it comes across as, "Your feelings don't count."
That makes the subordinates unnecessarily resentful.
When a person in a subordinate role claims a leader's ego is the problem, what is really being said is, "That person doesn't listen to me."
When board members conflict over "ego," at issue is plain old-fashioned chimpanzee dominance: who gets to mark the territory.
The very word "ego" is usually used as a weapon, the idea being that the person accused of bringing it to the table is somehow automatically wrong.
That's backward. "Ego" becomes an issue when people feel that personal investments of time, money, and emotional commitment are insufficiently appreciated, and when those feelings exist, addressing them effectively is paramount--much like feeding the cats and dogs when the cats and dogs are hungry. You either have to feed the cats and dogs, or they raise hell until you do.
My own feeling is that the word "ego" and sanctimonious speeches about "ego" should be left at home, while real issues involving ego should be brought to the table and dealt with in a respectful manner.
Usually, the only real problem is a misunderstanding--but denigrating talk about "ego" makes it worse instead of better.
There is nothing wrong with having an ego, meaning a sense of self: reinforcing a positive sense of self, as regards kindness toward animals, is why all of us are in humane work in the first place. "Compassion" is just a short word for all the ideas embraced in "a positive sense of self, as regards kindness toward animals."
Also worth a word of caution: many people bring to their interactions in humane work a set of social skills and responses learned in the home--and, too often, in a dysfunctional home--instead of those learned in the workplace.
That is a perennial problem, because a humane society, even if all-volunteer, is not a home-and-family, but rather an especially difficult kind of workplace, much like a hospital, where part of the job necessarily involves sharing the emotions and skills that most people use most of the time in home situations.
If you find yourself in a conflict involving humane work, it always pays to ask yourself, "Am I responding to this as a home issue, or as a work issue?" If you catch yourself responding to it as a home issue, you may have unintentionally made a mistake, albeit probably with the best of intentions.
Recognizing and accommodating our own animal nature
Some observations about gender politics may also be worth considering. Organizational psychologists have been aware for about 10-15 years now that the dynamics within organizations consisting mainly of men and organizations consisting mainly of women are extremely and sometimes dangerously different.
The key difference is that within organizations consisting mainly of men, conflict is externalized, ritualized, and generally worked out without doing harm to the organizational structure. Everyone knows where everyone else stands, what the conflicts are, and who the dominant apes are.
Dissidents figuratively get their heads beaten in, and are fired or pushed into resigning, but there does not tend to be much confusion about goal, tactics, and purpose.
There also are relatively few hard feelings among losers within internal debates, because of the extent of externalization and ritualization. Conflicts tend to be handled as "playing field" matters, not as war, and there is an ethic of sportsmanship (usually) that calls for winners refraining from gloating, while saying encouraging words to losers.
Within organizations consisting mainly of women, there tends to be less formal hierarchy and more emphasis on communal decision-making ("consensus"), with more concern about maintaining internal harmony.
This strategy works well within families, but can be catastrophic within organizations, where 1) some people do in fact have more knowledge and experience than others, and also must be legally responsible for the actions of others, and 2) real conflicts of perspective tend to be temporarily subordinated to maintaining the superficial appearance of unity until people of dissident outlook feel so repressed and ignored that they explode.
Then, typically, they step outside the rules of procedure, with staff and volunteers lobbying the board, department managers not trusting the executive director and/or board with information, etc.
The outcome is not "playing field" conflict, where issues are resolved within set rules and losers are comforted, but rather out-and-out war, where anything goes, stealth tactics predominate, and losers are left for dead.
Primatologists explain the gender difference in handling organizational conflict by pointing out that male animals of all sorts continually dispute over status, and have evolved all sorts of mechanisms to keep such disputes from becoming mutually self-destructive. Conflict, to males, is viscerally perceived as a game.
Female animals, on the other hand, engage in conflict primarily to protect themselves and their young. If they have to fight, it's life-and-death.
In institutional conflict situations within male-dominated organizations, the questions we always have to pose (and ask ourselves) are:
A. Is this fight over an issue, or just over status (ego)? And
B. Is someone exacerbating the situation with inappropriate chest thumping?
Often the resolution is found by re-externalizing the conflict. I once saw a very bad internal conflict within an organization resolved when the leaders of the warring factions got into a video game against each other during a break. Company softball games and golf tournaments often serve much the same purpose, by giving men an opportunity to separate personal issues from the workplace.
Within female-dominated organizations, the questions to ask are:
A. Has someone been ignored or slighted? And
B. Are the tactics in use here really appropriate to the nature of the conflict?
Usually, "B" really means, "Did I treat so-and-so unfairly by going behind her back?", and "A" really means, "Did the person who went behind my back do so because she felt her concerns had been ignored?"
There can be a lot of very bitter feelings under such circumstances, and the last thing the people involved may want to do is meet quietly and privately to get on a better footing. Yet often that is what is most necessary.
Humane work is a female-dominated field, and is correspondingly perennially struggling with the female-associated set of problems, compounded by the fact that in this field we really are dealing on a daily basis with life-and-death matters--albeit not matters, in terms of deciding which individual animals should be euthanized, that are appropriately taken to higher levels on a case-by-case basis.
There is not any escaping the problems, but if there is adequate will to achieve resolution, asking the necessary questions can help start the process.
How do we get media coverage for our efforts?
Question from a member:
We send press releases to our local newspapers, radio and TV stations, but rarely does the media pick up on the news. What are reporters and other media reps looking for when reading these releases; why do they cover some and not others and what's the secret to getting regular coverage?Response from Merritt:
This question could have many different specific answers.For example, you might do better to target specific individuals or news beats, instead of all media in general.
You may have a weak sense of what news is. This is very common among people outside the news media, who tend to confuse announcements with news value, and tend to avoid involvement in controversy.
If you want news coverage, don't be afraid to stand up and raise hell for what you believe in.
Possibly you write like your a*s chews gum, i.e. awkwardly and with great difficulty. We get some press releases here that are so thick with banal truisms, meaningless jargon, and rhetorical phrases cribbed from elsewhere that we can't even tell what we are supposed to be excited by.
Writing a good press release is not half as hard as giving pills to a cat. You too can do it!
Before I get into writing tips, however, begin with our "Media Relations for Animal Shelters" tip sheet, the first item below.
After that I will append a quick writing lesson that I gave to literally thousands of people, 1971-1992, many of whom had never written before but many of whom went on to write books now on the shelves of any big bookstore.
Most writing teachers make writing excessively mysterious and difficult. Actually, writing is merely the process of organizing thoughts. Almost anyone with anything to say can learn to say it well, without a fraction of the pain that a fractious cat who needs a pill is likely to give you.
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MEDIA RELATIONS FOR ANIMAL SHELTERS
1. Don't wait for the media to come to you. If you do, they usually won't come until someone has complained about a problem, which puts you on the defensive.
2. Get to know your local media. Find out who edits each of the newspapers and broadcast news programs in your area. Find out who covers the "Lifestyles," "Children," city, crime, and wildlife beats, as well as who writes the "pets" column, if the paper has one. Make sure all of these people get letters of introduction, welcoming them and explaining what your shelter does, followed by copies of all your newsletters and announcements.
Be aware that journalists usually have short tenures. Four to five years with a publication is often the maximum. Read the papers! Every time someone new appears on a beat that might overlap humane work, send a letter of introduction, which should always include an invitation to come by for a visit, any time.
Contact media with relevant background information any time a topic comes up that involves animals. Don't assume they're automatically going to think of you as a resource when, for instance, they're dealing with a child abuse case or a civic budget crisis, even though you may have reams of info they need.
3. Always have a media kit ready to mail, fax, or deliver in person to anyone who needs it. Include, in this order:
Contact information (and don't forget to offer a number for 24-hour-a-day crisis response
Vital statistics on your shelter together with the national norms in important area (dogs vs. cats, adoptions vs. euthanasias, budget relative to population served)
Succinct explanations of variances from the norms (e.g., "We have a high euthanasia rate because we are in an animal control shelter in a rabies area where there is no effective low-cost neutering program.")
Succinct statements of realistic short-term and long-term objectives ("We seek to lower our killing volume by doing thus-and-such.")
Succinct statements of short-term and long-term needs in order to achieve stated objectives (in terms of both income and/or legislation)
Summary of your most recent financial statement, including salaries of best-paid staffers. Allegations of high killing rates and self-aggrandizement are the two most frequent complaints from groups and individuals that engage in shelter bashing. If you put the essential info right out in front of the media, they won't be inclined to listen to people who claim you're hiding it for a nefarious reason.
If you don't have a fax machine, buy one. It will pay for itself in improved media relations alone within just a couple of months.
4. Hold at least one media event per month.
This can be a special announcement, an announcement of a major bust, an initiation of a campaign, a fund raising event, a response to a public issue, or a seasonal activity. Whatever it is, it's a reason to bring media into your shelter, introduce yourself and your organization, and get some positive publicity.
Avoid scheduling media events in conflict with elections and other big newsmakers. You'll get the maximum return for your effort on the slowest news days.
Make press conferences brief, prompt, and to the point. Always have adoptable animals present for photo opportunities.
Share the spotlight. Invite representatives of your local veterinary associations, animal rights groups, breed fanciers associations, et al, to joint you at media events involving their interests, and to say a few words. Always point out that, "While we aren't necessarily always in agreement with our friends at such-and-such group, we're working together on this aspect of this issue, and we'd like to welcome their perspective." This way, you avoid getting a reputation as a mere media freak, you build goodwill with the interest groups that could otherwise become problematic to you, and you establish coalitions that can help all of you get more things done.
5. Send a fresh packet of about five photos of adoptable animals to your local newspapers every week. Include one-sentence descriptions of the animals in each photo. If the papers need a filler (and a cute animal shot to balance ghastly headlines is always welcome), your photos will be handy, and every photo that runs is an adoption virtually assured. And, don't underestimate the cumulative effect of the photos in educating media about pet overpopulation.
6. In all communications with the media, remember that reporters always want to know Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How in that order. Don't try to give the background before covering the essentials (but if there is important background, always say "There is further background to this situation, which is important to your understanding, and I'll get to it in a minute.")
7. Respond immediately to media inquiries. Media people live on deadline. If they can't get your side of the story right away, they may opt to do without it. If you really can't respond right away, have someone else on your staff call and try to answer the necessary factual questions as best he or she can, with the promise that you'll call within a specified amount of time and with further clarification. (Do not, however, put someone else in the position of having to address policy matters or give opinions that will be construed as those of your organization.)
8. Acknowledge problems. Most people, including reporters, have sympathy for those who face up to difficulties and try to work through them. Those who practice denial, on the other hand, are generally suspected of deliberate wrongdoing.
9. Acknowledge discomfort. If you're uncomfortable talking to a reporter, say so. Reporters understand stress because journalism is among the most high-stress occupations. It's ok to be rattled when everything is going to hell in a handbasket. Explain that you're a lot better trained to handle animals than human crises, and that you are trying to do your best despite your feelings of awkwardness. Most reporters will respond positively.
Hard questioning does not mean the reporter is hostile to your position. Rather it means the reporter is doing his/her job.
10. Never lie to a reporter. You will always get caught, and you'll lose more credibility in five minutes than you've built up in five years when it happens.
You'll come out looking better with the simple admission, "I goofed," than with a string of circumlocutions, excuses, and evasions. The next question in such a situation is always, "Why?" Then you can give your explanations, and then the reporter will be listening, whereas previous to your admission of a goof, the question is not why it happened but rather what happened.
Don't ask to speak off the record with a reporter who doesn't know you. This may be construed as an attempted evasion of responsibility for what you're saying.
If you must speak off the record, give the reporter a means of verifying whatever you're explaining. Otherwise, you come across as attempting to influence a story with unverifiable hearsay, eroding your credibility as a source.
Remember that reporters have to protect sources, too. Your need to protect a source in a sensitive situation will usually be understood.
11. Don't hold grudges against the media.
Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity, and never ascribe to stupidity what can be ascribed to ignorance or miscommunication. If you think a reporter blew a big story involving you, invite the reporter to visit for some intensive backgrounding. The humane beat is a low priority with most papers, so you'll often be dealing with rookie reporters who just don't have enough background either in what you do or in reporting to make seasoned judgments about a lot of the information they receive. Most reporters will appreciate a friendly response to an apparently unfriendly story. Very few really have an axe to grind.
Never telephone a reporter with a complaint. Write it down. When journalists err, it is usually because of the pressure to become an instant expert on something complex in just a few hours before deadline. Telephone calls in response to yesterday's story interrupt gathering information on today's story, and are rarely appreciated. (And, bearing in mind deadline pressure, don't assume that the reporter who screams an obscenity in response to your hostile call really means it. Try a more friendly approach after a cooling off period.)
Write letters to the editor in response to anything that you feel deserves response, whether or not it involves your shelter directly. Keep your letters brief and factual.
Never threaten to sue a journalist if you're not really willing and able to follow through. And even then, don't do it. Most publishers will fire a journalist rather than defend against a lawsuit, even if the journalist is absolutely in the right, because journalists are more cheaply hired (and fired) than lawyers. Thus, when you threaten to sue, you're directly threatening the journalist's livelihood. The journalistic grapevine is swift and influential. If you go after one journalist's job, every other journalist in your community is going to know about it almost instantly. Unless you have one hell of a good case against someone who's known to colleagues as a sleazeoid, you will never again be trusted no matter how long you live and no matter what you do to cultivate good media relations.
Don't blame one reporter for something another one wrote or broadcast, even if it was for the same newspaper or TV station. Once again, journalist tenures are short. Chances are, the reporter you're talking to today doesn't have a clue what went down last month or last year--and it may be that no one else there does either.
Don't blame a reporter for quoting you accurately when you say something idiotic. People often don't say clearly what they mean to say or think they said. In a situation where you come across as an idiot, explain that your explanation of thus-and-such may have been garbled at one end or the other, and go on to clarify the matter, without accusing anyone of bias or underhandedness. Remember, the reporter probably never had a clue what you meant to say, and therefore took whatever you did say at face value, not realizing that something wasn't clear or complete.
There are bad reporters. There are three categories of bad reporters: "squirrels," young and inexperienced, who spend all their time chasing after nuts; airheads, usually TV or "Lifestyle" reporters, who want no more than a superficial take on any given topic; and would-be muckrakes who never let the facts get in the way of a good story, having decided in advance what the story is. If you feel a bad reporter has victimized you, and your attempts to straighten the situation out with the reporter have only verified your suspicion, contact a good reporter, who will usually be sympathetic, and try and try again.
Bear in mind, though, that many reporters are bad reporters before they become good reporters. It takes experience to cut through all the mendacity and fluff a reporter runs into, and to build the background necessary to understanding of any and all stories. You're usually better off helping a reporter than writing him or her off because of one bad encounter.
12. Always say "thanks" for good publicity, and neutral publicity, and especially for fair coverage of difficult situations. D*mned near nobody ever says thanks for a story. Even fewer subjects of stories ever say thank you for stories that balance the negative with the positive. If you can do that, you can bet your gracious response will be remembered for years to come.
13. If a reporter wants to corroborate your information, or needs background on a humane issue that you don't have handy, have him or her call ANIMAL PEOPLE. We're journalists too. Almost every day we help reporters with mass media make heads or tails of humane issues by providing context. Because we can talk reporter-to-reporter, and because copies of ANIMAL PEOPLE already go to every major newspaper and TV station in the U.S. and Canada, we have credibility on many issues that advocacy groups might not have. Where misunderstanding may become a problem, we might be able to help you out of a jam. Keep our numbers handy.
The two steps in writing anything for publication are:
1. PUT ALL OF YOUR IDEAS AND INFORMATION INTO WRITTEN WORDS FIRST.
This part is like going to the lumber yard to buy your materials, except that you don't draw up your plans for a piece of writing [usually] until you see what materials are available to do the job with.
2. REWRITE. This is essentially a process of reorganization for the purpose of accurately transferring the material from your own perceptions to those of your reader--i.e., making sure that your reader will see what you already have seen. Here is where the actual construction begins.
I will outline some further basics below.
1. ALL writing is about the reader, NEVER about the writer. What you see, think, feel, etc., does not matter, EXCEPT to the extent that you can induce the reader to share your perceptions, or at least respond to them with enough interest to keep reading.
1a) Contrary to what most people start out believing, style is an affectation. An effective style is not noticed. The reader instead accepts what one writes as his or her own thoughts.
2. Young baseball pitchers are taught to always throw to a target. It is the same with writing. Visualize your reader, and the means by which you will reach the reader.
3. Engrave this sequence into your memory to the point that you write in this format as automatically as you breathe: Who, What, Where, When, Why, How – in that order.
Every paragraph (and often every sentence) should contain that information. Without it, the reader will quickly be lost. Even in fiction and poetry, most writing follows the format.
This is how I learned it. I auditioned for a job as a cub reporter on my 15th birthday, competing against a lot of older people, some with previous newspaper experience. The editor assigned us to go out and bring him back a nine-inch business feature. I was the first one back, and the first to complete my write-up. The editor gave it a glance, balled it up, and bounced it off my forehead. His speech went something like this:
"Who-what-where-when-why-and-how, you dumb @#$%! That's how you write journalism. This is what it means:
"Who gives a @#$%?
"What does it matter to me?
"Where is my share of it?
"When do I get it?
"Why do I not have it yet?
"How do I get my share?
"That's what the @#%&$%$ on the street is thinking. Give him his answers and you might survive in the noosepaper racket."
I rewrote, knowing the editor was right, told the editor to stuff it up his a*s (which probably helped to get his attention--it is not standard procedure for job applicants), left, and found my article on page one of the newspaper the next day.
Obviously, I was hired. I have never forgotten the editor's speech, because it put the tools in my hands to do everything worth a damn that I've done ever since.
That editor continued to shout at me that way for the next two years. I shouted back at least as obscenely, and when he finally fired me I got a job with a bigger paper in about 10 minutes flat.
4. Every word of every sentence must lean forward, making the reader want to find out what happens next.
5. Action first. Then scene. NEVER try to set the scene before starting the drama.
5a) The most important sentence of any piece of writing is the first one, so make sure the first sentence grabs and holds reader interest.
Practice writing first sentences, remembering "Who. What. Where. When. Why. How."
I do this reflexively and habitually. If I am standing in a line somewhere, there is a good chance that if my mind is not otherwise occupied, I am imagining how I would write about whoever and whatever I see (usually, I must admit, in a satirical way.)
6. Presentation counts. Use correct punctuation and complete sentences. There are a few other things, relevant to doing particular kinds of writing, e.g. poems, short stories, etc., but the above is really the gist of it, and the rest is just "finish" carpentry.
Reaching out to minorities
Question from a member:
You mentioned in your previous post that we have not reached out enough to minorities to join in the animal welfare issues. I agree that this is something that we have fallen very short on and wonder what can we do about the failure to connect with these communities?Response from Merritt:
We've looked into this quite a bit here at ANIMAL PEOPLE.During our early years we published a cover feature on the substantial but under-recognized black humane tradition in January 1993; some polling of organization executives in 1992; our 1994 study of who uses low-cost sterilization programs; and extensive coverage of several discrimination cases involving animal advocacy groups.
More recently we have tried to integrate our coverage pertaining to minorities into other aspects of coverage, on the theory that if the coverage is segregated, the mostly un-self-aware segregationists among our readership will tend to overlook it, whereas if it is mixed into discussions of other issues, maybe they will get the message.
In my view, there is no lack of concern about animals among the black, Hispanic, and Native American communities; second-generation Asian immigrants seem just as generally aware and concerned as Caucasians, too, especially Indians from India, who sometimes are more concerned about animals right from the day they arrive.
There is also no shortage of well-qualified people from identifiable ethnic minorities to step into open jobs with animal protection groups, both in sheltering and in advocacy.
Yet very few of these well qualified minority people are being hired, and because few are hired, few feel encouraged to apply.
Improving minority outreach requires two things:
1. Walking into minority communities to talk with the people--and listen to them, too. There are a lot of people in minority neighborhoods who have a hell of a time finding a veterinarian, since the nearest vet is often 10 miles away; or getting help from animal control when the free-roaming dogs may be gang members' pit bull terriers. There are also some of the bravest and most dedicated cat-ladies who you will ever meet, and some gang members who tip their hats to them.
Show up to help animals, and you may get a hostile and suspicious reception from people who think you are there to round them up and kill them, but once it is understood who you really are and what you are really doing, you will find a very warm and cooperative response.
Certainly ANIMAL PEOPLE publisher Kim Bartlett did, directing our inner city cat rescue project in Bridgeport in 1991-1992, when Bridgeport had the highest murder rate per capita of any city in the United States. She was a white lady with a Southern accent, who was welcomed with literally open arms and--unasked--generous donations to help with our work.
2. Hiring minority staff, including in leadership positions, so that everyone who looks at a humane organization feels welcome.
Some observers have suggested that qualified minority people avoid applying for jobs in humane work because the salaries and benefits are lower than are available in comparable government service.
That is a total non-factor, so far as I have been able to determine in talking with qualified minority people who might seek positions in humane work but do not.
The nonprofit animal protection sector pays competitively enough. The major reason why minority members do not apply is that they feel they will not be hired, and they feel they will not be hired because they look around and see no one else who looks like them who has ever been hired.
There is a strong perception among many of the minority people I've talked to about this that they are not welcome in a sector which is predominantly Caucasian and always has been.
Frankly, I think they are right. Even some of the animal advocacy and animal care organizations with strong minority hiring records as a percentage of the workforce have poor records at advancing minorities into key strategic positions.
There is also a lot of just plain stupid insensitivity within humane organizations that heightens the minority perception. One example that has fried me for years was the time a major regional humane society with a good minority hiring record honored a black high school student for her volunteer service--and right next to her photo ran a headline over an article about a twice-abused cat, "Spooks is mistreated again." I knew the people responsible fairly well, and had known one of them for more than 20 years. None of them were racists. Unfortunately, none of them ever stopped for a second to realize that at a glance their newsletter came out looking as if it was amplifying a racist slur. When I showed it to other white people, none of them saw immediately what I was talking about, but when I showed it to black people they just about fell over backward.
There is also a lot of quite deliberate racism within some humane organizations, which comes out in choices of neighborhoods to hit with mailings, schools to do classroom presentations in, and, most of all, in whether or not to approve families to adopt animals.
I'm most directly familiar with the latter. I've had any number of veteran humane workers proudly outline to me the strategies they use to deny animals to minority applicants, after which I point out to them that they are out of their @#$%ing minds.
One of the major reasons that the North Shore Animal League America leads the universe in dog and cat adoptions from a single location is that it is minority-friendly--and has been for decades--while other major sheltering organizations in the greater New York area were not. So black and Hispanic families would sometimes drive for hours to go to North Shore instead of somewhere closer.
Does North Shore have more failed adoptions than other places? Most certainly not; they have one of the very best success rates.
On the opposite coast, the San Francisco SPCA has had the same positive experience, with particularly conspicuous success in placing animals with Amerasian families. Elsewhere, shelter people are afraid that Asian people who might adopt Fluffy or Fido would eat the critter.
Well, figure it out: nobody gets an animal fixed, vaccinated, and licensed just for the pot.
The real bottom line, however, in my very cynical opinion, is the bottom line. The people running animal protection groups, except for the handful at places that know better, like North Shore, the SF/SPCA, and Michigan Humane, wrongly have in mind that identifiable ethnic minorities are not a big donor group. They can see mountains of data showing that identifiable ethnic minorities are very generous donors to other causes, and still not realize that they will support humane work too if included in the strategy. Instead, the identifiable ethnic minorities are not only not targeted but are actually redlined out.
Much else said and done within humane organizations which resembles racism if viewed from outside is actually sheer misanthropy: many animal advocates just plain do not like people, period.
Even people who start out with a generally positive outlook toward humanity can eventually be pushed into misanthropy by the insensitive conduct of many people who either don't know any better than to be destructive and cruel, or don't care about the consequences of their actions, or--worst of all--are destructive and cruel on purpose.
However, as misanthropic attitudes emerge, people tend to exempt the handful of others who are most like them and closest to them. This, for most humane workers, means exempting the still mostly lily-white inner circle of fellow humane workers.
Everyone else becomes perceived as "the great unwashed," or "the barbarians at the gates."
When members of the public with whom the humane organization interacts happen to be of a different color or otherwise visibly different, generalized misanthropy can easily come across as specific racism, even if it really is not.
The number of self-aware racists involved in humane work could probably be stuffed into a telephone booth--but the number of misanthropes might fill a couple of major league stadiums.
But this raises a further question: what difference does it make to those on the outside?
Whether one is hated for being of African or Asian or Hispanic ancestry, or just for being human, one can still feel the resentment as one walks down the aisle of one of those stadiums and looks for a seat. And one must question, at that point, whether one really wants to be inside the stadium.
No humane organization can afford to have misanthropes doing any job that involves dealing with the public: not in reception, not answering calls, not making house visits, not doing humane education, not doing adoptions, not doing fundraising, not even flea-dipping dogs at a public event.
You need to have people-people welcoming the public, with warmth and encouragement. Accomplish that, and accomplishing better minority outreach should be relatively easy.
Figures on how many kitten/puppy births are prevented
Question from a Member:
I always see these figures about how many unwanted kittens/puppies are prevented for each cat/dog spayed. The figures seem incredibly high. Can you tell me if there is a good estimate to use or how to find one?Response from Merritt:
That figure cannot accurately be expressed as a fixed unit--which frustrates the hell out of people who want to quantify their long-term accomplishments beginning with sterilization #1.In actuality, dog and cat fecundity does not begin to fall until after you have sterilized approximately 70% of the population at risk, and the whole dynamic thereafter follows the same model as vaccination.
Until you have reached a 70% sterilization rate, your "kittens prevented" or "puppies prevented" total is zero, because up to that point, all you are really doing by suppressing reproduction in one cat or dog is increasing the availability of food and cover (or adoptive homes) to others, so that larger litters will be born and more kittens or puppies from each litter will survive.
I already discussed the importance of getting to 70% before, in responding to question a previous question, but will hit it again because it absolutely must be understood.
If you really think about what sterilization amounts to, it is in effect "vaccinating" animals against reproduction. Even though the procedure is surgical rather than immunologic (with current technology), the premise is the same: that by reducing the vulnerability of the potential host population to the condition, one can reduce the possibility of communication of the condition of one vulnerable animal to another to a point so low that the condition fails to replicate itself.
When this occurred to me some years ago, I began looking for dog and cat sterilization data to compare to the vaccination threshold for disease control, set at 70% as a convenient benchmark by WHO and the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (although the actual disease control threshold may vary slightly from place to place and illness to illness), and found that the U.S. data did in fact point to the same threshold. After that, I began writing about it, and others confirmed it, including in places like India, where the conditions are very different from here.
There is quite a lot of U.S. data that points toward the 70% threshold, the best of which pertains to the U.S. as a whole. Here, the numbers of dogs killed by animal control agencies have been rapidly falling for about 30 years, with the drop consistently beginning in each region as the percentage of owned dogs whose fertility was controlled reached 67%. (The U.S. in modern times has never had large numbers of street dogs, but 30 years ago it was common for owned dogs to roam at large. This is now relatively rare.)
The numbers of cats killed by U.S. animal control agencies has fallen rapidly for about 15 years, beginning when the percentage of owned indoor cats who were sterilized reached about 85%. About 3/4 of the U.S. cat population are owned pets; 25% are feral. Currently there are about 73 million owned pet cats in the U.S., and a breeding population of about 26 million feral cats (i.e., bearing litters in one year--not all existing at one time. The peak actually alive at the same time is about 20 million.)
(The U.S. owned cat population is up by about 15 million over the past 15 years. The breeding-age feral cat population is now down by about as much. You will see a lot of older data still posted to web sites by people who are unaware of the changes. The growth of the owned cat population parallels the growth in the total number of human households. The decline in the feral cat population relative to the human population growth is particularly noteworthy, because more human homes would otherwise mean more habitat for feral cats, who survive on the rodents attracted to human habitation.)
At 70% sterilization, you begin to cut significantly into the ability of cats (or street dogs) to fill the vacated habitat niches themselves. Other animals begin to claim those niches, and then elimination of the problematic portion of the dog/cat population comes rather rapidly--although you may instead have a lot more seagulls, monkeys, street pigs, etc., depending on where you are.
The most important thing to know is that the whole process of animal birth control works a lot more like paying off a mortgage than anything else people are familiar with. First, they have to pay off the interest. Then the principle falls relatively quickly.
Do cats suffer in the wild?
Question from Member:
Our county has a higher euthanasia rate than other surrounding poor counties because we have a fairly large, active shelter that does accept cats. I believe some surrounding counties have large numbers of uncounted animals suffering in the wild.Response from Merritt:
Are they really suffering?This commonly made claim is simply not sustainable as regards genuinely feral cats, any more than it would be sustainable as regards raccoons, rabbits, skunks, squirrels, or any other kind of wildlife.
ANIMAL PEOPLE during the fall, winter, and spring of 1991-1992 studied the state of feral cat health by taking 320 cats we trapped in northern Fairfield County, Connecticut, to Arnold Brown, DVM, of Trumbull, for sterilization, vaccination, and other veterinary care as indicated.
Nineteen cats, including 10 kittens, died or were euthanized due to life-threatening disability and/or illness. This category included eight of the 11 cats who developed serious respiratory infections with related eye damage; one of the five cats who arrived with a missing or severely injured eye; all four cats who had serious urinary tract blockage; and all three distemper cases.
The cumulative mortality of 19/320 over seven months, including kitten mortality, was just about the same as was indicated by then-recent studies of the owned pet cat population.
Although the cat rescue project took place amid a raccoon rabies epidemic, no rabid cats were encountered, nor any cases of either feline leukemia (FeLV) or feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV).
Ten cats, all believed to have been abandoned pets, arrived suffering from severe malnutrition. Nine of them survived and were adopted. We adopted one of them, who is still with us today.
In total, only 43 of the 320 cats exhibited significant health problems. This also compared well with the then-current data on the owned cat population.
Critical to understand is that feral cats live and die like any other wild animals.
When a wild animal becomes sick or injured, the animal quickly becomes dinner for another animal.
The major predators of feral cats include both red and grey foxes, golden and bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, fishers, great horned owls, and most of all, coyotes.
A 1998 study by the late Martha Grinder (died 7/14/99) and Paul Krausman, of the University of Arizona, Tucson, found that feral cats were among the main prey of urban coyotes, and a 1999 study by Kevin Crooks and Lee McClenaghan, of San Diego State University, affirmed the Grinder/Krausman work by discovering cat remains in 21% of the coyote scats they found in canyons near San Diego.
Coyotes kill cats the same way they kill rabbits: from ambush, with a swift scissors-bite to the spine. Usually the cat never knows what happened. No animal control officer could catch and dispatch a cat with as much speed and as little stress.
Is the public apathetic about animals?
Ed.: We received a number of questions on this topic and included several, in italics.What is the best way to penetrate the apathy that most communities have with regard to homeless animals?
This question starts out with a presumption that is absolutely dead wrong, and is demonstrably dead wrong in almost every community.
Nationwide, one household in 10 feeds feral cats. Does one in 10 participate in any other form of direct personal charity on a regular basis?
Not a chance.
Nationwide, one household in four donates money to animal protection organizations. Only religion has as broad a financial basis. Several other branches of charity get much larger average contributions, but animal protection is in the top 10.
Nationwide, there are more than 11,000 incorporated animal welfare charities, about half of them helping homeless dogs and cats.
Are there anywhere near that many institutions helping homeless people? Or abused women and children?
Again, not a chance.
There are certainly areas that are underserved by humane organizations, but not because of apathy.
In fact, the whole homeless animal problem exists because people do care. This was the great insight that enabled Richard Avanzino to transform San Francisco into the first U.S. no-kill city: he realized that people dump pets they can no longer keep for whatever reason, not because they do not care, but rather because they do care, and know that conventional shelters will only kill the animals instead of finding them homes.
Enough people at large do care, meanwhile, what every major survey of pet acquisition ever done, beginning with the 1981 Las Vegas study by Richard Nasser--the first of the genre--has confirmed: that more than 25% of all the cats in homes were adopted as strays found at large, along with a varying but nonetheless significant share of the dogs.
More than 10 million households in the U.S. include at least one cat or dog who was adopted as a stray.
That is NOT apathy. That is caring, and if you are not capable of tapping into it, you do not belong in the public contact end of humane work.
It is definitely an out-of-sight/out-of-mind phenomenon - that coupled with the self-gratification that rules the lives of most people nowadays.
Bunk.
IRS data shows that the percentage of taxpayers qualifying for deductions for charitable giving rose from 25.8% in 1995, then an all-time high, to 29.1% in 2000 (the most recent tax year for which the data is available.)
The average gross taxpayer contribution rose from $2,455 to $3,556.
The total pool of donated funding rose from $75 billion to $133 billion.
That does not look much like a preoccupation with self-gratification to me.
Very few people seem to place a value the lives of animals.
More complete rot.
The American Animal Hospital Association 2001-2002 annual survey of pet keepers found that 91% take their animals for regular checkups and vaccinations; 85% have had their animals sterilized; 83% feed their pets premium brands of pet food as a regular part of their diet; 80% see to it that their pets are groomed; 63% have tagged, microchipped, or tattooed their pets; 48% take their pets for dental care; and 18% spent more than $1,000 on veterinary care for a pet within the preceding year.
58% said they would be willing to spend more than $1,000 to save a pet's life. 35% set no limit to how much they would spend.
Most have never visited their local animal shelter and looked at the rows and rows of helpless creatures. And yet we are told that the horror stories don't convince people to help. It is supposedly a big turn off.
People do not visit their local animal shelter precisely because they know what happens to the animals and they cannot bear to see it.
Discovering that is how Richard Avanzino discovered that the way to boost community support for humane work is to stop killing animals. Then people are no longer afraid to visit the shelter, adopt animals, and volunteer.
Yet how many success stories are there when you are first starting out--zero.
No one in the U.S. is "first starting out."
With 85% of the pets already sterilized, you have only 15% of the problem left to handle.
The people trying to address all the other social problems in the U.S. would duckwalk from San Francisco to New York if they thought it would put them in a comparable position, i.e. with 85% of poverty already eradicated, 85% of cancer already cured, 85% of drug addicts already clean.
We have a 30-year national success story going: a 30-year record of shelter killing falling like a rock. We are now into the mop-up phase of the battle.
You may be feeling weary, like a marathoner at about the 21st mile of 26.2 miles who "hits the wall" at the point where the body shifts over from burning carbohydrates stored in the bloodstream to metabolizing fat, but speaking as a fellow who used to compete often at distances of up to 50 miles, I can assure you that the "wall" is a mirage. Run through it and keep on going!
Plus the mindset of local politicians (the Board of County Commissioners "runs" animal control, but exercises virtually NO oversight) is one of polite lip service only--if that. Animal welfare is not a money maker for them, will not help further their political ambitions, etc., so why bother.
So bypass them. You don't need to work with the Board of Cramped Constipation to get something done. Set up your own independent program, show what can be done, and out compete the anal-retentive people for public support.
Success is emulated. Do something right, succeed, and the world will copy it.
Sorry if this seems pessimistic: it is only meant to be realistic. The attitude seems to be either (1) I don't know that the problem exists, so why should I care; or (2) I know the problem exists, but I am content to let someone else deal with it.
Anyone who remembers the bad old days, when shelters were killing 115 dogs and cats per 1,000 Americans, mostly by decompression or gas, cannot possibly be legitimately pessimistic about all the progress made since then.
Anyone who does not remember the bad old days should take a few moments to contemplate what it really means that we are now killing only 15.6 dogs and cats per 1,000 Americans, and have several whole cities that are killing under three dogs and cats per 1,000 residents.
What it should mean is that an authentically realistic view is buoyantly optimistic, positively giddy with hope based on hard assessment of how far we have come already, and how much has now been demonstrated to be possible.
Are more shelters the answer?
Question from Barb in ID:
We live in a rural area and are working towards getting a shelter built. We have no humane society here at this time in this three-county area of about 60,000 people. There has never been a spay-neuter program or feral cat TNR program of any kind here. We have no idea how many animals to figure on getting in when we get our shelter open, but we know it will be a lot! Especially cats. How can we even begin to try to be a no-kill shelter, knowing we will be inundated as soon as we open our doors? The thought of having to euthanize all these animals makes us sick! Any suggestions?Response from Merritt:
Under these circumstances, building a shelter is a completely counterproductive measure.It is senseless, mindless, and literally the very last thing you ought to be doing--and you should not even think about doing it until and unless someone leaves you the land and money to do it.
Until then, putting money into shelter-building makes less sense than saturating hundred-dollar bills in tuna oil and using them for feral cat bait.
The most successful approach to preventing rural dog and cat overpopulation that ANIMAL PEOPLE has ever seen is the "No-kill, no-shelter" concept pioneered in Costa Rica by Alex Valverde, DVM, Gerardo Vicente, DVM, and Christine Crawford, founder of the McKee Project.
"DJR" is an honorary title I just conferred that stands for Doing the Job Right.
Everything they do in Costa Rica can and should be done in rural parts of the U.S. as well, for all the same reasons.
Vicente, who is a policy advisor to the Costa Rican Veterinary Licensing Board and is the former board president, is very proud that Costa Rica has had no animal control shelters in many years, closed and demolished those it once had long ago, and does not want or need any more.
As Vicente points out, shelters of any kind take a lot of money to build and run. Even the U.S., spending $2 billion a year on animal sheltering, between public and nonprofit investment, does not yet have complete shelter coverage of every community.
After more than a century of energetic shelter-building, half of the rural counties in the U.S. still have no shelter, public or private--and shelter-building has meanwhile proved to be a completely ineffective response anyway to the problems associated with homeless dogs and cats.
All shelter-building does is divert funding and public attention away from really solving the dog and cat overpopulation problem, while creating the illusion that institutions are taking care of it.
Enough shelter space can never be built to contain every dog and cat without a home, so long as dogs and cats breed freely.
Nor is it possible to lastingly reduce dog and cat overpopulation by killing the surplus. The U.S. amply demonstrated that during the 20th century, catching and killing more dogs and cats in shelters, several times over, than the probable sum of all the dog and cat purges undertaken during all of the Middle Ages and modern China combined.
No matter how many dogs and cats are killed, as the Italian mathematician Fibonacci demonstrated nearly 600 years ago, the fertile remainder can always breed rapidly up to the carrying capacity of the habitat, somewhere between becoming a public nuisance and suffering starvation.
Poor areas, rural areas, and developing nations, Vicente emphasizes, cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the rich.
Animal shelters will always become death camps and slaughterhouses, Vicente points out, if dog and cat reproduction is not controlled BEFORE the shelters are built.
If the population is controlled, the role of animal control shelters in housing the relatively few animals who require quarantine or special care could be done as efficiently by shelterless nonprofit humane societies, using fostering networks.
This is most especially true of rural areas, where the distances to be traveled to use a centralized shelter tend to become an incentive to dumping animals instead. Rather than spending money to run a shelter, animal rescuers need to set up a network which enables the nearest rescuer to collect any animal who is being surrendered, and then deliver the animal to the most appropriate foster home. The coordinating office needs no more than a desk, a telephone, Internet service, and the fundraising capacity to help the fostering volunteers cover their costs, including the costs of sterilizing and vaccinating the incoming animals.
Adoption placements can be arranged in four different ways:
By using the offsite adoption programs of PETsMART and Petco, if they exist in the community.
By arranging frequent offsite adoption events around the community.
By using a web site with photos to help advertise the availability of the animals.
By setting up a working agreement with a nearby big-city shelter which can place any overflow of puppies and kittens and otherwise easily adoptable animals. These days many and perhaps most big-city shelters have a shortage of highly adoptable animals, but rural organizations are still getting lots of them. As a result, literally hundreds of rural organizations are now successfully providing animals to big-city shelters, who are better situated to compete against pet shops and puppy mills in placing animals in homes.
If you really want to solve the homeless dog and cat problem, eliminate strays, and eliminate all the problems that go with them, you need to start by providing low-cost or free sterilization and vaccination.
In a rural area, you do not even need a fixed-site clinic, which is often a necessity in inner cities. Neither do you need a mobile clinic, in most cases, although having one can be handy.
What you need are veterinarians who participate in your program as partners and are appropriately compensated, including with subsidies for all the low-cost sterilizations and vaccinations that they do for people you send to them.
You also need a transportation pool to relay animals to and from the clinic for the rural elderly, disabled, and poor people whose access to transportation may be limited.
Being able to provide feral cat trapping help is also a good idea. If you provide the traps and the trappers, you can be sure that the job is done right and that no animals are harmed. If you merely loan out traps, or provide no practical help at all, mistakes will be made.
Vets, wheels, and feral cat-catchers are the necessities.
Later you can add an adoption center if the region seems likely to support one, and a care-for-life sanctuary if you inherit the money to do it.
If your sterilization and vaccination program is successful, meanwhile, you will never need conventional animal control shelters and so-called full-service humane societies that kill most of the animals they purport to "rescue."
You need a good low-cost sterilization and vaccination program first, because whether or not pet owners are able to afford sterilization and vaccination, or are responsible enough to do it, it still needs to be done, for the benefit of the entire community, including the animals.
Shelters evolved from pounds during the late 19th century, and the whole purpose of pounds was to prevent animals from running at large.
We have better technology for doing that now. We have not really needed pounds in 80 years, when the conventional sterilization surgical procedures were first approved as safe by the American Veterinary Medical Association, soon after the principle of preventing rabies through vaccination was approved. Building a pound these days makes about as much sense as building a crystal set in order to listen to the radio or buying a manual typewriter to handle high-volume correspondence.
You may encounter great resistance from some directions to the idea of "rewarding" so-called "irresponsible" pet keepers by sterilizing and vaccinating their animals for them, instead of trying to find some way to punish them.
It is often said that these people should not have pets.
That may be true, but such arguments are irrelevant to reality.
The fact is, people in need of help to get their pets sterilized do have dogs and cats, and those animals do need sterilization and vaccination. Merely impounding the animals does not serve the need or solve the problem.
Ignoring that need is like ignoring that your neighbor's house is on fire just because you happen to know that he smokes in bed. Whether or not your neighbor is a fool, the fire must be put out to reduce possible harm to your own house.
After you have a successful sterilization and vaccination program, establishing a pet adoption center might make sense, depending on the traffic patterns of your region, because in order to find homes for adoptable dogs and cats, you need to have them in a convenient location, where it is easy for them to attract people's attention, where the animals can be happy and healthy and comfortable, and where they can get whatever training they may need to succeed in a home while they await adoption.
None of that can be done effectively in dreary rows of steel-and-cement cages out beside the town dump. Placing these animals in good homes requires treating them as if they have value. Treat them as if they have value, and people will want them--and the way you treat animals, as humane representatives, will be perceived as the appropriate standard of pet care.
Let me briefly point out here that dogs do not go kennel-crazy from being in a shelter too long. Rather, they go kennel-crazy because conventional animal shelter design couldn't be better designed if they were put together by mad scientists whose sole object was to drive dogs insane--and, by the way, if you have in mind building any kind of so-called "shelter" that resembles the usual, you are not just doing something that will be counterproductive, you are also committing an offense against animal well-being, for which the penalty ought to be five days of living on bread and water in the typical "shelter" cell.
The standard cement-floored, cement-and-chain-link walled, tin-roofed dog run is an atrocity, which thoughtlessly evolved from the layout of horse stalls in the Middle Ages. Humane societies copied the manner in which hunting packs were kept, in spare horse stalls, without giving the slightest consideration to the behavioral differences between dogs and horses.
Dogs need compatible companions, they need room to run, they need security from being stared at from a close distance by strange dogs, they need outdoor air and light, and they need to be able to dig.
Give a dog what a dog needs, and it is very easy to keep dogs happy and healthy. Deprive a dog of any of these things, and you will soon have sick and despairing dogs.
Teach a community to deprive a dog of these things, and you will have a community full of maladjusted dogs being surrendered to shelters or dumped on the street--which may be exactly what you already have, partly because of the past 125 years of humane societies setting a piss-poor example.
Cats need to be able to climb--and they prefer a quiet environment. There is no animal easier to care for than a cat. Even great apes in zoos often keep pet cats successfully--and so has at least one now deceased grizzly bear. Unfortunately, great apes and the occasional bear in zoos often have a better sense of what a cat needs than humane society shelter directors.
Too often I visit humane societies full of nervous, panic-stricken, and diseased cats, who are kept in cells the size of a microwave oven, where they have to listen to 100 kennel-crazed dogs barking all night and all day.
That is not a humane way to keep a cat; it is a kitty torture chamber, and if the ancient Egyptians were right that human beings will face a cat on Judgement Day, many a shelter director may be passing a very hot eternity.
If you keep dogs and cats in a facility that looks like a jail and smells like a cesspool, dogs and cats all over town will be treated like prisoners on a chain-gang, because the condition of your facility sends the message that you think this is okay.
If you treat dogs and cats as if they are honored guests, the community standards will rise to your standard. This too has been proved time and again.
Finally, after you have a very effective outreach sterilization and vaccination program, and after you have an adoption program that places every animal who can be quickly placed, and after the resources become available as result of your inspirational effect on your community, it is worthwhile to start a care-for-life sanctuary as a backup to the rest of your system, for the animals who cannot be adopted out, because many people will not surrender a dog or cat to a humane organization if they think the animal might be killed. Instead, they will abandon the animal somewhere "to give him a chance," or "give her a chance." That animal may then contribute to the breeding population of street dogs and feral cats.
People give up pets for all sorts of reasons. Whether or not we think the reasons are "valid," giving up pets is a fact of life which must be accommodated. It must be understood that many of these pets are given up not because they are not loved, but because desperate people feel they have no choice: they have lost their job, lost a home, an animal has bitten or scratched a child, the spouse hates the animal, the landlord is threatening to evict them, or someone has died and the pet-keeper is so depressed he or she just can't cope.
If these people feel the pet is going to either find a home or be well looked after at a sanctuary, they will bring the animal into the adoption-and-care network. The animal will not end up having "accidental" litters out on the streets, further contributing to the homeless animal problem.
Animal control agencies that can respond immediately to nuisance animal complaints and act as a dog-and-cat lost-and-found are very nice to have--but they are not what it takes to end pet overpopulation and shelter killing. Full-service humane societies that can provide emergency veterinary care, do humane education, do animal rescue, and investigate cruelty complaints are also nice to have. Yet they are also not what it takes to end pet overpopulation and shelter killing.
A community placing the first emphasis on developing animal control agencies and full-service humane societies, in short, is just plain going in the wrong direction. It needs to slam on the brakes, turn around, and go back to what really needs to be done.
Go the right way, and you can get to no-kill animal control while solving all the community animal problems very quickly. Go the wrong way, and you will spend the next century repeating all the same dimwitted mistakes that the U.S. humane community made throughout the last century.
