The Giuliani-appointed bureaucrats that run CACC have failed because they have not embraced the following successful philosophy leading to a no-kill shelter.
Executive Director Perspectives:
Nathan Winograd
The
On June 11, 2001, I started as Executive Director of the
On June 12, my staff informed me that our dog kennels were full and that since a litter of six puppies just came in, I needed to decide who was going to be killed to make space. I asked for Plan B. There was none. I asked for suggestions. None were forthcoming. My plan to be the silent observer came to an end. It was time for a staff meeting.
I introduced myself formally, told them about my background and experiences, and shared with them my view of what it takes to be a successful shelter. Success, I said, is defined by how many animals go home alive, period. Of course, we want to make sure they are going into responsible, loving homes-anything less would mean that the animal would come right back, taking us further away from, not closer, to our goals. I told them that hard work was expected to make sure we saved them, but hard work was not enough. At the end of the day, everyone would be measured by results. The rest would fall into place: community support, new resources, and the programs that follow. To get the results, we needed the desire to succeed, the creativity to come up with solutions, and the flexibility to implement them.
As a former prosecutor, I learned in the courtroom that context matters greatly. That concepts like "truth," "guilt," "reasonable doubt," were often meaningless abstractions devoid of a clear, articulable concept. Who can forget the famous quip "if it doesn't fit, you must acquit?" Jurors can grasp that. So, without context, "desire," "flexibility," "creativity" were meaningless abstractions, the kind of jargon batted around by self-help gurus. So I used the full cages scenario to provide context to these concepts: What will we do with the puppies? Should we kill dogs to make room? Do we have foster homes? Is there something we haven't tried? I got nowhere. "We don't have anywhere to put them." "We don't have any foster parents who would take dogs or puppies." "This is how we have always done it." Day two and my experiment with trying to build consensus came to an end.
"Volunteers do not bring home a paycheck," I said. "They do what they do for the sheer love of the animals and for no other reason. If they throw up their hands and say 'there is nothing we can do,' I will accept it from them." I looked around at the blank stares. "Staff," I continued, "are paid to save lives. If they throw up their hands and say 'there is nothing we can do,' I may as well eliminate their position and use the money more constructively to either hire someone who will find a solution or for something else like temporary boarding space at a local kennel. So, what are we going to do with the puppies that doesn't involve killing animals?"
And a solution was found: horse troughs for puppies in the lobby next to the front desk. What better way to showcase those little gems, keep a loving vigil over them while they play and sleep and ensure much needed socialization during their tender critical period? This simple change giving staff responsibility for finding alternatives to killing has since resulted in many such innovations, but the process took time.
The next weekend, 70 kittens were relinquished to the shelter, above and beyond the regular cadre of incoming dogs, cats, and other assorted animals (including 16 mice left out by our dumpster). As the humane officers informed me that they had just raided a residence and were bringing in 30 sick cats, I overheard one staff member say to another "maybe now he will euthanize some animals." Back to square one. I explained that killing for space reasons was no longer an option, and again, appropriate alternatives were found.
Not all staff were supportive of our newly achieved
no-kill status. Over the next five months, seven of the twelve full-time
employees on staff moved on, eventually replaced with new co-workers who shared
our vision of a no-kill
Taking the Community No-Kill
How does a traditional shelter make a community No-kill? In
On February 6, 1901, the
Next year, the
I have worked for many no-kill organizations including the San Francisco SPCA, where the concept of creating a partnership between
municipal animal control and a private no-kill agency was developed. Such a
model is now touted as the way of the future. Unfortunately, the model not
applicable in
Over the next five months at the TC SPCA, I developed a flurry of programs to increase the number of homes, reduce birthrates, rehabilitate injured animals, and keep animals with their loving, responsible caretakers. We plead our case before the public and asked for their help. The result?
In 2001, the death rate in Tompkins County plummeted by 78% during our peak summer season, the number of animals sterilized prior to adoption went from 10% to 100%, we went from a dozen to 140 regular volunteers, and from a handful of foster homes to 196 during our busy summer months. And the level of community giving skyrocketed. What happened? We went from excuses to answers, from blaming to solving. We went back to the basics.
The Keys to Our Success
There is no magic formula to saving lives in
1. Volunteers. When I arrived in
2. Foster Homes. Foster parents are free to adopt their own animals or find homes for them. If I trust them to bottle feed baby kittens for four weeks around the clock, I am going to trust them to place them with loving, responsible caretakers-after we spay or neuter them.
3. Off site adoptions. The TC SPCA attends every neighborhood fair, grand opening, Church bazaar, community event, or simply sets up shop at corner malls, stores, and neighborhoods. Over 10% of all our adoptions occur off-site and the number is steadily increasing. Once the community began to learn about the lives being saved at the TC SPCA, the offers to help by hosting events began pouring in.
4. Public Access Hours. The TC SPCA is open seven days a week until 5:30 pm giving working people an opportunity to reclaim lost pets or find new ones.
5. Pre-Release Sterilization. No animal goes home unaltered so that we do not contribute to overpopulation or kill the offspring of pets we ourselves adopt out.
6. Work with Local Veterinarians. We offer free and low-cost spay/neuter thanks to partnerships with local practitioners, and get vastly discounted fees on care for our sick and injured animals.
7. Get the word out. The TC SPCA is either on the radio, television or newspaper an average of 20 days out of every month without paying for a single ad. Get those press release, events, stories out daily!
8. Ask for help. Once you give us support, we will be unrelenting. You can say no, but we will always ask. And people generally always give. Ask, ask, ask. We speak at community groups and always end by asking them "to support our lifesaving work by opening your hearts and wallets to the needy animals who make their way to the shelter."
9. Treat volunteers and staff at the end of the day, but only for a job well done. Hard work alone doesn't save lives. Hard work, effective programs, and results save lives. Reward that!
10. Come in under budget on one line-item and one line-item only: euthanasia drugs. Fundraise and meet your line-items for the rest.
But the bottom line is this: we evaluate and treat each animal as an individual and stay flexible. Too many shelters lose sight of individual animals as they stay rigid with their shelter protocols, believing that these are engraved in stone. They are not. Protocols are important because they ensure accountability from staff. But protocols without flexibility can have the opposite effect: stifling innovation, causing lives to be needlessly lost, allowing shelter employees who fail to save lives to hide behind a paper trail.
Come what may, you are only successful if the animals go home alive. The
number of children reached through humane education is nice, the number of
volunteer hours amassed is nice, the size of the
endowment is nice. None of it amounts to much if the save rate (the percentage
of animals going home alive) is not steadily increasing every year. In
And we did it, not with a big shelter, not with lots of money, but with a commitment to stop the killing and the flexibility to see it through. It started with six puppies in a horse trough. Today, it involves hundreds of animals in foster care, hundreds more traveling to off-site adoptions, a coalition of breed specific rescue groups, local veterinary participation, and a community that has faith in its shelter and wants to support our lifesaving results. Is each life precious as every shelter tells us? Only if we believe that at the end of the day, every death of a healthy, treatable sick or injured animal or feral cat is a profound failure. And only if the shelter director acknowledges that the responsibility for the death is his or hers alone.
About the Author: Nathan Winograd
is the Executive Director of the
For Animal Organizations
Community Partnerships
IT TAKES A COMMUNITY
By Nathan Winograd
Executive
Director,
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A decade ago, the idea of finding a home for every healthy shelter dog and cat would have sounded like science fiction. Now we are poised to make it a reality. But whether you call it No More Homeless Pets, No Kill, or other things, in a nutshell, the challenge is to build a humane "society."
To meet that challenge, we need to get the community excited, to energize people for the task at hand. Everybody needs to be a part of the mission. And the measure of how much we succeed-or fail-is a function of what happens to the cat living in an alley in our community, whether the business downtown adopts a 'pets at work' policy, whether landlords will help our lifesaving goals by saying yes to renters with dogs, whether our neighbors adopt imperfect pets because they believe in our lifesaving mission. It is about the cafes, the storefronts, the squares, the neighborhoods. That is how we will be measured. And that is what it takes to save all the lives at risk-regardless of how big or how small your shelter is.
What confuses a lot of people in this movement, what stops them before they start is the completely false idea that to end the killing of healthy and sick homeless pets, you need to start with big bucks and big shelters. That helps, it helps a lot, but it is putting the cart before the horse. And that's not so great an idea when our cart and our horse have a long way to go.
To reach our goals, we must first focus our energies, not on building a shelter, but on rebuilding our relationship with the community.
If No Kill is going to become a reality in our hometowns, the ethic, the beliefs, the desire must penetrate the community. No-Kill may be defined by what happens to the animals within the halls of the shelter, but it can only be achieved by what happens outside of them. How much the lifesaving ethic is embraced in the cafes, storefronts, squares and neighborhoods. By how much we build our image by reflecting the values that people hold dear, and in turn expand the resources to save more and more lives at risk.
Let me give you one example. Jamie had never heard of feral cats. All Jamie knew was that after she fed the hungry stray in her yard, she started noticing others-- all of them hungry. So she started feeding them. And she wanted to have them spayed.
She managed to catch them-one by one. And since she paid full price, over $200 for an exam, vaccinations, and spay/neuter, she could only afford one cat every two weeks.
When the local SPCA opened a feral cat spay/neuter clinic and began loaning out traps for free, Jamie went on to trap and alter over 120 cats in one year alone. And a team of 70 "Jamies" put together a neonatal foster network that reduced kitten deaths by 85% throughout the city.
Jamie exists in every community. We need to tap into that energy, that compassion, that desire to do the right thing-and harness it. We build a humane shelter within our walls. We become a humane society by embracing the landlords, merchants, and feral cat caretakers in our communities-and energizing them for the lifesaving effort ahead.
It is absolutely essential for the humane movement to embrace the community we serve. We cannot save the lives of animals without people's help.
If you reflect the community's values, if you are doing a good job for animals, if you tell them about it, and then ask for their help. They do help. They want to be a part of the effort. Jamie traps cats for spay/neuter. Landlords make their apartments "pet friendly." Others give donations.
Whether its pets in rental housing, dogs at work, cats in alleys, or finding homes for older, sick, injured or traumatized pets in our shelter, if we are going to save lives, we need four things: desire, creativity, flexibility, and most importantly, community support.
The big, beautiful shelter, the expanding resource base, the successes will all be a byproduct of that, not their cause.
About the author: Nathan Winograd
is the Executive Director of the
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