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This is a fairly long article, but one that I thought was
very interesting
and many of you may appreciate.
Executive Director Perspectives:
Nathan Winograd,
Tompkins County SPCA
The Tompkins County SPCA (TC SPCA) is located in Ithaca, New York.
TC
SPCA maintains an animal control contract with the city of Ithaca as
well as all ten townships in the county. The semi rural/urban county has
a population of 100,000 people. TC SPCA has a full-time staff of twelve,
an annual budget of $616,000 and takes in approximately 3,000 animals
per year.
On June 11, 2001, I started as Executive Director of the Tompkins County
SPCA. Before I shared with the staff my philosophy and approach to
animal sheltering, I wanted to give them an opportunity to show and tell
me their own, unencumbered by fear that it would conflict with mine.
What were their views of releasing feral cats after neutering? How did
they temperament test dogs for aggression? Could people who surrendered
animals put in a "call before euthanasia" in the event their pet
could
not be placed?
Should we release animals to rescue groups? I could have told them what
I was planning, but I wanted to see where they were, what their experience
was, whether they had experiences that were different from my own?
My plan
was to spend the first two weeks learning how they cleaned the kennels,
fed
the animals, treated them for illness, tested dogs for aggression, took
animals in, adopted them out, investigated cruelty complaints.
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 homesâ?"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 â?"
giving staff responsibility for finding alternatives to killing â?"
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 Tompkins County. In the meantime, not a single animal
was killed for lack of space.
Taking the Community No-Kill
How does a traditional shelter make a community No-kill? In Tompkins
County, we did it with a simple, yet highly effective three-step process:
1.
Stop the killing; 2. Stop the killing; 3. Stop the killing. I am not
joking.
No-kill starts as an act of will.
On February 6, 1901, the Tompkins County SPCA was incorporated and
opened its first shelter three years later. For the next one hundred
years,
the
SPCA would act in the primary capacity of pound master for Tompkins
County, a beautiful rural community in Central New York. Like so many
shelters with animal control contracts, the TC SPCA would rely on the
fiction that the only solution to pet overpopulation is the "blue
solution," and continue to blame "irresponsible owners" for
the fact
that so many animals would go out the door in barrels rather than in the
loving arms of families. Like so many other shelters, it never once saw
the
killing as its own failure to find solutions, meet its mandate, or live up
to the very real but often ignored shelter credo that "every life is
precious." A new Board of Directors decided to make a change. It was
time
to take some personal responsibility.
Next year, the Tompkins County SPCA will celebrate its 100th birthday,
no small achievement. But to highlight the centennial would be an exercise
in elevating form over substance compared to the real celebration: the
first traditional shelter that serves as an animal control agency that
takes
in every stray animal and has not killed a single healthy animal, feral
cat, or sick or injured treatable animal since June 11, 2001. And that
includes goats, chickens, bunnies, guinea pigs, and other assorted
critters, in addition to dogs and cats.
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 Tompkins County where, like so many other rural/semi-urban
areas, there are no other shelters in the community. Nor are there any
prospects for oneâ?"small counties do not, as a general rule,
prioritize
animal sheltering for public funding. Like many other rural/semi-urban
communities, the TC SPCA is the only animal organization in the county,
aside from a few dog or cat fanciers that also do rescue. If we were to
relinquish our contracts, the alternative would be a pick up truck and
someone's barn. Dogs would be slaughtered by the thousands. We would
have
to find another way.
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 Tompkins County. We started
with a commitment: to stop the killing of healthy and treatable animals.
To make the dream a reality required accountability, services that get
results, and the community's help. These are the programs that worked
for us:
1. Volunteers. When I arrived in Tompkins County, the then-shelter
manager informed me that it was her view that "volunteers were more
trouble
than they were worth." That view would be simply ludicrous if it were
not so
disturbing. We increased our volunteer core to 140 from about 10â?"by
asking people for their help, and telling them what their help would
accomplish.
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 caretakersâ?"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. Fund raise 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 Tompkins
County, by sheer will, hard work, creativity and flexibility, this year
9 out of every 10 dogs and 8 out of every 10 cats will go home alive!
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
Tompkins County SPCA in Ithaca, New York. Nathan has been instrumental in
developing groundbreaking programs for feral cats for more than ten years
at institutions like Stanford University and the San Francisco SPCA.
Winograd has also worked with the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the
Greyhound Protection League, the Palo Alto Humane Society, Farm Sanctuary,
Alley Cat Allies and the ASPCA. In a former life, Nathan was a criminal
prosecutor.
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