It’s great to be alive!
Dear Colleagues:
Today marks the 23rd anniversary of when No Kill went from the theoretical to the real. On June 10, 2001, not a single No Kill community existed in the U.S. On June 11, there was one. As I drove into the parking lot for the first time as the new director of the shelter in Tompkins County, NY — an agency that ran the municipal shelter for all ten towns and cities of the county — I was met at the front door by a truck driver with five kittens he didn’t want.
Spaying his cat was not a priority. To him, the kittens were no longer “his problem.” Whether they lived or died was not his business. In his estimation, by handing them over to us, he had done his duty. He had brought them to the animal control authority for the entire county, and they were now our responsibility.
For many shelters, this is where the breakdown that leads to killing occurs: it was his failure to spay his cat and make a lifetime commitment to the kittens that is to blame. But this view, while endemic to animal control, is not accurate.
First, it is for this reason that shelters exist in the first place: to serve as a safety net of care for a community’s neediest companion animals. Second, the practices of the shelter itself often lead to killing. If a shelter does not maintain adequate adoption hours or has poor customer service, refuses to work with volunteers, foster parents, or rescue groups, fails to treat and rehabilitate sick, injured, or traumatized animals, or exterminates, rather than sterilizes, community cats, then the killing is not an inevitable outcome of circumstances beyond the shelter’s control. It results from the choices made by those working at the shelter itself.
Thankfully, on June 11 of that year, the truck driver did not live in a community whose shelter still made excuses. On that day, Tompkins County explicitly rejected the policies legitimized and championed by pounds nationwide. Not surprisingly, we found all of the kittens a home.
We did the same for other cats, dogs, rabbits, mice, gerbils, hamsters, and — given that we were an urban/rural shelter — chickens, pigs, horses, and cows. It didn’t matter if they were young or old, blind or deaf, healthy, sick, injured, or traumatized; they were guaranteed homes, and they all found one.
And it didn’t take ten years to do it. It didn’t take five years to do it. Despite a per capita intake rate twice the national average and per capita taxpayer funding that was a fraction of what others spent (roughly 90 cents per person), we did it overnight. No excuses. No compromises. No killing.
It started with a truck driver and a box of kittens in a pothole-filled parking lot in Ithaca, New York. The rest, as they say, is history.
For the animals,
Nathan Winograd
Executive Director
P.S. For shelter staff and managers who are new and lack institutional knowledge of the No Kill Equation and for those who are not new but have (conveniently) forgotten how to perform their duties humanely because of voluntary amnesia, wilful blindness, or any other reason, the No Kill Equation is how you run a shelter without killing and without turning animals away. Its programs are readily available, affordable, and, when comprehensively implemented to the point that they replace killing entirely, effective. The No Kill Equation should be mandatory in each and every community in the country. And with your help, someday, it will be.