Getting to Zero
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GETTING TO ZERO: A ROADMAP GETTINGTO TO ENDING ZERO: ANIMAL A ROADMAP SHELTER TO ENDINGOVERPOPULATION ANIMAL SHELTER IN OVERPOPULATION IN THE UNITED THESTATES UNITED STATES PETER MARSHPETER MARSH i Getting to Zero: A Roadmap to Ending Animal Shelter Overpopulation in the United States Peter Marsh ii GETTING TO ZERO: A ROADMAP TO ENDING ANIMAL SHELTER OVERPOPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronically, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owner. © Copyright 2012 by Peter Marsh First Printing November 2012 ISBN ISBN-10: 0983521964 ISBN-13: 978-0-9835219-6-9 Printed in the U. S. A. Town and Country Reprographics, Inc. Concord, New Hampshire 03301 iii DEDICATION This book is dedicated to my twin sister, Pat, and to all the companions we shared while growing up: Merry Kookaberry, Dubber, Cinderella, Captain, Midnight, Trouble, Hippity, and Hoppity. And to our parents, who showed us how to be worthy companions to the animals in our care. iv GETTING TO ZERO: A ROADMAP TO ENDING ANIMAL SHELTER OVERPOPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES v INTRODUCTION By the early 1990s, American animal shelters had been struggling against overpopulation for more than a century. Those working in shelters believed they understood what caused it and how best to handle it. They thought shelters should be the first line of defense against it and that it would be inhumane if they refused to immediately admit every animal a person wanted to give up. They worried that if they told other people what this meant—how many animals had to be put to death— many would turn against them. It seemed to them that no one else cared about homeless animals or what happened to them. Just them. Twenty years ago, some began to take a second look at these commonly-held beliefs. This book tells about the journey they took and what they discovered. It tells about: • The conventional wisdom they found to be mistaken, shown in ten highlighted sections or sidebars throughout the book; • The lessons they learned, as shown in two dozen Lesson Sidebars, and how these lessons can be applied to develop more effective shelter overpopulation programs; • The programs that will be needed to end overpopulation throughout the country and the principles that underlie them, shown in fourteen Getting to Zero sidebars; • The new humane ethic that has emerged and the work that will remain after shelters no longer put animals to death just to make room for more homeless animals. As is fitting for a book about companion animals, this book has a companion, an earlier book called Replacing Myth With Math: Using Evidence-Based Programs to Eradicate Shelter Overpopu- lation. There are references throughout this book to data and other information contained in the earlier work, for those who would like to dig a little deeper. Included with this book is another companion, a documentary film by Bill Millios, A Commu- nity Comes Together to Save Its Companion Animals: The New Hampshire Story. Bill made this film to update an extraordinary film he made in 1994 about New Hampshire animal shelters, Killing Our Best Friends. People working in shelters throughout the state made great progress in their life- saving work since the first film was made. Bill made A Community Comes Together in an attempt vi GETTING TO ZERO: A ROADMAP TO ENDING ANIMAL SHELTER OVERPOPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES to better understand how that happened. He hopes understanding what happened here will be of some value to animal protection groups working in other parts of the country where the rate at which homeless animals are put to death in shelters is now as high or higher than it was here in the early 1990s, before things turned around. He has kindly allowed me to provide copies of his film with this book. It is a very welcome addi- tion. It allows many of the people who were the most responsible for the great strides shelters made to tell what happened. Like the book, the film tells their story, how they worked tirelessly to bring together everyone who cared about the homeless animals in our state, how they changed their world—and the lives of the companion animals they cared for—by changing the way they looked at the world. ______________________________ Many thanks to Barbara Carr, Gregory Castle, Rick DuCharme, Frank Hamilton, Jim Mason, Sue MacRae, Bill Millios, Bert Troughton, and Esther Mechler for their generosity in reviewing parts of the manuscript. Special thanks to Rick Hall for the thoughtful and valuable suggestions he made about how to improve the book, to Donna Maurer for the care and precision with which she edited the manuscript, and to Bunny Stoykovich for the patience and good humor with which she put this book together. And, most of all, to Roxanne. Concord, New Hampshire September, 2012 vii Table of Contents Chapter 1 Breaking the Silence: The Chain of Collars ................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 Working Smarter: The Power of Data and Targeted Programs ................................ 11 Chapter 3 An Ounce of Prevention ................................................................................................ 21 Chapter 4 Spay/Neuter: It’s Not Just About Kittens and Puppies ............................................... 33 Chapter 5 Spay/Neuter: It’s Not Just About Whether, It’s Also About When ............................ 39 Chapter 6 Spay/Neuter: Financial Assistance Programs for Pet Caretakers Living in Poverty— We Can’t Get to Zero Without Them ....................................................................... 47 Chapter 7 Legislation: Community-Wide Solutions for a Community-Wide Problem .......... 55 Chapter 8 Moving From Avoiding “Fates Worse Than Death” to Finding Fates Better Than Death ............................................................................. 67 Chapter 9 Getting to Zero: The Roadmap ..................................................................................... 77 Chapter 10 Afterword: Beyond Zero ............................................................................................... 87 viii GETTING TO ZERO: A ROADMAP TO ENDING ANIMAL SHELTER OVERPOPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES 1 Chapter 1 BREAKING THE SILENCE: THE CHAIN OF COLLARS “It is important to us to show respect to the animals in this book, and homeless animals everywhere, by telling the complete and full truth. We feel that it dishonors the animals and what they go through, to tell only the stories with happy endings and exclude the animals whose fates are hard for us to face. As you can easily guess, this means that some of these stories will be sad, some hard to read. Some will break your heart, as they did ours. Writing these stories and reading them is a profound act of “bearing witness,” but also we believe that the truth cannot be changed until it can be seen. And so we have undertaken to show it here.” From the Introduction to One at a Time: A Week in an American Animal Shelter by Diane Leigh and Marilee Geyer (2003; No Voice Unheard: Santa Cruz, CA, p. xii), a book that tells the stories of 75 cats and dogs admitted to an animal shelter in California during a single week. On a fine summer day in 1992, we began stringing together the collars on a huge lawn in front of the State Capitol in Concord, New Hampshire. Staff at animal shelters throughout the state had made a paper ID collar for each cat or dog who had been put to death in their shelter during the 2 GETTING TO ZERO: A ROADMAP TO ENDING ANIMAL SHELTER OVERPOPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES first seven months of the year. A description of the animal that died was written on the collar: “Os- wald—3 mo. Tri-color kitten,” “Black long-hair F. cat about 3 years old,” “Scout LabX—loved Fris- bee.” We were putting them together in a single chain as part of a Memorial Service and Candlelight Vigil for Homeless Animals that would begin at dusk. Little by little, as staff from different shelters arrived with their collars and added them to the chain, the buzz of friends working together died down. We were stunned as we began to see how long the Chain of Collars was going to be. When we were done, it stretched for almost a mile! Later, at the vigil, shelter workers stepped forward to a microphone on the State House steps and told about some of the animals represented by the collars. Donna Brigley-Savluk, a soft-spoken Valley Girl—as women who worked at a shelter in a river valley near the seacoast were called— came forward to tell the story of a cat whom we came to call the Cat Who Loved Kittens (her pic- ture is at the start of this chapter): “She was a stray, domestic long-haired blue cream tortoiseshell. who was brought to our shelter 29 days ago. She was a very pretty cat. She loved kittens. She didn’t have any with her when she came in, but when she was allowed out of her cage for exercise, she would run up to the cages with kittens in them and try to clean them by licking them. If any kitten began to cry in our cat room, she would become all alarmed and I would have to go over to her and pat her and assure her that the kit- ten was all right. On the days that our shelter was closed, I’d let her out of the cage to stretch out on my desk and she’d try to play with my pen while I tried to do my paperwork. Two weeks ago, she became the cat who had been at our shelter the longest, so I had her photographed and made her “Pet of the Week” in our local newspaper. Unfor- tunately not one person called.