Prodigal Pets
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TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1 INTRODUCTION 2 PART I: The First Era of Sheltering 1 – Animal Control from the Colonial Era Through the 19th Century 5 2 – Philadelphia: Home of the First Animal Shelter 17 3 – New York City: The Politics of Sheltering 31 4 – Boston: A Different Approach 44 PART II: The Traditional Animal Shelter 5 – Shelter Operations in the 20th Century 51 6 – Death at the Shelter 62 7 – Pound Seizure 70 PART III: Shelters and Pet Population 8 – The Pet Overpopulation Crisis 84 9 – A Simple Surgery 93 10 – Reducing Shelter Intake 104 PART IV: The No Kill Idea 11 – Evolving Attitudes Toward Homeless Pets 119 12 – Early No Kill Sheltering 126 13 – Using Marketing to Save Lives 136 14 – Feral Cats and the Origin of TNR 148 PART V: No-Kill Cities 15 – San Francisco: No Kill Programs 164 16 – San Francisco: No Kill Model 175 17 – Parallel No Kill Efforts 185 PART VI: The No-Kill Movement 18 – The Human Toll of the Traditional Shelter 191 19 – In the Name of Mercy 200 20 – Organizing the Grassroots 207 EPILOGUE: No Kill in the 21st Century 222 COVER PHOTO: Sido, the dog who inspired the first No Kill city (San Francisco), courtesy of Richard Avanzino and the San Francisco SPCA. Circa 1980. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to express my gratitude and thanks to the people who helped me with this book. The help was offered in many different forms, including interviews, advice, and providing historical documents. Almost everyone I contacted about the book was willing to help, and some spent hours answering my questions or proofreading or finding and sending me materials. The book could not have been written without the assistance of Bonney Brown. She encouraged me, answered endless questions, introduced me to interviewees, and sent me boxes of rare documents that proved invaluable. Richard Avanzino spoke with me over the course of several interviews about the development of the first No Kill city. Historian Bernard Unti helped educate me about the crucial period from the Civil War to the 1920s, recommended materials, and reviewed the manuscript. Andrew Rowan answered all my many questions about dog and cat statistics, the spay-neuter movement, the Pound Seizure issue, and the use of animals in laboratories. Merritt Clifton, who has studied and written about animal sheltering for decades, was very generous with his knowledge and sent me a lot of helpful material. Ed Duvin communicated with me at length about the philosophy of No Kill and the milieu in which it developed. Many other people provided help that was crucial on some of the individual topics in the book. Ellen Perry Berkeley, Becky Robinson, Julie Levy, and other Trap-Neuter-Return practitioners and pioneers enlightened me on the history of efforts to manage and assist community cats. Several people provided information on notable early metro and statewide shelter-reform efforts, including Bob Rohde (Denver) and Peter Marsh and Bert Troughton (New Hampshire). I’m grateful to the American Pet Products Association, which provided me with data on trends in pet markets. I’m indebted to the people at Bideawee and the Women’s Humane Society who sent me copies of important historical documents. Esther Mechler gave me a detailed look at the spay-neuter campaigns of the 1990s. Mike Arms provided an in-depth look at his game-changing work on adoption marketing. Steve Zawistowski’s encyclopedic knowledge of sheltering was helpful to me in developing the big-picture outline of the book, and I appreciated his comments on the text. Jan McHugh-Smith talked to me about the earliest years of the Open Adoption movement in the 1990s. Doug Fakkema gave me a vivid picture of what it was like to work at high-volume shelters in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the toll that such work took on shelter workers. Lynn Spivak, Mary Ippoliti-Smith, and Sharon Fletcher aided my research on the San Francisco SPCA in the crucial years from 1976 to 1999. Lynda Foro (who passed away in late 2016) told me how her groundbreaking work of the 1990s unfolded. Betsy Banks Saul recounted the early days of Petfinder. Craig Brestrup described his own case study of No Kill reform. Several people from Best Friends Animal Society, including Michael Mountain, Faith Maloney, Francis Battista, and Gregory Castle, described the history of Best Friends and its crucial role in the development of the early No Kill movement. On the technical side, Don Jennings managed the transition of the book from text files to the Out the Front Door website and did a wonderful job. Many more people contributed interviews, documentation, and advice than I have space to mention here. I’m grateful to all of you. 1 INTRODUCTION Animal shelters can be found in most jurisdictions in the United States, yet the history of animal sheltering has received little attention. This book seeks to fill that gap. Sheltering can be divided into three eras—early, traditional, and No Kill. The “early” era lasted from colonial days to around 1920, encompassing the development of animal sheltering from dog control to a public-private system that included attention to animal welfare. The second era lasted from roughly 1920 to 2000 and saw the institutionalization of animal sheltering and the origin of the No Kill movement. The third era—No Kill—began around the year 2000. This book covers the early and traditional eras of sheltering, with an emphasis on the origin of No Kill in the years from 1970 to 2000. The modern animal shelter is a surprisingly complex institution. It may be public or private, or a mixture of the two. It may operate on its own or be part of a coalition of organizations. Its funding may come entirely from government or entirely from the private sector, or anywhere in between. The labor to carry out sheltering may be paid, volunteer, or a mixture. Some shelters take in any animal that comes to the door, including animals surrendered by their owners, while others restrict the number or type of animals they admit. Public animal shelters (shelters run by city, town, or county governments) have two distinct operational aspects—animal control and animal care. Animal control is the public function. The core mission of animal control is to protect people from animals, and it requires the police powers of the state to carry out. The animal-care aspect of public shelters has gained increasing attention in recent decades, and today it may include a goal of releasing as many animals as possible alive. At a minimum it means humane treatment of animals while in the shelter. Many public shelters have changed their names in recent years to some version of “Animal Care and Control” to reflect these twin missions. Part I of this book covers the first era in animal sheltering, from colonial times to about 1920. The earliest animal-control measures in the United States date back to the 1600s and were primarily designed to allow individuals to protect their livestock from free-roaming dogs. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, state and local governments began to become more involved in animal control due to the increasing threat of rabies from dog bites. There was no vaccine available for rabies until near the end of the 1800s, and panics induced by fear of the disease were frequent in cities in the 19th century. The increasing need for animal control spurred the development of city “pound” systems staffed by dog catchers. Dog pounds in the 19th century were often cruel. In Philadelphia, for example, dog catchers killed unclaimed dogs by beating them to death. Caroline Earle White, one of the three great leaders of the post-Civil-War animal-protection movement, was appalled by this cruelty. She negotiated a contract with the city of Philadelphia for her organization, the Women’s Branch of the Pennsylvania SPCA, to take over the dog pound. In 1870 the Women’s Branch built a new, humane facility and called it a “shelter” to distinguish it from the pound. In 1874, the Women’s Branch opened a second shelter, the City Refuge, which accepted all types of animals and had no government connection. Both of the Women’s Branch facilities were the first of their kind, and both became models that were replicated by animal welfare organizations in many other cities. The phenomenon of private humane organizations taking over governmental duties of animal control by contract, and supplementing animal-care expenses with donated funds, was an early example of a public- 2 private partnership. The three centers of the animal-protection movement in the late 1800s— Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston—all had some form of public-private arrangement for either dog care and control, cat care and control, or both by 1910. These public-private partnerships were notable in that the private-sector involvement was motivated not by profit but by compassion. The “traditional” era of animal sheltering is discussed in Part II. This era extended from roughly 1920 to 2000, but from 1970 to 2000 it overlapped with the origin of the third era, No Kill. The years from 1920 to 1950 were a time of institutionalization of animal care and control. Animal shelters were not a priority for governments, and the demands of animal care weighed down the private humane organizations that were involved in sheltering. The animal-protection movement stagnated in the years from 1920 to 1950 as large numbers of humane organizations dedicated much of their resources to the never-ending task of animal sheltering.