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Putting the responsibility for shelter killing on the public makes working for no kill a discouraging and hopeless endeavor, because the public is not going to change.

For that reason, someone who believes that spay-neuter is the only solution to a pet overpopulation crisis is not going to be a very effective proponent of no kill.

We need to have a bright line between the myth that shelter killing is caused by the irresponsible public and the truth, which is that shelter killing is the responsibility of shelter management.

Although there was an initial decrease in euthanasia from 85% to 50% between 1999 and 2001, after 2001 the AAC (the only open admission shelter in Austin, Texas) consistently took in over 23,000 animals and euthanized an average of 50 - 55% of the animals admitted each year.

In fact, AAC euthanized over 14,000 animals in 2007, which was a decade record and showed me that my efforts were not decreasing shelter intake or euthanasia like I had hoped.

Using Data to Identify and Fill in the Gaps

Using Data to Re-Assess and Fine-Tune Programs

The second strategy

Using Data to Develop Programs: Filling the Gaps

The first strategy

the medical help that I provided did not help the sheltered animals leave alive in any larger numbers.

off-site adoption programs

These were animals with mange or kennel cough, minor behavior issues like being scared, or animals with minor injuries. APA created a large-scale foster program to provide short-term foster for these animals as they overcame their minor problems.

neonatal nursery with all the supplies needed for around-the-clock kitten care

again built up a large-scale medical foster base for all the injured and ill animals.

large breed dogs with behavior problems.

The Austin community's demand for adopting a pet is higher than the supply from AAC

By bringing in animals from other shelters, APA is able to prevent adopters from becoming pet store pet buyers and thus save a whole lot more lives.

adult large breed dogs with behavior issues are adopted each year because of improved customer service,

pet-matching practices,

behavior modification

APA rescued over 5,000 animals last year. No cat, kitten, small breed dog, puppy of any breed, or large breed friendly dog, including pit bulls, died in the City of Austin in 2011 simply because it didn't have a home.

increase the number of adoption venues

additional exposure.

MSNL do not decrease the number of animals entering or being killed in shelters.

MSNL have resulted in more abandoned animals, higher shelter admissions, higher kill rates, lower compliance with licensing and rabies vaccination laws, and radically increased costs for animal control. 

People become afraid to get pet licenses because proof of sterilization is required. 

They are afraid to go to a veterinarian for rabies shots or medical care because veterinarians are required to report them

People abandon their pets because they fear fines and penalties.

Numerous studies have shown that the primary reason people do not sterilize their pets is costs

When the result of not sterilizing is an unaffordable fine or confiscation/impoundment of the pet, animals die.

more than 80 percent of owned cats in the US are already sterilized

This means that the majority of unsterilized cats are unowned strays.

MSNL would do nothing to increase the sterilization of unowned cats and would not reduce their deaths in shelters.

Also, MSNL are a nightmare to enforce.

hey burden already underfunded, understaffed animal control departments with more responsibilities.

Each community must hire more animal control officers to enforce them so an enormous amount of additional money is spent to enforce a draconian law when a much better use of those funds would be to provide low cost or free spay/neuter services.

immediately after passing MSNL, kill rates began to rise in L.A.

successful no kill shelters have stopped the killing without these laws.

Even though the author claimed that the economic downturn has caused kill rates to rise in L.A., clearly this isn’t the correct explanation.

All of these shelters dropped their kill rates without MSNL.

It is obvious that Mandatory Spay/Neuter laws are not a factor that helps to stop the killing in shelters. 

Big cities have a concentrated population from which to draw volunteers, fosters, and donors, and they also have ready availability of expertise in areas such as marketing and grant proposals.

What does correlate with no kill success? No-kill leadership at the shelter.

We need to focus on regime change, not on distractions like population size.

if we could magically replace every old-fashioned shelter director in the US today with a director who supports no kill and has the ability to implement the No Kill Equation, then we could be a no-kill nation by the end of this year.

the impediment was Washoe County’s regressive director

One point which needs to be added is that larger cities not only have more resources to draw from, they tend to have lower per capita intake rates.

an octopus can taste with all of its skin

but first they go senile, acting like a person with dementia

Octopuses die after mating and laying eggs

“You’d chase them under the tank, back and forth, like you were chasing a cat,”

Octopuses in captivity actually escape their watery enclosures with alarming frequency.

Some, she said, “would lift their arms out of the water like dogs jump up to greet you.”

How do you prove the intelligence of someone so different?”

Small brain size was the evidence once used to argue that birds were stupid—before some birds were proven intelligent enough to compose music, invent dance steps, ask questions, and do math.

BIOLOGISTS HAVE LONG NOTED the similarities between the eyes of an octopus and the eyes of a human.

Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.

“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,”

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate

the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye

In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin.

“Home,” Mather found, is where octopuses spend most of their time. A home, or den, which an octopus may occupy only a few days before switching to a new one, is a place where the shell-less octopus can safely hide: a hole in a rock, a discarded shell, or a cubbyhole in a sunken ship. One species, the Pacific red octopus, particularly likes to den in stubby, brown, glass beer bottles.

octopuses who dismantle Lego sets and open screw-top jars.

This octopus wasn’t the only one to use the bottle as a toy.

not only can these animals play with toys, but they may need to play with toys.

researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body. 

“Octopuses,” writes philosopher Godfrey-Smith, “are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind.”

the natural lifespan of a giant Pacific octopus is only three years

Except to mate, most octopuses have little to do with others of their kind.

we have to change the way we think of the nature of the mind itself to take into account minds with less of a centralized self.”

“I think consciousness comes in different flavors,” agrees Mather. “Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine.”

This time I offered her only one arm. I had injured a knee and, feeling wobbly, used my right hand to steady me while I stood on the stool to lean over the tank. Athena in turn gripped me with only one of her arms, and very few of her suckers. Her hold on me was remarkably gentle.

"I joined the ASPCA to bring the life-saving model I championed in San Francisco to NYC and beyond

As a pioneer of the "no-kill" model of animal sheltering

which exhorts community groups to collaborate to stop the killing of healthy or treatable dogs and cats in animal shelters

Mr. Sayres was recruited to the ASPCA in 2003 to bring no-kill to New York City

At that point, only 33 percent of the animals in New York City's shelters made it out alive. By the first quarter of 2012, that figure had risen to approximately 80 percent.

Mr. Sayres has been the guiding force behind the ASPCA's effort to build collaborative partnerships across the country with municipal and non-profit animal welfare agencies so that they may end the killing of healthy and treatable dogs and cats.

And then the antibiotic-resistant staph learned to jump back into humans.

"It's like watching the birth of a superbu

whole-genome analysis on a staph strain called CC398 and 88 closely related variations.

emerged within the past decade in pigs and has since spread widely in cattle and poultry as well as pigs.

the animal bacterium jumped back into humans with close exposure to livestock.

This "pig MRSA" has been detected in nearly half of all meat sampled in U.S. commerce

we think it may be changing gears, so to speak, and gaining the capacity to be passed from person to person.

Price says the new data provide an early warning of what might become a major public health problem.

in some areas of the Netherlands, it's causing as many as 1 in 4 human MRSA cases

"our inappropriate use of antibiotics ... is now coming back to haunt us."

the solution is clear — banning antibiotics in livestock feed, as the European Union has done.

Most antibiotics sold in the U.S. go to animals, mostly in their feed, where they act as a growth promoter and damp down infection outbreaks in large feedlots.

It said it would focus instead on "voluntary reform" by the meat industry to limit use.

Responded Humane Farming Association founder Brad Miller, “It is simply delusional to think that getting humane organizations into the business of promoting meat from heritage breed chickens will result in even the slightest reduction of animal suffering. The ASPCA decision to fund the commercial production of chickens for meat raises a number of troubling issues,” Miller continued. “Beyond the obvious ethical issues from the animals’ standpoint, there is also the matter of using charitable dollars to further the commercial interests of a privately owned, profit-driven poultry company. This is just the latest,” Miller charged, “in a growing trend on the part of several major animal organizations to, in effect, merge with the livestock industry.” Miller noted that Farm Forward has previously promoted a variety of federal and state legislation that HFA regarded as more likely to entrench the status quo in animal agriculture than to bring about meaningful change.

“A commercial animal production operation is not an alternative to factory farming, but an extension of it. In this instance, chickens and turkeys are being mass-produced in mechanical hatchery incubators, raised motherless for human consumption by the thousands, and slaughtered, i.e., factory farmed.

“In addition to cruelty and commodification of animals being falsely represented as ‘humane,’ ‘compassionate,’ ‘anti-factory farming,’ etcetera,” Davis added, “is that these relatively smaller farms seek to grow and expand. Regardless of what size they are, they do not reduce the amount of resources needed to raise and slaughter animals

“It is unethical for an ‘animal welfare’ organization,” Davis concluded, “to suggest to the public that millions and billions of people can continue to eat the same number of animals, as long as these animals are raised ‘humanely’ on non-factory farms. Humans will never set aside hundreds of millions or billions of acres of land to accommodate billions of animals living ‘free range,’ yet this is the false prospect being offered to a public that wants to believe that incompatible desires and realities can be reconciled.”

If you think it is wrong for the ASPCA to use charitable donations to fund and promote poultry slaughter, expand poultry breeding and hatchery facilities and pretend that a factory farm is Not a factory farm, while doing NOTHING to promote genuine compassion and respect for these birds,

The civil rights movement wasn’t just seeking the discretionary ability to sit at the front of the bus or to eat at the same lunch counters or be given equal protection and equal opportunity. Its goal was winning the right to do so, a right guaranteed in law.

what Will Tuttle calls radical inclusion. 

rom the other side of the fence and I knew that

Guilt and shame never changed anyone’s heart or mind.

They now have a new sow that gives birth to about 20 piglets and that her body size is such that the old crates are too small, that they literally won't fit into the old crates.

There is NO humane solution to dairy other than just making it stop

that most calves are sent to auction 24-72 hours after birth.

the coming convergence of global warming, peak oil, population growth, ecological disaster and other factors will force a remedy upon us. 

I am the eternal optimist and believe that people are capable of great things if given the opportunity. I have seen it time and again. It is about creating a safe place and a community where people can come and deconstruct their indoctrination.

I think it is important that although you may want to give up cheese it isn't all your fault that you can't, despite your will power.  there is a component in the protein of milk called casomorphine.  Yup, morphine.  You are addicted as are so many vegetarians that want to eat a plant based diet.  It is a tough addiction to break but to be informed  goes a long way.  One we understand that there isn't anything in any animal product that we need then it is recognized that it is only a want. Wants are easy to leave behind.

they have evolved biologically as omnivores, meaning their systems can derive nutrients from a wide variety of sources, including fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes and animal products.

Vegetarian pet foods require the addition of synthetic amino acids to fill nutritional gaps or a much higher overall protein level to supply all of the essential amino acids.

She feeds them a prepared blend of dried vegetables, fruits and herbs that she mixes with water and either tofu, beans or textured vegetable protein.

It's been known so long that predator odors are great rodent deterrents, but we've discovered one molecule that's a key part of this ecological relationship,