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Where Have All the Kittens Gone?

July 23, 2010 by shelterhawk

One of AWLA’s kitten fosterers recently mentioned to us that the shelter didn’t seem to be receiving the steady stream of abandoned kittens that usually begins in April and continues into the fall. We speculated that maybe the winter blizzards had taken a toll on the feral cat population, or that maybe years of spay/neuter efforts by the local animal-welfare community were starting to pay off.

Curious about this absence of kittens, we sent AWLA a written request for their intake and disposition records for cats and dogs for the first six months of 2010. Section 3.2-6557 of the Virginia Code compels AWLA to make these records available for public inspection. AWLA responded by sending the records promptly (probably because when they refused to do this two years ago, they were taken to court by the requester and ordered to comply by the judge.)

The cover letter enclosed with the records provided the helpful information that:

AWLA is a private non-profit corporation founded in 1944 to improve the welfare of stray, abused, and neglected animals in Northern Virginia. AWLA is not a public body under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) and, accordingly, nothing in AWLA’s response to your Request shall be deemed to subject AWLA to the requirements of FOIA.

OK, we get it; AWLA will fulfill the minimum requirements of the law when Arlington residents inquire about the welfare of the animals it is entrusted to care for with taxpayer funds — but don’t ask for any additional information. When we asked AWLA to include the animal ID numbers with the records, they refused. That makes analyzing the intake/disposition records much more difficult.

As we flipped through the records, the sad truth about this year’s crop of kittens emerged. Between March 28 and June 21, AWLA received 40 kittens that were younger than two months old. Three of them died at the shelter, and the other 37 were euthanized. How many of the 40 kittens were transferred to foster care? None.

During the same time period, AWLA also received 17 kittens that were two or three months old. Of these, one was euthanized and the other 16 were adopted, all within 10 days of their arrival at the shelter. The 16 survivors were old enough to be offered for adoption without spending time in foster care. Since losing one kitten out of 17 is a casualty rate that approximates the survival odds most rescued kittens face, we’ll give AWLA the benefit of the doubt with that kitten.

But when 40 out of 40 young and newborn kittens perish, the word “euthanization” no longer applies — especially when the vast majority of them were dead within hours of their arrival at the shelter. Some of these kittens may have been sick, but my five years of kitten fostering has taught me that most sick kittens recover fully with basic TLC and common medications — the very treatment that foster homes are happy to provide. I’ve seen ten-ounce kittens recover from diarrhea, vomiting, hypoglycemic shock, 107-degree fevers, and severe upper-respiratory infections. What they need is encouragement and a chance.

The likelihood is that most of the kittens entrusted to AWLA’s care were healthy. They just weren’t weaned yet, and they needed to be bottle-fed. That’s what kitten-fostering programs are for. AWLA has over 30 kitten fosterers, yet it couldn’t manage to actually utilize them when the need arose. Maybe because AWLA’s volunteer coordinator left her job earlier this year and the position remained vacant for a while.

Whatever the reason, AWLA’s indiscriminate killing of this year’s bottle-babies represents both a sickening step backward from prior years and an insidious betrayal:

- of the citizens who thought they were “rescuing” kittens by bringing them to the Arlington shelter;

- of the kitten fosterers who trusted AWLA to let them help save orphaned and abandoned kittens;

- of the donors who contribute based on the false belief that AWLA tries to save needy kittens;

- of AWLA’s own asserted mission to improve the welfare of stray, abused, and neglected animals in Northern Virginia.

One fosterer said that when she inquired about the dearth of kittens recently, a shelter staffer told her that they’d been referring kitten-finders to other shelters or rescue organizations. If that’s true, then AWLA wasn’t just betraying its constituents — it was also lying to them.

Clearly, the culture of stonewalling, elision, and path-of-least-effort at AWLA didn’t entirely disappear with the departure of the former Executive Director. When her replacement arrives, we retain some hope that the culture can be converted into one that truly values the lives of Arlington’s neediest companion animals.

That will take a leader who is willing to perform a thorough house-cleaning at AWLA. Any staff member who can rationalize AWLA’s recent treatment of bottle-baby kittens has no place in a well-managed open-admission shelter. Too many innocent animals pay for that ambivalence and lack of compassion with their lives.

Posted in AWLA Policies, AWLA Stories, Principles | 4 Comments »

The Root of the Problem

July 15, 2010 by shelterhawk

In its fiscal 2009, AWLA received $1,229,326 from Arlington County to perform animal control and manage Arlington’s open-admission animal shelter.

But as a private non-profit organization, AWLA also raised $1,031,897 in charitable contributions. Along with depreciation of $91,162, those contributions resulted in positive cash flow of $500,000 in fiscal 2009. If AWLA were a for-profit organization, its EBITDA would be an enviable 20% of revenue.

What is AWLA doing with the $500,000 it generated in fiscal 2009 (or the $632,000 it generated in fiscal 2008?) Is the money being used to save more homeless animals?

Based on the number of cats and dogs that AWLA found homes for or transferred to rescue during the last four fiscal years…

2009 — 1,098
2008 — 1,029
2007 — 1,049
2006 — 1,073

…it’s hard to see a correlation between positive cash flow and improvement in animal outcomes.

Could that be because fundraising is AWLA’s top priority, and saving homeless animals comes second?

I think this is an endemic problem when a private SPCA, humane society, or animal-welfare league handles animal control and manages an open-admission shelter under contract with a municipal government. The league (or SPCA, or HS) views every action it takes through the lens of how it might affect fundraising efforts.

Animals successfully placed in adoptive homes help the league generate contributions by providing happy-ending anecdotes and adding potential donors (the adopters) to the mailing list. But animals the league can’t find homes for — and ultimately kills instead — represent failure. If publicized, these killings diminish the league’s reputation and undermine charitable contributions. So it’s no surprise that happy endings are trumpeted on the league’s website and in newsletters sent to donors, while euthanasia statistics are buried in obscure tables, if they’re provided at all.

Domino is off-view at AWLA. What happens next?

Why doesn’t the league encourage rescue groups to take animals that it can’t or won’t adopt out? As municipally-run shelters have learned, the best way to get the attention of resource-constrained local rescue groups is to broadcast an e-mail with a picture of Rosie the coonhound saying “Rosie’s time is up tomorrow! Can anyone PLEASE give her another chance?”

If the league did that, its fundraising appeals would trigger cognitive dissonance. They would be heard in the context of stories about death-row dogs being pulled from the league-managed shelter, rehabilitated by a rescue group, and adopted into a loving home… anecdotes demonstrating that due to their willingness to invest time and money, the rescue groups were succeeding where the league had failed. Why wouldn’t the charitable contribtutions then start swinging toward the rescue groups instead of the league?

Taken to an extreme, if rescue groups were given access to all stray and surrendered cats and dogs received by the league’s open-admission shelter, maybe a network of these groups would eventually pull all the healthy and treatable animals, leaving the league essentially responsible for animal control and euthanasia of the least adoptable animals. That’s a hard story to sell to potential donors.

So at some level, non-profits that handle animal control and manage an open-admission shelter have an incentive to hold rescue organizations at arm’s length, and to simultaneously hide statistics on the number of animals they end up killing.

By contrast, an open-admission shelter funded entirely by the municipal government doesn’t pursue charitable contributions, so it doesn’t have the same motivation to hide euthanasia statistics. It can blast out Rosie’s picture with the caption “only three days left!” to spur a response from rescue groups that already have their hands full.

Knowing that it has limited ability to find homes for the animals in its care, a municipal shelter has every incentive to offer animals to any rescue group willing to take them; each cat or dog pulled is one fewer animal the shelter has to care for, or eventually kill. The municipal shelter doesn’t have to worry that transferring an animal might also mean transferring a possible happy ending — and a possible stream of charitable contributions — along with it.

This perceived conflict between the goals of maximizing charitable contributions and saving as many homeless animals as possible is, in my view, a core reason that non-profits like the AWLAs of Arlington and Alexandria and the Montgomery County Humane Society save a much lower percentage of their homeless animals than organizations that collaborate closely with the municipal pound but don’t manage it — like Richmond SPCA and the Nevada Humane Society.

RSPCA and NHS don’t have to worry about killing unwanted surrenders or strays. Instead they focus on pulling as many animals as they can from the pound, then use proven programs like foster care and adoption events to find homes for them, on the assumption that if they save enough animals, the fundraising will take care of itself.

That seems like the best approach. Let the local government manage animal control and maintain the municipal shelter. And give a full spectrum of animal welfare organizations — from SPCAs and humane societies managing limited-admission shelters to foster-care networks to breed-specific rescue groups — access to all the stray and surrendered cats and dogs, so they can pull, nurture, and promote any animal.

Killing animals without giving anyone a chance to save them is inhumane. Every homeless cat or dog consigned to a shelter that kills unwanted animals at least deserves the chance to be seen by everyone who might be willing to help.

Posted in AWLA Policies, County Contract, DC Area Rescue Orgs, Principles | 3 Comments »

Vision

July 8, 2010 by shelterhawk

From the About Us page of the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals:

Founded in 2002, The Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals is a non-profit, public-private partnership of over 160 animal rescue groups and shelters working with the City of New York toward the day when no New York City dog or cat of reasonable health and temperament is killed merely because he or she does not have a home.

Since the Mayor’s Alliance was formed in 2002, the publicly-funded Animal Care and Control of New York City has received roughly 40,000 homeless cats and dogs each year — and managed to cut its euthanization rate for cats and dogs by more than half, thanks to its partnership with the Mayor’s Alliance.

According to ShelterWatch.org, NYACC and AWLA now have almost identical live-release rates for homeless dogs (68.8% for AWLA, 68.7% for NYACC.) But AWLA has made no progress on its live-release rate since 2006, so NYACC should surpass AWLA this year as it continues working toward the Mayor's Alliance goal of making NYC a no-kill community by 2015.

Here are links to the Mayor’s Alliance 2009 progress report, and a recent edition of their E-Newsletter.

The essential difference between organizations like those participating in the Mayor’s Alliance in New York (or in similar alliances in San Diego, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and elsewhere) and municipally-funded non-profits like AWLA (Arlington), AWLA (Alexandria), and the Montgomery County Humane Society is one of vision, commitment, and effort on behalf of homeless animals.

Open-admission shelters in New York and other forward-looking cities have it, while their counterparts in the affluent suburbs of Washington, DC still do not.

Posted in Principles, Yardsticks | Leave a Comment »

Out of the Frying Pan…

June 19, 2010 by shelterhawk

Last weekend AWLA transferred five of its dogs to Loudoun County Animal Control. Four of them — Buddy, Buttercup, Hannah, and Sophera — are currently listed as adoptable on the LCAC website. All four had been “on view” at AWLA for about six weeks without attracting adopters.

To its credit, AWLA first offered these dogs to two local rescue organizations, but both were at full capacity. While each group had recently accepted a difficult dog from AWLA, they both work primarily with rural high-kill shelters. That’s partially out of necessity, because until recently AWLA had no interest in transferring its dogs to rescue groups. If AWLA now wants to work with non-breed-specific rescue organizations, it needs to cast a wider net.

As we’ve noted before, AWLA has other options it could pursue for its long-tenured dogs. It could promote them by staging adoption events and taking them out into the community, by posting flyers in neighborhood venues, and by advertising them online. And it could circulate them through its own network of foster homes — if AWLA made the effort to develop a network of dog fosterers, the way the rescue organizations do. Both of these approaches are used by the country’s most successful open-admission shelters.

Instead, AWLA transferred five dogs to the Loudoun County shelter. According to ShelterWatch, here’s how LCAC’s kill rate for homeless dogs in 2009 compared to that of three similarly-sized open-admission shelters.

 
Homeless dogs, 2009StateOutcomesKilled
Tompkins County SPCANY3768.2%
City of Montrose Animal ControlCO41211.2%
Culpeper County Animal ControlVA37613.5%
Loudoun County Animal ControlVA45754.3%
 

Out of 39 shelters listed on ShelterWatch, LCAC ranked 36th; only three shelters killed a higher percentage of their dogs.

Let’s hope Buddy, Buttercup, Hannah, and Sophera make it out of the Loudoun shelter alive. If they don’t, AWLA should be considered complicit in their deaths.

Posted in AWLA Stories, DC Area Rescue Orgs, Yardsticks | 3 Comments »

How They Did It

June 15, 2010 by shelterhawk

After holding management positions at progressive animal-rescue organizations Best Friends Animal Society and Alley Cat Allies, Bonney Brown joined the Nevada Humane Society as Executive Director in 2006. She and the NHS Board were determined to convert NHS from an open-admission shelter that killed most of the homeless animals it received into an open-admission shelter with one of the country’s highest live-release rates.

This brochure summarizes how they did it.

AWLA could use the ten steps listed as a blueprint for how to improve its own results. While all of the steps are important, these two seem especially relevant to AWLA:

3. Invest time and assets in lifesaving. Review every program in terms of its lifesaving impact. If a given program did not significantly and immediately contribute to saving lives, then we gave a hard look at letting it go. Though a program may be a nice thing to do, until we are saving all the animals that can be saved, we have a responsibility to ensure that we focus our resources and attention on creating a true safety net for homeless animals of the community — not next year, but right now.

We… eliminated several humane education projects in order to focus on getting the community immediately involved in saving lives.

For AWLA this could mean scrapping non-lifesaving programs like dog-manners classes and Kids Camp, and choosing instead to host adoption events in concert with rescue organizations or to expand its foster program to include adult dogs and cats.

4. Inspire and Involve the Community. Make a public declaration. While the idea of making a public declaration to become a no-kill community may be intimidating, the declaration itself actually has a powerful effect. Not only does it focus your internal efforts on the no-kill community goal, but it helps inspire and energize the community to support what you do.

To inspire animal lovers to get involved, you need to invite them to be part of something big, exciting, and worth the effort. So declaring an all-out effort to create a no-kill community is an important step in getting the support you need to make it happen.

This is the leap of faith that AWLA’s next Executive Director must already understand or be willing to make. Asking more of the community — asking it to help AWLA make Arlington a national leader in its treatment of homeless animals — will unleash a flood of untapped effort and resources. If AWLA challenges Arlington residents to help it save every homeless animal it receives, and then focuses its efforts on productively managing an army of volunteers, it won’t need to spend its time on fundraising events like Walk for the Animals and Catsino Night.

People like to associate with and contribute to winning organizations. If AWLA becomes one, the fundraising will take care of itself.

Posted in Principles, Yardsticks | 1 Comment »

Transparency

June 4, 2010 by shelterhawk

Comments we’ve received from an AWLA volunteer on our last two posts suggest that maybe we’ve been too optimistic about the rate at which AWLA is improving its efforts on behalf of homeless animals. A culture of stonewalling and inertia is hard to change, especially when most of the management team responsible for it remains in place.

How will we know when AWLA shifts its raison d’etre to saving as many homeless animals as it can from whatever its top priority is now (fundraising?)

1. AWLA will actively recruit foster homes for its long-tenured cats and dogs, not just its kittens and puppies.

2. AWLA will use its ample resources to pull more dogs from high-kill shelters, and then involve its dogs in community events on a regular basis.

3. Dogs like Leo won’t be stashed in off-view kennels for weeks on end, where adopters can’t meet them and volunteers are prohibited from walking them.

4. AWLA will implement Oreo’s Law.

5. And AWLA will commit itself to outcomes transparency for its homeless animals.

Here’s what transparency looks like at the Humane Society of Berks County in Reading, PA.

HSBC has fewer resources than AWLA, but it handles more cats and dogs and works much harder on behalf of those animals. And it encourages feedback and suggestions from its volunteers and constituents. If you spend 15 or 20 minutes comparing the AWLA and HSBC websites, you’ll realize that the motivations of the two organizations are fundamentally different.

AWLA could learn a lot from peers like this. Let’s hope its next Executive Director agrees.

Posted in AWLA Policies, Principles, Yardsticks | 12 Comments »

Glimmers of Hope

May 25, 2010 by shelterhawk

Earlier this week, AWLA invited its volunteers to offer feedback and suggestions at an evening meeting hosted by the President of its Board of Directors. To anyone but an experienced AWLA volunteer, this gesture might sound unremarkable, but it actually represents a profound break with AWLA’s culture of the past several years.

As recently as a few months ago, volunteers (kitten fosterers for example) were told not to seek help or suggestions from each other when problems arose, but to interact exclusively with the volunteer coordinator — despite the fact that the volunteer coordinator was often unable or unwilling to respond in a timely fashion.

Suggestions or critiques about volunteer programs were discouraged, and the most experienced and knowledgable volunteers were periodically marginalized or dismissed — presumably because they might point out shortcomings in AWLA’s modus operandi.

It would be nice to think that the arrival of a new Executive Director will allow AWLA to reboot its culture, and that the new ED will replace any staffers too invested in AWLA’s traditional circle-the-wagons mentality. We’ll see. This week’s meeting with volunteers provides a glimmer of hope.

Other AWLA critics are hopeful too. Here’s an excerpt from the letter that Arlington-based animal-welfare advocate Debbie Marson sent to AWLA’s Board President last week:

…I wanted to let you know that AWLA released a dog, Justice, to me last week. He is a gorgeous German Shorthaired Pointer mix. He had been in the shelter for about two months and [redacted] contacted A Forever Home (ed: a local rescue organization) to see if we could take him. I was really pleased that she contacted us. It looked like AWLA stopped working with AFH about a year and a half ago. I’m glad that we are working together again.


FYI, Justice is doing great. My pack of dogs are teaching him the life skills he needs. I don’t want to jinx anything, but I do have a pending application on him and will let you know if it goes through.

Also, I want to applaud you and the shelter for some significant events recently. First, I learned that AWLA treated a heartworm-positive dog and she is now better and is available for adoption. She was offered to a rescue group (not AFH) several months ago but they could not afford her treatment. We asked if AWLA would even split the cost of treatment with us and Kay said “no”. The rescue group tried to find a way to take her and I had a friend who was willing to foster her, but it never happened. I just learned that AWLA kept that dog and gave her the treatment she needed. I was VERY glad to see that AWLA saved this girl’s life.

Second, it looks like the kennels have had a lot more dogs than last year. I watch the site regularly and last year it was common to see an average of 5-7 dogs a day there. Now it looks like about 12-15. It appears that AWLA is giving the dogs more of a chance.

I’m truly grateful for these steps.

Debbie

Whether AWLA’s recent willingness to listen to its volunteers and begin collaborating with rescue groups is due to the online criticism the organization has received, to the ongoing change in leadership, or to something else, it’s cause for optimism.

The potential for AWLA to emulate the country’s most successful animal shelters remains, and we hope AWLA’s Board hires an Executive Director who is committed to meeting the standard set by shelter directors in Tompkins County, Charlottesville-Albemarle, Richmond, Reno, Boulder and elsewhere.

Posted in AWLA Policies, AWLA Stories, DC Area Rescue Orgs | 5 Comments »

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