The September numbers are in for KC Pet Project -- and our challenge of taking over an open-admission municipal shelter and trying to turn it into a No Kill community shelter. For those of you not familiar with KCPP, we took over the city contract on the Kansas City, MO animal shelter in January, 2012. Until that point, the shelter had about a 65% live release rate, and we've been working to improve on that number.
It's been a challenging month on a lot of levels, but our team, staff, volunteers and rescue partners, continue to show great progress and fortitude.
For the month, we did 280 adoptions, had 99 RTOs and 110 animals transferred to area rescue groups -- for a total of 489 animals saved for the month.
Our live release rate for September was 91% -- marking the 3rd consecutive month of being over 90%.
Our live release rate on the year is 84% -- 86% for dogs, 77% for cats. We've done 2,140 total adoptions on the year and created 4,186 total positive outcomes. This is more than 1,000 more positive outcomes than there were in this shelter through the first 9 months of the year in 2011.
I'll be honest, our cat numbers are probably never going to be in the 90% range. We are very lucky in Kansas City that our animal control officers do not actively seek to bring in cats -- however, about 36% of our cats come in via animal control. The only reason these cats come to us is in situations such as hoarding cases (which are rare) and when animals are badly injured or diseased in the community. So a pretty significant percent of our cats come in in situations where they just can't be saved.
We're continuing to make progress here in KC. It's a challenge to keep up in a shelter that is very small and not designed for optimal life-saving. But it can, and is, being done.
A huge kudos goes out to our hardworking staff, volunteers and rescue partners who have all contributed immensely to our success.
Congratulations on a great month.
Posted by: Jan | October 05, 2012 at 03:53 PM