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« The link between ignorance and irrational fear | Main | Three dog bite related fatalities from the past couple of weeks »

December 23, 2013

Comments

Friends of Newark NJ Animal Shelter

I could not agree more. Simply put you need to decrease your length of stay to ensure your intakes do not exceed your outcomes. Some shelters with spectacular leaders can pull it off on the fly, but I suspect most shelters would need to start building programs resulting in short lengths of stay. Exceptions would be shelters who already pretty close to no-kill threshold.

It would be quite interesting to hear what programs drive KC Pet Project's and successful shelter very impressive length of stay figures.

Brent

Newark,

I agree that it does take time to build some of the programs. We certainly were less efficient and had fewer options for them 20 months ago than we do now at our place.

Our success is largely built on increasing adoption traffic -- building traffic to the main shelter (and much of that has been done through social media, and making our old shelter seem like a better environment to adopt from that it would have been previously). We also do a lot of adoption specials and events at the shelter.

We then opened up a 7 day a week satellite adoption facility to provide yet another option for people who may be overwhelmed by the "shelter" adoption experience. Plus, it's in a high profile area that serves a different geography than our main shelter.

It's been a process, but maximizing the number of people who are exposed to your pets is critical. You can't sit back and wait for people to find them.

www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000732829259

In researching I have done, I found out the community of Berkeley set out in the 1970s to become no kill and achieved it in 2002. Everything you say is helpful but I would hope you add spay and neuter outreach and assistance programs, targeting the specific animals most likely to overwhelm a shelters's resources. In general that is pitbull type dogs and cats in my community. Preventing births of kittens will help in finding cats homes. There is still a need for spay and neuter in many communities and outreach is needed to get to the people who need assistance. When a shelter looks at which animals they are euthanizing, which is unlikely to be bichons or golden retrievers, they should look at preventing the creation of these animals in the first place. Best wishes with your KC shelter's continued success.

Randy

You have hit the nail on the head! Unless your shelter has infinite capacity (and none do) then you have to either reduce intakes or increase outcomes. Its not complicated! There are techniques for both as you know but too lengthy to go into here. Unfortunately, simply running around in an emotional dizzy screaming out "no kill now" or trying to "mandate" no kill without a plan while perhaps emotionally fulfilling to some actually works against the goal since it almost guarantees disaster for the effort and gives it a bad name. Unfortunately too there are enough examples of bad implementation out there under the NK name that it diminishes the actual goal of trying to reduce EU and find every animal a home.

TINA MARIE HOFFMAN

I dream of seeing the day when all shelters become a NO KILL! No animal deserves to die! God created them, so who really has the right to kill them, just because they are overpopulated? If the human race is overpopulated, do you think GOD would want to kill us? Of course not! He loves us all, like He does His creatures.

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