A formal grievance filed with the board this week said injured or sick animals went untreated; dogs were jammed in tiny, filthy cages; and at least one botched euthanasia left a cat to languish in agony for hours.

Click here to read the full story at the Indianapolis Star. You can attend tonight’s board meeting from 6pm-7pm at 2600 South Harding St., or watch it and past board meetings online or on TV on Channel 16.

When: Saturday, August 16, 2008
Where: Valparaiso University Union, 1400 Chapel Dr., Valparaiso, IN 46383
Time: 6 pm

Sponsored by: People for Animal Welfare, Inc.

Animal welfare organizations are often the first to suffer when people have less money to give. American Public Media’s Marketplace radio program visited the Washington Animal Rescue League to find out how economic circumstances have impacted the animal shelter: as foreclosures go up, so do pet surrenders. Listen to the story, and discuss how the economy is impacting animal welfare in your area by leaving a comment at Indy Animal Media.

In this episode of the IAM podcast, Nathan Winograd tells us about his experience with the San Francisco SPCA, and how moving the shelter — and city — to No Kill brought in more money than ever before. Also, if you’re interested in the No Kill movement but don’t know how to make a difference, Winograd shares some tips.

We hope this series with Nathan Winograd has provided some food for thought; please leave a comment about No Kill and animal sheltering to share with other listeners. And as always, we’re looking for great topics for future podcasts. Are you an animal welfare expert with knowledge and experience to share? Do you know someone who invests their time working for the betterment of animals? Send us an email!

Interview with Nathan Winograd: Part IV

IAM: It’s been around in the news here quite often that the Humane Society is turning away strays – can an organization like that still move to No Kill and keep their high-profile brand? Or should money currently used to market the organization only be used to directly save lives? How can the motives of, say, spending money for brand awareness versus saving lives be reconciled?

Winograd: The irony is that if the Humane Society were to lead the No Kill endeavor in Indianapolis, they would have more money than they knew what to do with. When San Francisco started the march towards No Kill, the SPCA there was 90 days from bankruptcy. It was literally 90 days away from closing its doors forever. It didn’t spend money on brand awareness. It didn’t say “give us money so we can save lives.” It started to save lives. It first did good things for animals, then it told people about it, and it asked for their help.

When I left San Francisco in 2000, we had an $8 million/year budget, and $50 million in the bank. We got that money as a byproduct of all the good work we were doing to save the lives of animals. It wasn’t the cause of the lifesaving, it was the byproduct, the support that people flocked to us because they knew when they gave us money it would be used to save the lives of animals. Not just what we call the “cute and cuddlies,” but what, again, I affectionately call the old & uglies. And to sweep animals under the rug because they don’t meet your misinformed, restrictive, meaningless, unfair definition of adoptable is unfair to all the savable animals losing their lives at Animal Care and Control.

In fact when I walked through Animal Care and Control today, I saw a tremendous number of friendly, cute animals of all shapes, sizes and colors that should have filled the empty cages I saw at the Humane Society. And if that occurred, and the Humane Society led the movement, there would be no need to spend money on brand awareness. Everybody would know who the Humane Society was, because what it would be would be was the leader of the No Kill revolution, which I have no doubt that people in Indianapolis would flock to support.

IAM: I’m still rather new to the idea of No Kill, and I know many people who would probably assume that all shelters operate under a policy of wanting to kill as few animals as possible. How can the average animal lover, who might not know much about the history of agencies such as the ASPCA and Humane Society of the United States, make a change in their community towards No Kill?

Winograd: Well, first of all, they need to educate themselves, and there are organizations like your own and Move to Act in the community that sort of lay an accurate portrayal of what’s happening in terms of the life and death calculus for animals that enter Indianapolis shelters.

One, it starts with knowing what the problem is, and knowing which agencies are doing their part to solve the problem, and which agencies are content to pass the blame to others and continue business as usual.

The second part of it is to get involved. One of my favorite stories, and it’s a story I tell in my book Redemption, is you look at Fulton County, Georgia, where the shelter was killing over 90% of all the dogs and cats coming through the facility. And two people, regular citizens who loved dogs and cats and found out about this and were outraged, decided they weren’t going to tolerate this any more. So they started attending the county board of supervisors’ meetings, and saying “we’ve got to do better. There has to be a better way.” And it took some time, and it took a lot of energy, but at the end of the day, the county commissioners finally backed down, and they formed their own humane society – I don’t think people need to do this – and took over sheltering operations. And they haven’t killed a single puppy or kitten since the day they took over. And again, virtually overnight like the experiences of Reno, Charlottesville and Tompkins, they reduced killing by 50%. So one or two people can make a huge difference in the lives of the animals.

More globally, we don’t know who the No Kill leaders of tomorrow are going to be, and I would argue that anybody with a passion for animals, a commitment to saving lives, and any requisite skill sets that might be applied to the shelter environment: they could be web-savvy and help promote the animals on the internet. They can be carpenters and help build socialization pens for animals in shelters. I mean, there’s a whole host of skills that people can take from what they’re currently doing to the shelter environment, and you’d quickly achieve the kinds of results that some of these more progressive shelters are achieving, and you could do it very, very quickly. So the one thing after getting informed, is I encourage people to jump in with both feet and make a lifesaving difference to animals in their community.

IAM: Anything else you’d like to share?

Winograd: We can make this happen, and we can make it happen very, very quickly. If all shelters have the will and desire to embrace this new approach in sheltering, I think we could be a No Kill nation today. Unfortunately, right now in the United States, there are about 5,000 or 6,000 shelter directors who are mired in old ways of doing business, who are thwarting the will of the 100-plus-million dog and cat lovers in the United States. And so we’ve got numbers on our side, and we’ve got the hearts and minds of the citizens on our side, and we spend billions on our animals and we give billions more to these animal-related charities. These are our organizations, and we need to take them back.

IAM: Nathan Winograd, thank you very much for your time!

Winograd: It’s my pleasure.

There are many organizations who’ve picked up in areas where HSI has dropped the ball (check out the links to the left), but roughly 40 animals are killed in Indianapolis every day, many of whom are likely adoptable. So with a positive vision for animals in mind, how do you think citizens and animal welfare groups in and around Indianapolis can reconcile their differences with HSI to move forward to act for the animals? Leave your comments and share your opinions about the future of animal welfare in Indy.

Also, be sure to check back this weekend (or sign up for email updates, subscribe to the RSS feed or the Indy Animal Media podcast) to hear or read the final installment of the Nathan Winograd interview series on No Kill. And if you have an idea for future shows, let us know! We’re always looking for interesting people to talk to (and pets to profile!)

Finally, check out videos of just some of the dogs available for adoption at Indianapolis Animal Care and Control at our sister site, adoptananimal.org and share with your friends, family and coworkers.

This episode of the Indy Animal Media podcast (which you can listen to by clicking the play button above, or by downloading it to your computer in MP3 or M4A format), is the third in a four-part series of an interview with Nathan Winograd, director of the No Kill Advocacy Center and author of Redemption: the Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America.

In this episode, Winograd talks about:

* what makes a No Kill city like Reno different from a city with traditional sheltering like Indianapolis
* how the move to No Kill can be expedited
* how long such a move might take.

If you’d like to read this portion of the interview series, you’ll find the text below. Be sure to subscribe to the IAM podcast by clicking a link to the upper left of the page: you can subscribe to updates via email, via your favorite RSS feed reader, via iTunes, or even simply bookmark the site in your browser and come back to it regularly. And if you have comments on this episode, please let us know. We’d love to hear your opinions!

In the next episode of Indy Animal Media, find out how going No Kill brought plenty of money to the San Francisco SPCA and how it can do the same for your local shelter. Also, Winograd tells us how you can help your city move to No Kill.

What’s your opinion about your local animal shelter? Are they doing enough to save animals? Leave a comment to share your opinion!

Be notified via email when the next part of this series comes out by clicking here to subscribe to email updates. Or use one of the services in the menu to the upper left to stay up-to-date.

Have an idea for a future episode? Click “Contact Us” at the top of the page to let us know!

Interview with Nathan Winograd: Part III

IAM: Do you know if Indianapolis’s current animal control policies (through the Humane Society of Indianapolis and IACC) are helpful in moving the city towards No Kill?

Winograd: Let me put it his way. Let’s compare Indianapolis, which has a population of over 800,000, with Reno, Nevada – Washoe County. Washoe County has a population of just over 400,000, so it has half the population of Indianapolis. They take in anywhere between 16- and 18,000 dogs and cats. So despite half the population, they’re taking roughly the same number of dogs and cats that you are here. And yet they’re saving 92% of all the dogs and 78% of all the cats, where the vast majority of animals are dying in Indianapolis shelters. What is the difference? The only difference between Washoe County and Indianapolis are the choices being made by the leaders of the large shelters, whereas the leaders in Washoe County have not just embraced the No Kill philosophy, but they’ve embraced the programs and services that save lives.

Programs like making Pit Bulls available for adoption rather than killing. Like trap-neuter-return for feral cats. They’ve opened up their shelters to foster parents, to volunteers. Because, like most communities, their shelters are located in a remote part of the city, away from the population centers, away from people work live and play, they take their animals off site to those population centers 7 days a week. They have friendly adoption hours into the evening and all weekend. They heavily promote their animals. It’s truly a welcoming environment.

One of the things I found somewhat disappointing, and really it makes a world of difference, is when you walk into Animal Care and Control, the first thing you’re greeted with are 5 or 6 signs at the front door telling you everything you can’t do: you can’t use their phone, you can’t use their bathroom, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. It’s not very welcoming.

Then the animals are kept under lock and key. So to go in, you literally need to be escorted, whereas if you walk into shelters in Washoe County, it’s wide open, you’re allowed to come in and play with the animals, you’re encouraged to play with the animals, you’re encouraged to adopt the animals.

At the end of the day, one of the things we’ve seen around the country is that the ability to significantly reduce the death rate on the order of 50% in one year, 60%, 75% happened when longstanding directors in these communities were replaced by newcomers to animal control: people with a passion for saving lives and the desire to see it through, not just by saying “we support No Kill,” but by thoroughly implementing the programs. And death rates declined significantly in those communities. San Francisco would still be a bloodbath if it wasn’t for Richard Avanzino. Tompkins would still be a bloodbath if the old director wasn’t replaced. Charlottesville would still be a bloodbath if their 20-year veteran wasn’t replaced with a newcomer to animal control. Reno, Nevada would still be killing the vast majority of animals.

If there’s a central lesson here, it’s that lifesaving is made or broken by the leaders of those shelters. I’d come here and was hoping I’d be able to meet with the shelter directors and do an evaluation of the shelter and help them move significantly towards lifesaving; unfortunately it didn’t play out that way. But I believe that if the leaders of the two large shelters in the community embrace this philosophy, follow through with the programs and services that save lives, that you would have the level of lifesaving that Reno, Nevada does, and because you have twice the population, it should be easier than it is in Reno, Nevada. And they did it in less than one year.

IAM: If a place like Indianapolis’s policies regarding homeless animals are still killing thousands of animals annually, how can the move to No Kill be expedited? How long might a typical transformation to No Kill take a city like Indianapolis?

Winograd: I’m not patting myself on the back here, but I ran two of the most successful shelters in the most successful communities in the country. I’ve been helping shelters in communities nationwide reduce their rates of shelter killing significantly, and Move to Act has brought me to this community to do intensive how-to seminars of all these different programs so that local shelters can benefit from the success in other communities. Unfortunately, the representation from the two large shelters isn’t what it should be.

And here’s the irony: when San Francisco achieved success, you would have thought that because shelter killing was still happening elsewhere in the country, everywhere else, that shelter directors would’ve sent teams to San Francisco to find out how we did it, to bring back with them the cure for the disease of shelter killing that had been discovered in San Francisco. But that didn’t happen, even though that’s how I believe people dedicated to saving lives are ethically compelled to act.

And here we are in Indianapolis, we’ve got 120 people from rescue groups and other organizations, and even shelter directors from outside Indiana, coming to learn how to reduce killing in their community, and the two directors from the two largest shelters have no intention of being present. To me, that speaks volumes about the commitment towards lifesaving that is occurring in Indianapolis. So all I would do is remind the public that you are footing the bill for the killing: you’re paying for it with your tax dollars, and you’re paying for it with your donations or philanthropy.

The killing is being done in your name, because these organizations represent the citizens of Indianapolis. You’re being blamed for the killing because of the fault that “belongs to the public rather than the shelters.” But you’re not paying the ultimate price. That ultimate price is being paid by the animals who are unfortunate enough to enter a shelter that has not embraced either the No Kill philosophy or comprehensively implemented the programs that make No Kill possible. And if those organizations don’t reflect your values, you have to reclaim those institutions and you have to demand accountability and results. In the case of the municipal shelter, from your city council or county commissioners. In the case of the private shelters, you need to attend board of directors’ meetings and say “this does not represent the compassion that exists in this community. Other communities are achieving greater success with less resources and a ‘bigger problem.’” Remember that Reno’s taking in twice the #’s per capita than you are in Indianapolis, and yet they’re saving 92% of the dogs and almost 80% of the cats, and they did it in less than a year. So if they can do it in less than a year with twice the problem, Indianapolis should be able to do it virtually over night.

The second episode of the Indy Animal Media podcast (which you can listen to by clicking the play button above, or by downloading it to your computer in MP3 or M4A format), is the second in a four-part series of an interview with Nathan Winograd, director of the No Kill Advocacy Center and author of Redemption: the Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America (click here to check out the first part of the interview if you missed it.) If you’re an animal lover, an animal shelter employee or volunteer, if you donate to animal welfare organizations such as the ASPCA, the Humane Society of the United States, or PETA, or even if you’re simply a taxpayer, you’ll want to listen.

In this episode, Winograd shares his opinions on:

• why No Kill shelters aren’t more widespread
• purebred cat and dog breeders
• breed discrimination towards bully breeds such as Pit Bulls, and how the current state of animal welfare is failing them.

If you’d like to read this portion of the interview, you’ll find the text below. Be sure to subscribe to the IAM podcast by clicking a link to the upper left of the page: you can subscribe to updates via email, via your favorite RSS feed reader, via iTunes, or even simply bookmark the site in your browser and come back to it regularly. And if you have comments on this episode, please let us know: we know this is quite the controversial topic, and we’d love to hear your opinions!

In the next episode of Indy Animal Media, find out if Indianapolis is moving in a direction to save the lives of more dogs and cats, and what it and other cities can do to stop needless killing. Also, Nathan Winograd tells us how long does it takes a city to go to No Kill.

What’s your opinion about your local animal shelter? Are they doing enough to save animals? Leave a comment to share your opinion!

Be notified via email when the next part of this series comes out by clicking here to subscribe to email updates. Or use one of the services in the menu to the upper left to stay up-to-date.

Interview with Nathan Winograd: Part II
IAM: Why isn’t No Kill more widespread? Is it too time-consuming? Expensive? Are shelter/animal control directors too lazy to implement new systems and policies?

Winograd: I think there’s a handful of reasons. For one, remember, we’re living in a movement that has never had accountability thrust upon it because we’ve always had somebody else to blame. So a shelter director can kill the majority of animals in the shelter and no one’s going to say “you’re not doing a good job,” because that person is saying “it’s not my fault, it’s the irresponsible public’s fault.” If I could summarize the fundamental basis of No Kill in one word, it is accountability. It is rather than doing what we’ve always done, you know the same old programs that haven’t eliminated the killing, we need to make sure that shelter directors are held accountable to results. And I think that frightens a lot of directors, because some of them are making six figures, they’re well-respected people in their community, they’re pillars in their own movement and they’re called upon to be experts and lead workshops at these national conferences by the large multi-million-dollar animal protection organizations. And all that is being threatened when someone says “you’re going to be judged on one thing and one thing only: how many lives you’ve saved. And that is going to be the basis of how we hold you accountable and the esteem that you’re held in the community.” And a lot of shelter directors don’t want that.

I think another part of the reasoning here is guilt: if the shelter directors have to accept the fact that the killing they’ve been doing was unnecessary, and unnecessary because they refuse to put in place programs and services that would eliminate the “need to kill,” then they become culpable for causing the barrels to fill, day after day, with furry bodies. And I don’t know that a lot of people – shelter directors, particularly people who’ve been in the business for 10 or 20 years – want to look in that direction. But at the end of the day, I think it comes down to a failure of caring. The No Kill philosophy is relatively new in this movement, but it’s been around for better than a decade. And if shelter directors were internally motivated by truly wanting to save lives, the model on how to do that has been around for about 14 years. It started in San Francisco, it spread to upstate New York, we’ve done it in the north, we’ve done it in the south, in urban and rural, in cities big and small, in blue states and red states. There’s really no excuse for doing that, and for shelter directors refusing to modernize and adopt the programs and services that eliminate the need for killing.

The analogy that I often use is that it would be like a doctor refusing to keep pace with the changing face of medicine, and treating for example pneumonia with bloodletting and leaches and magical incantations instead of using antibiotics and fluid therapy and rest. And so a shelter director that refuses to modernize their operations, that refuses to keep pace with the changing pace of sheltering, we should no more tolerate that than we would a medical doctor that’s practicing outdated and therefore dangerous medicine, particularly because in both cases there are lives at stake – lives who would be lost in a totally needless way.

IAM: Are purebred dog and cat breeders culpable at all for the killing rates in cities without No Kill shelters?

Winograd: I think as long as animals are dying in shelter, that’s where the supply of animals should come from. But when you’re talking about culpability, at the end of the day, if in fact all shelters who embrace the No Kill philosophy and the programs & services that make it possible, if they would eliminate the killing of all the savable animals, as I think they can, but the choices by the leaders who run them don’t allow it, then that’s truly where culpability lies. I’m not saying that the person who allows their cat to have litter after litter and then surrenders those kittens to their local kill shelter doesn’t bear the onus of that death. But once those animals cross the counter, the threshold, where the director can save or kill these animals depending on the choices he or she makes, that really is – to me – where culpability lies. And I think if we want to make an impact and save the vast majority of animals, that is really where our reform efforts should be focused. Because, let me put in perspective for you: in San Francisco, in Tompkins County, Charlottesville Virginia, Reno Nevada, Ivins City Utah and elsewhere, they’ve managed to save — in San Francisco 85%, these other communities — in excess of 90% — of all impounded animals. That doesn’t mean “adoptable animals” by any self-serving, nonsensical definitions. That means of all animals. And so what these communities, very divergent communities, have proved, is that well over 90% of all impounded dogs and cats are savable and can be placed in homes. And if every shelter director embraced the No Kill philosophy and the programs and services that make it possible, and achieve the same level of success as these other communities, of the 5 millions dogs and cats killed in shelters last year, 4 and a half million would still be walking around this earth today. That is a huge amount of needless lives lost, and that is where we should focus our efforts at reform. Once we save all those animals, then sure, we can open up the discussion to “where can we further save lives out in the community?” But at this point I think it’s a distraction.

IAM: Earlier you mentioned you have two pit-lab mixes. As most people know, Pit Bulls are kind of the evil villain in the dog world right now. You’ve said that the animal protection movement is failing Pit Bulls, and you’ve spoken out against anti-Pit-Bull policies. However, many people believe that Pits and other ‘bully breeds’ exist for one thing only: to fight and kill. Is this true? And why should these quote unquote ‘bullies’ be protected from euthanasia?

Winograd: Well, for one, I think we do a great disservice in this movement because a lot of the time we operate on dogma, we operate on things that we think are true but we don’t have the data to bear it out.

When I was in Tompkins county, we saved 93% of all the dogs, and if you were to isolate all the dogs we call “Pit Bulls”, we saved about 86% - a slightly lower number, but still almost 9 out of 10 Pit Bulls. In other words, what we found was that about 9 out of 10 Pit Bulls were friendly to kids, were friendly to cats, and were friendly to dogs. And that’s not just unique to Tompkins County. If you look at Charlottesville, Virginia, for example, on any given year anywhere from between 45 to 55% of the dogs they take in are Pits or Pit mixes, yet they’re saving 92% of all the dogs coming through their open-admission animal-control shelter.

If you look at national temperament testing results, nationally for Pit Bulls, 86.6% are found to be friendly. Incidentally, that is a pass rate that’s higher than the Golden Retriever. And so we need to sort of break through the fog and the mythology around the viciousness of Pit Bulls, because historically, before they became the “thug’s dog of choice,” they had a reputation as a family-friendly breed of dog, and in fact after World War II, they were the most popular dog in America for families. And so it’s not the dog.

I think even if we were to do it in a benign way, say “well no one wants them, they’ve got a bad reputation, unfortunately they’ve been trained for fighting,” the end result is the same: we’re essentially calling for the mass slaughter of Pit Bulls in shelters, when experience shows that 9 out of 10 of them can be adopted, and adopted into families with kids, with cats and with other dogs. And so we are truly, in my view, failing them as a movement.

And when you look at overall dog issues in the country, we already require dogs to be licensed with the local animal control shelter or local government. We already have leash laws that prevent dogs from being in most parts of the community. We already have dog limit laws that say “you can only care for a small number of dogs, and we won’t let you have any more.” We have dangerous dog laws that address the specific behavior in case dogs act in anti-social ways. We allow animal control officers to seize & destroy dogs that they themselves deem to be a nuisance, and in many states we don’t allow independent review of that decision. So we’ve already been regulating all dogs, including Pit Bulls, incredibly heavily.

And when you look at bite-rate statistics in the country, it’s a very, very small number. Even though there’s been an explosion in the number of dogs in the United States in the last 20 or 30 years, the number of (dog-caused human) fatalities has not changed. The number of dog bites has not changed. So dogs rarely bite, and when they do bite, they don’t even bite very hard: 92% of all bites result in no injury. In fact, the vast majority of them can’t even be constituted to be considered force: it’s essentially the dog putting their mouth and touching the skin without piercing the skin. If you look at the other 7.5%, it’s considered the lowest class of injury possible: you can barely even see it. So they rarely bite; when they do they don’t bite hard. And most of the time when they’re biting, it’s really the dog protecting themselves from some provocation, or it’s many breeds of dog biting someone they know who provoked the dog. So regulating Pit Bulls or enacting breed-specific bans is geared to overkill by definition, since the majority of dog bites aren’t being done by Pit Bulls.

IAM: And overkill is basically killing more animals than is necessary?

Winograd: Exactly. And so you look at the policy of Indianapolis Animal Care and Control, and if this is a Pit Bull, they’re going down. And so you’re looking at 300 dogs being killed each and every month simply because they happen to belong to a stigmatized breed. Now, shelters are not supposed to hide behind media frenzy. Shelters are not supposed to hide behind perceptions that are not based on facts and reality. Shelters are supposed to increase the status of animals in society, and so shelters are the ones that should be leading the fight to reverse the unfair reputation of dogs that we call “Pit Bulls.” And they should be the ones to show the community how incredibly friendly these dogs can be.

In terms of my own dogs, and when you talk to other Pit Bull owners, they’ll tell you the same thing. One of the most fascinating characteristics of Pit Bulls is what I call “merger.” Pit Bulls think they’re lap dogs. They literally like to sit on your lap and sort of merge with you. They don’t want any separation between you and them, so they’ll snuggle – it’s almost like they want to crawl inside your skin and be a part of you. And that is a characteristic that I think is unique to the breed, and it shows how incredibly loving and friendly these dogs can be, and for a shelter to say we should kill them all simply because they might be at this point in history the thug’s dog of choice is blaming the victim rather than punishing the abusers.

Thanks for visiting IAM: speaking out for those who can’t!

The first episode of the Indy Animal Media podcast (which you can listen to by clicking the play button above, or download it to your computer), is the first in a four-part series of an interview with Nathan Winograd, director of the No Kill Advocacy Center and author of Redemption: the Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America. If you’re an animal lover, an animal shelter employee or volunteer, if you donate to animal welfare organizations, or if you’re simply a taxpayer, you might be interested in learning how the movement can help save more lives.

In this episode, Winograd discusses:

• the origins of the No Kill animal welfare movement
• how No Kill shelters are different from the majority of traditional humane societies and animal control organizations
• why the practice of No Kill is important and how it positively affects communities

If you’d like to read this portion of the interview, you’ll find the text below. Be sure to subscribe to the IAM podcast by clicking a link to the left of the page: you can subscribe via email, your favorite RSS feed reader, iTunes, or even simply bookmark the site. And if you have comments on this episodes, please let us know.

Special thanks to Warren Patitz of Move to Act for arranging this interview.

Interview with Nathan Winograd: Part I

IAM: I grew up in an animal-loving household with a basic menagerie of all kinds of animals: cats, dogs, reptiles, amphibians, what have you. Right now I have three dogs: two pit mixes – what I believe to be pit mixes – and a yellow lab and also a gecko. Can you tell me a bit about your pets?

Winograd: I can. My life is sort of like a Brady Bunch with animals. I had about 13 cats and met my wife and she had about 9 to 11 cats, depending on whether you call the ferals that she fed her cats or not. So when we met and combined our household, and at our peak we had 27 cats in our household. They were all what I affectionately call the old and uglies. All had medical problems and couldn’t be placed for one reason or another. We were both involved in animal rescue and kept the ones that were not placeable. Now we have two dogs, I call them pound dogs, but they are pit/lab mixes that I got from the shelter in San Francisco when I was there. We’re down to 9 cats, and when people hear we have 9 cats and think that’s quite a bit, for us that’s a walk in the park. Up until recently we had two hamsters; unfortunately they passed away. I also have two kids.

IAM: And everybody gets along?

Winograd: Everybody gets along, but like any family we have occasional spats, but we work through it.

IAM: For those not familiar with the No Kill movement, can you briefly tell us what the No Kill movement is and how you got involved?

Winograd: For well over a century in this country, we’ve been operating under the principle that the best we can do for homeless animals is to adopt a precious few and kill the rest, although we say we do that humanely.

It really started In the mid-1990’s in San Francisco. We’ve challenged that notion. In 1994, San Francisco became the first city and county in the U.S. to end the killing of healthy homeless dogs and cats in any San Francisco shelter. That was something that all the national groups said was impossible. But in fact San Francisco proved that not only was it possible, it was hard work but not complicated work.

And while there was no model at the time, through trial and error, and really just focusing on trying to save as many lives as possible, a model on how to do that emerged. It’s a series of programs and services that I call the No Kill Equation: programs and services that I’ll talk about at the conference this week (ed. note: Winograd held a conference on No Kill in Indianapolis May 3-4, 2008) and that I lay out in the book Redemption.

Since that time, the philosophy is that we put actions behind the words of every shelter’s mission statement that all life is precious, and we know “Though Shall Not Kill” is the basic foundation of the philosophy, and then following through with the programs and services to save the lives and move them into loving new homes.

Since that time several other communities have embraced not just the philosophy, but the San Francisco model of sheltering, places that have nothing in common with one another. They’re very diverse in terms of economic status and demographics. For example, some of them are urban like San Francisco, some of them are rural like upstate New York and Thompkins County, some of them were in the South like Charleston, Virginia, some of them are in what we call “blue states” or liberal locations, and at least one is in the reddest part of the reddest state. So despite the fact that these shelters have little in common in terms of their policital makeup, their economic status, their level of urbanization or how rural they are, they have all embraced the same model and they’ve all to a large extent ended the killing of all but irremediably suffering animals, or in the case of a small percentage of dogs, those that are truly vicious with a poor prognosis.

So it’s a movement that’s spreading across the country, and the agenda of the No Kill Advocacy Center is to further that along, essentially to end the systematic killing of animals and encourage U.S. shelters today.

IAM: Aren’t all animal shelters in the business of saving lives, though? How is the No Kill movement different from what most humane societies do?

Winograd: I think one of the primary mistakes that people make is to assume that just because an organization comes with the label “Humane Society” or “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” that they are staffed with people who are truly passionate about saving lives and who would leave no stone unturned if it meant the ability to save an animal’s life. And as someone who has visited well over 400 shelters in the last 4 years, and as someone who has traveled all across the country to virtually every state, typically that is not the case. In many cases, these agencies are part of municipal government, and the people who have the jobs, it’s no different from, say, a sanitation department or some other arena of government.

A lot of these shelters claim that their mandate is not to save the lives of these animals but to focus on public health and safety, even though the two are not mutually exclusive, as success in places like San Francisco and elsewhere have proved.

In some cases, one of the unfortunate things that has happened in our movement is that while some of these organizations have gotten very wealthy and very large and influential, they have none of the zeal for reform that characterize the movement’s early founders. And so while we’ve become large and wealthy, we’ve also become bureaucratic. And one of the fundamental downsides is that they tend to focus on fundraising and leadership positions and self-preservation at the expense of their missions. And so while the typical claim is that we all want the same things and no one wants to kill, there are too many shelters out there that sure find it easier to kill than do what is necessary to stop it; just in visiting shelters across the country and here in Indianapolis (I see this). I walked into the shelter here in Indianapolis and counted 42 empty dog cages. Meanwhile there’s 9,000-plus animals killed at Animal Care & Control. That makes no sense to me, and while I would never accuse anybody of wanting to kill or wanting to have those animals killed, to me those are 42 lost opportunities for lifesaving. And frankly, to me there’s no excuse for that.

IAM: Besides saving lives, why should people embrace the No Kill philosophy? How does No Kill positively affect local communities?

Winograd: Let’s start with what I think is a flawed premise in traditional shelter thinking. Traditional shelter thinking says that the public is bad, that it’s the public’s fault that shelters in the country kill about 5 million dogs and cats a year. I don’t deny public irresponsibility. Before I got into sheltering, I was a criminal prosecutor and saw not only the ugly things that people do to other people, but as a prosecutor and animal control director, the ugly things they do to animals. So there’s definitely irresponsibility out there, but that’s only one side of the picture. And if you look at those communities that have been successful, I think one of the central lessons you see there is that there is enough love and compassion for animals in any community to overcome the irresponsibility of the few.

I mean, you started out talking about how nuts you guys and your family were about your animals and how you grew up with animals, and I sort of shared my life, and to think that you and I are the aberration is misinformed. If you look at the data out there, Americans are spending about $40 billion a year on their pets. Giving to animal-related charities is the single-fastest growing segment in American philanthropy. Entire industries like the travel and care industry are catering to pet owners: that’s the single largest area of growth for them, and you see hotel chains across the board are adopting pro-pet policies. If you look at the best-seller list, they’re dominated by pet-related books. And of course No Kill’s on the agenda of local governments nationwide. So as a nation, we truly love our animals. And No Kill is important because it takes that love that we have for animals and channels it towards lifesaving.

When people say “we’ve gotta get the community on board towards No Kill,” I kind of remind them that we already have their support. It just takes shelter leadership committed to the philosophy and the programs and services that make it possible to channel that compassion in order to realize that goal.

But aside from the animals and lifesaving, there are other girls. For one, it’s compatible with public health and safety. If you take the issue of feral cats, these alley cats, for example, that are unsocialized to people and not adoptable, in those communities that embraced non-lethal TNR (Trap-Neuter-Return programs), nuisance complaints go down, which is good for neighborhoods. The number of animals impounded as strays — which the more they’re out there, the more potential conflicts with people — those numbers go down. The unneutered tom for example, has an average home range of about 10 miles. So that’s 10 miles of walking around, potentially crossing people’s lawns, getting in the garbage, that type of thing: you neuter that tom cat and put him back out into the community, and his home range declines by about 90 percent. So you’re already reducing conflicts out there.

The number of animals found dead on arrival, meaning less animals out there, plummets as well. And all these things, it cuts across all the programs of the No Kill Equation. What it shows is that programs to save the lives of the animals have parallel effects in terms of reducing complaints, reducing conflicts with people, improving public health and safety, and perhaps more importantly for a lot of government leaders and others in these difficult economic times, is that they’re also more cost effective. So it is far more cost effective to neuter an animal than it is to take him and kill the generations of offspring of that animal. So across the board this is a win-win-win, regardless of whether you love animals as most of us do, or you’re more interested in the health and safety aspects, or you’re more interested in the fiscal consequences.

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