Episode 1: Nathan Winograd pt. I [12:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Episode 1: Nathan Winograd pt. I [12:46m]: Download

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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