Episode 2: Nathan Winograd pt. II [14:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Episode 2: Nathan Winograd pt. II [14:11m]: Download

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.