The San Francisco SPCA have begun featuring adoptable dogs and cats at Macy’s in San Francisco’s Union Square as part of the 24th annual Macy’s Holiday Windows, which will run through to the new year.

The pet display has been a winter staple since 1987. During that time, more than 2,000 animals have been adopted and $250,000 has been raised to support the SF SPCA’s hospital, shelter and community initiatives. This year, the goal is to find homes for 320 animals. Almost 300 were adopted last year as part of the event.

The environment is temperature controlled and has comfortable spots for catnaps, according to SF SPCA. They even have a live webcam feed .

Some pictures from this and previous years;

Image: http://sfcitizen.com/blog

Image: http://sfcitizen.com/blog

Image: www.newyorksocialdiary.com

Image: www.newyorksocialdiary.com

Image: www.newyorksocialdiary.com

Image: www.newyorksocialdiary.com

Image: www.newyorksocialdiary.com

Image: www.ptank.com/blog

Image: www.sfgate.com

Image: www.sfgate.com

Image: www.sfspca.org

Image: www.sfspca.org

Image: www.sfspca.org

Image: www.sfspca.org

Image: www.sfspca.org

Image: www.sfspca.org

At this time of year, many animal lovers will be considering where to make their holiday donation. With so much talk of under-performing pounds and a new wave of animal rescue groups saving lives, it can be hard for those outside the industry to keep up. How can you tell the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’? Does smaller always equal better? And just how should you spend your yearly animal welfare donation this year?

Who’s who?

The first step is to understand the difference between pounds, shelters and community rescue groups and their role in the community.

Pounds are the council funded holding facilities for stray and impounded pets. Pounds are owned and used by a single council, or may contract their services out to many councils. They generally don’t fund raise, but they do often use volunteers who may form a non-profit to support them (this is a good sign that they are working with the community to bring about good outcomes for pets), or work with local rescue groups. The performance of pounds is often dictated by pressure from their local community. Many pounds are small and regional, some are centralised and huge. Many pounds are running low kill or No Kill facilities, with good examples here and here.

Shelters are privately managed facilities that work to provide shelter for transient pets. Some contract local council pound services for a fee, others operate entirely to take pets who have run out of time at the local pound and private surrenders. They can be very large, or small. Some are part of a bigger chain of shelters (like the RSPCA or Lost Dogs Home), or they can be independent and local. Their performance is often dictated by the pressures of their local community, but also the capacity and direction of their management. They are non-profit or charity organisations that generally run ongoing fundraising programs. Some shelters run low or No Kill facilities, others kill more pets than they save.

Community rescue or foster groups are small groups of pet-lovers who work together to save pets in their local area. Often working with pounds and shelters to take pets, they keep animals in their homes until new families can be found. Some are very small (a single person or a few friends) or they can have up to 1,000 carers all working together. They often form where there is little support to save the lives of pets (regional locations) or where there is a direct need for more community involvement because of high kill rates. Community rescue groups generally take treatable pets and hold them until new homes can be found, meaning they are low or No kill.

So how do you choose who to support?

If your usual plan is to give to whomever sends you the first fundraising mail, you may not be investing in the most efficient and effective animal welfare group. There are a few details you’ll want to get before parting with your hard earned cash, that will help you choose.

1. Check their performance

Most of the larger animal shelters produce an annual report which includes their activities for the year. As a side to their community involvement, one of the most important factors is one they don’t necessarily want you to focus on. Just two numbers; their animal rehome rate vs their euthanasia (kill) rate.

They may try to distract you by using overall statistics, or they might not provide these numbers at all. But the reason they are so important is thus – these figures show what happens to the animals left, after owners have picked up lost pets. What a shelter or pound does with an animal who isn’t collected is a vital indicator of their performance. They can either work to save it, or kill it.

A healthy pet should be adopted to a new family or passed onto rescue. A treatable pet should be rehabilitated, then made available for adoption. In instances where the rehome rate is the same size, or smaller than the kill rate, there is an indication that the shelter is not taking its responsibility to save lives seriously.

Before you donate to a shelter, you should ask to be given these figures or look them up in their annual report. If they aren’t very impressive, use this year’s donation as an opportunity to provide feedback to the organisation’s management;

Dear XXX,

I have been a donor to your organisation for X years. I have seen that this year your rehome rate was XXX while your kill rate was XXX, an unacceptably high rate.

I believe that all healthy and treatable pets should be given a chance to find a new, loving family. I give my donation this year in the hope that you will use it to improve the situation for pets at your shelter, so that next year you can report a low kill or No Kill outcome for pets.

2. Weigh up your options

You might decide based on the information you find, that you want to support a different organisation this year. With community rescue groups growing in status like never before, it is a good opportunity to investigate who else is operating in your local area.

A great place to start is PetRescue’s Rescue Group Directory. Over 75% of the groups using PetRescue are small, independent community rescue groups. You can examine the animals they have been working with, how long they’ve been operating and skip through to their own websites to find out if they’re calling for donations. Most of these groups also have a Facebook page which you can follow to keep up to date on their news (and maybe even get involved yourself!). Check out case studies and try and meet with the group at an event to find out more about their programs and level of professionalism.

It goes without saying, the more resources these smaller groups have, the more good work they can do for pets in the community. While they probably won’t have a fundraising department, or send you glossy newsletters, you’ll know your money is going directly to help animals.

3. Show your support for No Kill

If no one in your local area takes your fancy, you could use your donation this year as an opportunity to further the No Kill movement in Australia. In every state there are No Kill shelters not only saving the lives of pets, but helping other groups reach their own No Kill goals. (If you haven’t got a background on No Kill, try downloading this pdf to see the kinds of programs that a No Kill shelter supports).

To find No Kill organisations, google “No Kill” and your state.

By supporting the groups ‘leading the way’ in innovation and lifesaving programs, you are investing in long term improvements for homeless animals.

Choose wisely

This year, don’t just do what you’ve always done. Use your xmas gift as an opportunity to improve outcomes and support those groups who are saving lives.

There has never been a better time to be an empowered supporter.

See also: The Foundation for the Charismatic, Good Looking, Healthy Homeless

We all know community foster care and rescue groups make a vital contribution to animal welfare across the country. Thousands of pets every year owe their lives to volunteer pet-lovers who give up their time to save the lives of needy animals. Rescue and foster groups involve the whole community to bring about life saving outcomes for pets, caring for them as if they were their own in healing family environments. Community rescue and foster groups are the life blood of the animal sheltering process.

Victoria however, has legislation which is hindering animal rescue and foster groups from operating. This week the internet has been awash with outrage that Victoria’s Department of Primary Industries (DPI) sent an notice to pounds across the state, advising them that to release pets to community rescue groups was in breach of the ‘Code of Practice for the management of dogs and cats in shelters’. The problem they claim, is that anyone taking pets from pounds should be registered as a domestic animal business (including individual foster carers) and that would mean complying with several group housing standards designed for shelters and pounds;

Dog Rescue Association of Victoria president Trisha Taylor said volunteers take unwanted dogs and cats into their own homes and spend time and money rehabilitating them so they can be rehomed. They did not want to have to turn their homes into animal shelters and report to the bureau.

”The rules for shelters are onerous and intended for multiple dog situations,” Ms Taylor said. ”This is no different than you taking an extra dog into your home and having to declare yourself an animal shelter, with the bureau coming to check you meet the code’s standards.”

She said volunteers did not put the rescued cats or dogs in cages, but treated them as pets until they were adopted out.

She said the bureau wanted to either gain control over rescue groups or shut them down – a move that would force up the kill rate of abandoned animals.
The Age

The situation has always been difficult for community rescue and foster groups in Victoria and this is why it hasn’t really thrived as it has in other states. The code of practice that they are referencing, has been in existence for years and if you were to interpret it in its most strict sense, rescue and foster would have always been illegal in Victoria. Some pounds have been interpreting the laws in a relaxed fashion to ‘get pets out the door’. Others have chosen not to work with rescue and use the laws as an excuse to kill animals. Depended entirely on who was in charge.

At most Victorian pounds, more animals are killed than are rehomed. Each and every day, thousands of dogs and cats are shot with firearms or given fatal overdoses of anesthetic, and their bodies discarded. All the while rescue groups stand by with safe foster homes at the ready, but are refused access to these animals. Often it is because pounds are afraid that by letting rescue groups in, they will be no longer able to hide poor performance, inhumane conditions or simply because ‘working with rescue is too much trouble’.

The groups in Victoria are doing an excellent job driving an ongoing effort to get recognition for community rescue. Taking advantage of the momentum of adoption and No Kill initiatives here and overseas, there is no doubt there is enormous community support for the awesome work that they do. The result is a clash between legislation from the nineties and the new belief system of the community about the valuable role of rescue, which is, almost unappreciatedly, only a few years old.

Politicians are promising to review the code of practice to make provision for rescue groups should they be elected. But they are doing so with a double-speak of ‘not wanting to have an unregulated rescue industry’. Even with evidence that the rescue industry is thriving in other states and that the animal outcomes are excellent, they still don’t trust the public to know how to care for pets. However, despite these unneccesary hurdles, this could be the very opportunity Victorian rescue groups have been waiting for.

If the behaviour of rescue groups in Victoria is outlined in a new Code of Practice, so should the rights of those same rescue groups be.

Community rescue and foster groups should be supported through proactive efforts to remove artibitrary rules that make it more difficult for them to operate. But if rescue groups do have to apply for a pre-determined financial status, provide certain reporting criteria and offer particular treatments and services to pets, in order to be an ‘authorised’ rescue group – pounds and shelters across the state should no longer be able to block or restrict access to death row pets. All groups should be granted a legal right to take any pet that a pound is unable to save. No pound should be able to choose to kill a pet if a rescue group is willing to take it, rehabilitate it and find it a new family.

In the case of somewhere like the Lost Dogs Home, who last year adopted 3,101 dogs, but killed 3,242 – each one these dogs should have been made available for further treatment by a rescue group. A pound management’s descretion to pick and choose whether they will work with rescue groups, when groups are willing to save and treat animals with money from their own pockets must be removed in the new legislation. Pounds must work with rescue groups and this must be made law if pets are to survive the shelter system.

If Victoria insist on standardising rescue and continuing down the restrictive path that has cost so many lives in the past, we must use it as an opportunity to gain recognition for the valuable role we play in the community.

The rights of rescue groups to save lives must be enshrined in law.

It gets worse.

From the Lost Dogs Home 2009/10 Annual Report, for the 24,426 cats and dogs impounded, the outcomes were as follows;

3,101 adopted
13,594 killed (3,242 dogs, 10,352 cats)
7,645 returned to owner

They also recorded “Revenue from continuing operations” as $11,854,916.

We will no longer stand by quietly while pets are killed unnecessarily, while this group grows rich off people’s compassion for companion animals. There will be a lot of talk of ‘intentions and outcomes’. A plea to stop being angry and to join forces. They’ll say we’re being divisive; why can’t we all just get along? But if to get along is to excuse and validate killing, then collaboration is not the answer.

The genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going back in.

Circle of Blame
Step 1. Have your community alert you to unacceptably high cat kill rates.
Step 2. Blame ‘the irresponsible public’ for the numbers
Step 2. Provide cat traps
Step 3. Blame ‘the irresponsible public’ for the surge in impounds
Step 4. Send cats to pounds with a 90%+ kill rate
Step 5. Blame ‘the irresponsible public’ for the killing
Step 6. (See step 1.)
Repeat

Moreland (VIC) pet-owners are urged to desex cats and dogs to help arrest the problem of illegal pet dumping.

After collecting more than 1000 animals off the streets since July 2009, Moreland Council said it is alarmed by the number of pets being dumped in the municipality.

The council handed residents some 800 cat cages to trap stray and feral cats over the period.

Lost or abandoned pets are sent to the Lost Dogs Home or Cat Protection Society where they must be destroyed if unclaimed within 28 days under a state Code of Practice.

While those caught dumping an animal can face 12 months in prison and up to $14,000 fines, RSPCA Victoria Senior Inspector Simon Primrose said there was still about half a million stray cats.

“The community should be taking more responsibility in this regard and cutting the problem off at the source by getting their pets desexed,” said Insp Primrose.

“If these animals are not able to indiscriminately breed, we would see far fewer unwanted animals being abandoned.”

It’s genius. At no point does the council have to actually address the ‘half a million’ stray, breeding animals with humane solutions, but it can be seen to be taking action by lending traps and maybe even punishing the ‘irresponsible public’ in the coming months with some new cat laws.

Speaking of cat laws, an update from Wyndham (VIC). After being criticised last year for not providing any enforcement for their dusk to dawn curfew, and with 1200 cats impounded by council for the year (781 killed), the Council did what councils often do – not terribly much. This year celebrates the 10th anniversary of their cat curfew with the news that not a single person has been fined under the law in a decade. Cat impoundments however remain steady at 1100 cats impounded in 2009-10 (935 killed).

The council could not say how many complaints it was taking about cats wandering at night, saying these were not recorded.

On why no one had been fined under the curfew, prohibiting cats being off their owners’ property from 10pm and 6am and banning them from public areas, the council said most residents did not know where wandering cats came from.

It also said most trapped cats had no identification and were never claimed, meaning there was no one to fine.

The only cats effected by laws like curfews are those animals unfortunate enough to be living without owners, meaning we’re not punishing an ‘irresponsible public’ with these laws… but the cats themselves.

Whether its registration, curfews or mandatory desexing, the laws are proving not only unenforceable, but ineffective. If you genuinely are a cat lover, only support those initiatives that help and protect cats. Cat laws fail to do either.

A recent puppy farm awareness effort estimates that over a hundred thousand puppies and kittens are sold from pet stores each year.

And yet we often hear there aren’t enough people who want to bring a pet into their families.

Australian’s are spending more than ever on gourmet foods, treats, toys, bedding and grooming, pampering and veterinary treatment. Not to mention enrichment, day care and walking services, treating their pet like a member of the family.

And yet we often hear that Australians are irresponsible, neglectful and uncompassionate.

According to the Petcare Information and Advisory Service, rescue pet adoptions are surging; doubling in the last ten years.

And yet we often hear that there aren’t enough people willing to adopt a pet.

PetRescue has helped rehome 73,000 pets, with 75% of those being through community rescue and foster care groups. The Pedigree Adoption Drive was a huge boost to these groups, raising awareness and inspiring compassion, with over 30,000 pets finding new homes in 2010 alone.

And yet we often hear that the community doesn’t know how to care for pets, that the community has no business in animal welfare and that pets are better of dead than in the hands of the public.

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We have been duped into believing that we are the problem, not the solution to companion animal issues. We have been blamed for shelter killing. We have been lied to, as the number of animals being killed is kept hidden from us. We have been told that there are no solutions and that we must donate money and resources in ignorance, trust our animal welfare leaders and never question.

We must take back our animal welfare industry and demand it reflect our own progressive values towards companion animals.

We all have a part to play, even if we’re not working in animal welfare, even if we’re not encouraged to do so, even if we’re told we’re wrong in wanting these things from our animal shelters.

We are the animal lovers of Australia. And we are the answer.

As Seth Godin once said, “The best way to keep your bank from getting robbed is to not open a bank.”

If you open a shelter to take the public’s unwanted pets – you guessed it – people are going to bring pets to you. And given we chose to offer this service/ work in this industry/ take donations to do so… why then are we so quick to condemn those who come forward for our assistance?

The term ‘dumping’ (like ‘euthanasia’) is being misused in animal sheltering.

A must read from Yes Biscuit: Can You “Dump” a Pet at a Safe Haven?

One of the stated outcomes of the Hobson’s Bay Domestic Animal Management Plan is to:

Address any over-population and high euthanasia rates for dogs and cats.

From 1st September last year, council moved its animal control and after hours service in house, and its impounds to the Lost Dogs Home in North Melbourne. Their impound figures for the year released yesterday, show that 1,337 pets were impounded and their outcomes were as follows:

78 adopted
723 killed (84 dogs, 639 cats)
536 returned to owner

This is a single council. The Lost Dogs Home holds more than a dozen of these pound contracts, moving pets from the shires where they’re collected to a ’super pound’ in North Melbourne. Despite long term efforts to encourage them to work with the community, and even when they are killing many times more than they are saving, they can and do block community rescue groups from taking pets, choosing to kill them instead.

This week community rescue groups in Victoria sent a message to supporters imploring them to support the mandate that large animal welfare organisations be forced to work with them, rather than kill homeless pets. New interpretations of the animal welfare codes of practice in the state seem designed to phase out these community groups entirely, when clearly the need for them has never been greater;

Currently in Victoria – under current legislation according to the Code of Practice, it is illegal for Rescue Groups to save companion animals lives.

As responsible, registered organizations we continue to do so, for one reason. To save lives.

Based in the Community, we are self funding and promote desexing, microchipping and vaccination of all animals, responsible rehoming and pet ownership. We are often the last stand for a pet who would otherwise be killed.

We want the right to save lives. To take animals and work within the community as we have been doing for years. And we want the Government to recognize we are a vital and necessary service. Please help us by supporting the Dog Rescue Association of Victoria.

We are incorporated, with guidelines, a constitution and the knowledge of more than twenty years combined in saving animals in our state.

Please join us in spreading the word. We want the right to save lives. Join us on Facebook and tell your friends.

Victoria’s pets deserve better than a quick death at the hands of uncaring mega-pounds. To find out more about how to support the Dog Rescue Association of Victoria, please click here to visit their website.

An update on the RSPCA Victoria ‘adoption fee waived’ cat promotion. Between Thursday 11 and Saturday 13 November, 110 cats found new homes.

“That’s a freaking lot”, I hear you say; “but why didn’t they adopt more?”

Because they ran out of cats.

The revolving doors of the RSPCA almost stopped spinning at the weekend after 110 felines were given away.

Staff were stunned when the shelter’s nine Victorian catteries were emptied for the first time.

Every cat older than four months found favour with a new owner offering a home.

Cat lovers converged on the organisation’s shelters, making the most of extended twilight adoption hours, to claim a one-off costless cat.

… “It’s really spooky, and eerily quiet in the cattery with it almost empty for the first time ever,” said media manager Tim Pilgrim.

Are we seeing the trend yet?

A shelter saves a pet in under 2hrs by asking the public to adopt.

A shelter saves six dogs in three hours by asking the public to adopt.

A pound saves 79 pets in a week by asking the public to adopt.

A regional pound saves 97% of the dogs it takes in by asking the public to adopt.

The long held myth that the public simply don’t want to adopt pound animals and that shelters are just ‘doing the dirty work of an irresponsible public’ is finally being recognised as the furphy that it is. You can adopt your way out of killing and positive, proactive marketing by compassionate shelters finds pets homes.

In his paper ‘Temperament Testing in the Age of No Kill’ for Best Friends Animal Society, Nathan Winograd discussed the limitations of temperament testing in the US, namely that it wasn’t very scientific;

Temperament testing is a series of exercises designed to evaluate whether an animal is aggressive. Because dog behavior is highly specific to context, it is unfortunately not enough to say that a dog is friendly and of reasonably good temperament if she comes into a shelter with her tail wagging. The flip side is also true. Because the shelter is a highly stressful, unnatural, and frightening environment for a dog who has just been abandoned by a family, the fact that a dog is scared and growls at staff on intake is not enough to make a determination that the dog is unfriendly and vicious. So it is not only fair, but a good idea, for shelters to evaluate dogs to make sure they can safely be placed into loving new homes.

But temperament testing has many limitations. It requires skill and training; the results greatly depend on the environment in which the test is conducted; and, because its predictive validity has not been established by any stretch, it can – and often does – result in dogs being wrongly executed.

However, despite their limitations, temperament tests are still a useful tool in a No Kill setting; as when using them as a guide, rather than a pass/fail for euthanasia, the process of determining which rehabilitation a dog needs can begin.

Dog behavior runs the gamut from simple bad manners, such as jumping up on people, to global undersocialization. Some behaviors are easily remedied; others are beyond the ability of a shelter to rehabilitate. Certainly no shelter should kill a dog for bad manners, and a no-kill shelter is obligated to rehabilitate all treatable behaviors, even those like food aggression.

But the situation in most pounds (and some shelters) across Australia is that a fail on a temperament test is a guaranteed death sentence. With limited investment in developing skilled foster carer programs, or supported behaviour modification programs, a pound can relieve itself of any obligation to save the pet simply by determining that it ‘failed’ its temperament test. Even if the issue is common and treatable and the prognosis for rehabilitation is good (like cases of ‘jumping’, ‘mouthing’ or ‘resource guarding’) a failed test usually means the pet will lose its life.

Previously there has really only been US research available on the effectiveness of temperament testing in determining a pets future behaviour in the home. Surely, Australia shelter workers are more highly skilled than our US counterparts? Our temperament testings more scientific and advanced? And surely in our pounds, where pets are killed in the thousands, rather than the millions like in the US, pets are given a much more fair evaluation and chance at treatment?

A Review of Behavioural Assessment Protocols Used by Australian Shelters to Determine the Adoption Suitability of Dogs

From the Oct-Dec 10 Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science examined data from 11 shelters and pounds across six states. They also observed 50 shelter-dog assessments and interviewed 26 shelter workers.

Guess how many of the pounds and shelters were using standardized protocols that had been scientifically validated.

Zero.

In fact, only two of the testing protocols had specific and standardized step-by-step instructions on how to administer the assessments. And “there was little consistency in how the protocols were administered, partly because of constraints including limited availability of time and resources”.

When it came to interpreting the results of the test “in most cases there were no guidelines to assist scorers in interpreting the results of the individual assessments. Because the protocols were so diverse internally, it was often impossible to sum scores into a meaningful total. Decisions regarding the fate of assessed dogs were therefore made subjectively.

So if staff have to make a subjective assessment on results, how confident are they that they’ve had enough support and training to accurately asses a dog? Just 35% felt ‘very confident’, while 50% felt ’somewhat confident’.

“The interviews with shelter staff revealed, notably, that experience was not correlated with confidence in the current assessment protocol or confidence in the respondent’s ability to accurately assess dogs.”

Potentially, therefore, shelter staff are required to make important decisions based on inadequate training, potentially invalid assessment protocols, and subjective interpretations of behaviour in which they have limited confidence; shelter staff members decide which dogs live or die (are euthanized) and which dogs are released into the community. This is unacceptable in terms of placing both dogs and members of the public at risk. It also potentially causes undue stress to shelter staff and may result in high staff turnover and traumatic stress symptoms.

When the outcome of a failed test is death, the lack of true scientific data on temperament tests leaves both staff and animals vulnerable. As we move forward improvements in how we use and deliver behavioural assessments and increasing capacity of treatment programs for pets who enter the pound system will become an integral part of modern sheltering. Killing pets rather than providing options for them to be rehabilitated will no longer be acceptable to pet lovers, shelter donors or the shelter workers themselves.





See also: The Foundation for the Charismatic, Good Looking, Healthy Homeless