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Oregon Humane Society New Shelter Project 2000
Skanska USA Building
Free downloadable PDF file: <www.oregonhumane.org/shelter.htm>
To
review in May 2005 a book published to commemorate the opening of the
new Oregon Humane Society shelter in June 2000 might appear to be revisiting
old news, but ANIMAL PEOPLE learned long ago that shelters need time to
age.
The Oregon Humane Society shelter in April 2005 scored 100 on the ANIMAL
PEOPLE 100-point scoring scale, explained in detail in the June 2004 edition.
Based upon how well a shelter fulfills the “Five Freedoms” articulated
by the British Farm Animal Welfare Advisory Committee in 1967, with nine
further considerations specific to dog and cat sheltering, the ANIMAL
PEOPLE scale is designed to evaluate all types of shelter on an equal
footing, regardless of size, function, or budget.
New shelters tend to score better because they incorporate better ideas,
but the $8.3 million investment put into the Oregon Humane Society shelter
has much less to do with the perfect score than the successful functioning
of the facilities, including a particularly effective floor plan. Many
more expensive shelters fall short, sometimes scoring only in the 70-point
range, while thoughtfully designed shelters built on a fraction of the
Oregon Humane budget have scored above 90 points. Oregon Humane handles
more than twice as many animals as any shelter previously scoring 100.
ANIMAL PEOPLE does not score newly opened shelters. Most shelters look
good in architectural drawings, and are immaculate at debut. Many do not
stand up well to hard use by stressed animals and people. Five years after
opening, some of the most touted shelters are already weary with stale
air, clogged drains, chipped floors, dim lighting, demoralized staff,
and a rising din of barking attesting to the failure of sound baffles
and wallboard to compensate for obsolete architecture. Shelter killing
rates plateau or even rise, while adoptions drop, reflecting the increasingly
uninviting conditions.
The Oregon Humane Society went the other way. Planning and fundraising
to replace the old shelter built in 1939 by the Works Progress Administration
began in 1993.
Remembered by current Oregon Humane Society executive director Sharon
Harmon as “A horrible place,” the 1939 shelter was still nationally
regarded as a good example of shelter design as recently as 1963, when
it was favorably mentoned in The Quality of Mercy, the then-considered
definitive history of the humane movement by William Alan Swallow. The
initial design specifications called for it to employ 12 workers, handling
4,000 animals per year, however. By 1973 the animal traffic approached
55,000 per year. Giving up the Portland and Multnomah County animal control
contracts, held since 1916, gradually brought the volume down to about
15,000 animals per year, handled by 48 employees and 600 volunteers.
Ancrom Moisan Associated Architects completed the initial plans for an
expanded shelter in 1995, but the building committee was reconstituted
in 1998, partly in response to the 1994 opening of the Oakland SPCA Adoption
Atrium and the February 1998 debut of Maddie’s Adoption Center at
the San Francisco SPCA.
Both were largely funded by the Duffield Family Foundation, before it
created Maddie’s Fund to promote community-wide five-year plans for
converting to no-kill animal control. Both built upon ideas pioneered
by the North Shore Animal League adoption center in Port Washington, New
York, and the PETsMART Charities Luv-A-Pet adoption boutiques, but took
their innovations a few steps farther.
Designed in the mid-1980s, the North Shore adoption center represented
the first big break from traditional kennel design toward customer friendliness.
Today it has been so widely emulated that relative newcomers to animal
sheltering may have difficulty imagining how different the use of space,
light, and handling of air exchange and drainage all seemed to be circa
1990.
The Luv-A-Pet adoption boutiques fused some of the same ideas with high-volume
retail marketing. As the PETsMART chain expanded to hundreds of sites,
it showed that high-volume adoption could be done anywhere, and that animals
could be housed in facilities that are neither noisy nor stinky.
If there was any doubt that an attractive high-volume adoption center
could attract markedly more adopters to a traditional full-service shelter,
the Oakland SPCA Adoption Atrium proved otherwise.
Maddie’s Adoption Center completed the transition away from traditional
shelter design by showcasing animals for adoption in habitats more resembling
living rooms than kennels––albeit living rooms engineered to
resist animal damage.
Big
job
The
Oregon Humane Society had a bigger job underway than any of the other
innovators, since it was completely rebuilding one of the busiest full-service
shelters in the U.S., on the site it had occupied since 1918, without
a shutdown.
That necessitated a modular approach to construction. Work began in February
1999. The new dog housing was completed in November 1999. The 1939 shelter
was then partially demolished while the rest of the new shelter was built.
The last of the old shelter came down after the new offices, cat facilities,
and euthanasia and receiving areas were completed.
While borrowing ideas from many other sources, Harmon told ANIMAL PEOPLE
that she probably relied most upon Wisconsin Humane Society executive
director Victoria Wellens. Wellens began building the new Wisconsin Humane
Society premises in 1998, concurrent with the Oregon Humane Society replannning.
The Wisconsin Humane Society shelter opened in 2001. Harmon said she and
Wellens were constantly in contact, exchanging the information each gathered
from wherever.
ANIMAL PEOPLE has not yet visited the Wisconsin Humane shelter, nor the
new Richmond SPCA shelter, which also drew inspiration from Wisconsin
Humane. Both are, however, well regarded by other critical visitors.
As all of the key ideas, floor plans, photos, and history are included
in the free downloadable PDF file Oregon Humane Society New Shelter Project
2000, just a point-and-click away for anyone with a web browser, there
is little need to review the details of the Oregon Humane design, except
to note that the importance of the floor plan is understated.
The traffic flow moves entirely from left to right, from separate receiving
stations for dogs and cats, through separate holding areas for quarantined
animals, animals needing veterinary care, and holds for rehoming. Never
is there need to take unfamiliar dogs and cats past each other.
Animals pass the entrance to the lightly used euthanasia room as they
leave the receiving area, on their way to be housed in other wings of
the building. If they sense the presence of the euthanasia room at all,
they sense that they are being taken away from it. Animals arriving for
euthanasia do not pass those in care. Rarely is there need to take animals
to be euthanized back past others still in care.
Animals offered for adoption rotate toward the lobby, enjoying ever more
attractive and comfortable surroundings as they clear health and behavioral
checks. Those at the shelter longest are displayed most prominently, giving
them the best chance to be the next animals to find homes. Possibly the
most active rabbit adoption center in the U.S. is just off the lobby––and
access to it is arranged so that the rabbits have little if any awareness
of proximity to cats and dogs.
Harmon admits that she did not think of adding bird facilities during
the design process. The two noteworthy design flaws surfacing during the
first five years of shelter operation are the lack of aviary space and
an on-site sterilization clinic. Sterilization surgery is contracted out
to off-site clinics, but will be done in-house when a soon-to-begin expansion
is completed. The expansion will also more than double the already spacious
humane education area.
Portland
gains
The
influence of the Oregon Humane Society shelter on the Portland and Multnomah
County dog and cat population is not easily teased apart from other changes
and innovations in animal care and control, but is consistent with a 137-year
history at the forefront of humane progress.
Founded by Dr. Thomas Lamb Elliot on November 17, 1868, though not formally
incorporated until 1880, the Oregon Humane Society is only eight months
younger than the San Francisco SPCA, which was the first in the western
U.S. Only the American SPCA (1866) and Massachusetts SPCA (1868) are older.
The initial mission of all four organizations was protecting draft horses.
Oregon Humane added child protection services to the original mandate,
and was the official state child protection agency from 1881 to 1933.
Humane education was put into the Oregon Humane mission statement in 1882.
As of 1972, when Oregon Humane opted out of animal control, Portland and
Multnomah County were killing between 130 and 140 dogs and cats per 1,000
human residents, almost all of them by decompression. The national average
was then circa 115 per 1,000, but many cities with lower killing rates
did not even try to pick up feral cats.
Portland soon followed Berkeley (1972) and San Francisco (1976) in abolishing
decompression killing. Pet sterilization was promoted successfully enough
that by 1993 the Portland/Multnomah rate of shelter killing was down to
22.7. The advent of early-age sterilization and neuter/return of feral
cats cut the killing rate further, to 11.3, by the time the new shelter
opened in 2000.
Since then, the toll has fallen further, to just 6.75 in 2004.
While the value of the Oregon Humane Society shelter is not easily quantified
in isolation, it can be said that it gives the fast-growing Portland metropolitan
area the capacity to achieve no-kill animal control, in combination with
the feral cat sterilization efforts of Pet Over-Population Prevention
Advocates and other local coalitions.
Although San Francisco and Ithaca, New York, have lowered shelter killing
per 1,000 humans to circa 2.5, and New York City is close, the effective
threshold for no-kill animal control in most cities is about 5.0. After
that, further reductions require ever-increasing investments in saving
seriously sick, injured, or dangerous animals.
The steepest drops in the Portland toll have coincided with the two tenures
of current Multnomah County animal control director Mike Oswald, who during
his first term of service in the 1980s was among the first shelter directors
in the U.S. to issue a public warning about increasing intakes of pit
bull terriers and other potentially dangerous dogs. This is now the largest
threat to progress in Portland, as to the U.S. shelter killing rate nationally.
In 1987, according to Oswald’s records, 24.8% of the dogs entering
the Multnomah County shelter were Labrador retrievers, German shepherds,
and their close mixes, reflecting their popularity. Just 6.3 were pit
bull terriers, and 0.4% were Rottweilers.
In 2004, exactly 24% of the incoming dogs were Labrador retrievers, German
shepherds, and their close mixes: almost no change. But 21% were pit bull
terriers and 6.6% were Rottweilers.
Bites by Labrador retrievers and German shepherds were exactly 30% of
the bite investigation caseload in both 1987 and 2004––but the
total bite caseload increased 42%. Bites by pit bulls increased 65%, from
13% of the total to 20%, and bites by Rottweilers increased more than
five-fold, from 2% of the total to 10.6%.
Despite the rising numbers of potentially dangerous dogs received, Oswald
has achieved a community-wide reduction of approximately 30% in the numbers
of dogs killed in shelters, about 80% of them killed by animal control.
––Merritt
Clifton
The
Tipping Point
How little things can make a difference
by Malcolm Gladwell
Back
Bay Books
(1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020), 2002.
280 pages, paperback. $14.95.
“Listen!
My children and you shall hear
of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
Twas the 18th of April in ‘75.
Hardly a man is now alive
who remembers that famous day and year.”
So
begins William Wadsworth Longfellow’s immortal poem about Paul Revere’s
ride, and so begins this profoundly absorbing book by Malcolm Gladwell.
At the same time that Paul Revere rode forth to “spread the alarm,
to every Middlesex village and farm, / for the country folk to be up and
to arm,” William Dawes set out to carry the same message. Yet Dawes’
role is little remembered, whereas in Revere’s case, “the sparks
struck out by the steed in his flight / kindled a nation to flame with
its heat.”
Even less remembered is the third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott, who was
actually the first of the three men to reach Concord.
Gladwell suggests that Revere won the most historical note through the
combination of three fundamentals: the prestige of the messenger, the
importance of the message, and the social context of the enterprise.
Revere had the strongest previous association with the American independence
movement. Further, while Gladwell and Prescott fulfilled their missions
by stealth, riding as quietly and evasively to their assigned destinations
as possible, Revere alerted everyone he could along the way, enlisting
the entire countryside as fellow messengers. He was eventually arrested,
but only after amplifying the alarm in all directions.
The term “tipping point” refers to the threshold in all trends,
epidemics, enterprises, and social movements when whatever is happening
gains sufficient momentum that it can no longer be suppressed. Gladwell
argues that often a trend needs only the smallest of nudges to push it
over the critical threshold.
Gladwell defines three categories of people who have the necessary influence
to supply that nudge:
Connectors, who are influential people with a large network of relevant
acquaintances; Mavens, knowledgeable people who are repositories of relevant
information and intellectual capacity; and Salespeople, who take that
knowledge and present it in a way that appeals to the relevant market.
In an afterword, Gladwell comments upon the conventional ways of spreading
an important message, as well as the New Economy methods such as the Internet,
and suggests that today, the information overload is so great that people
more and more rely upon old-fashioned word of mouth for advice.
The relevant question for animal advocates is how to move the animal rights
movement past the tipping point, so that the goals achieve broad cultural
acceptance.
Gladwell relates how the preacher John Wesley established the Methodist
Church, riding thousands of miles a year to establish the network of churches
that eventually became the United Methodists.
Wesley, writes Gladwell, “was a classic Connector. He was a super
Paul Revere. The difference is, though, that he wasn’t one person
with ties to many other people. He was one person with ties to many groups,
which is a small but critical distinction. Wesley realized that if you
wanted to bring about a fundamental change in people’s beliefs and
behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an example to others,
you needed to create a community around them, where those new beliefs
could be practiced and expressed and nurtured.”
So rehabilitation centers and animal shelters should be far more than
mere facilities for animals: they should become centers of communities
where AR beliefs can be “practiced and expressed and nurtured.”
To some extent animal welfare groups have coalesced into communities.
But the failure of large animal welfare institutions to reach the tipping
point needed to carry the concept of animal rights into the mainstream
may have something to do with what Gladwell calls “the 150 rule.”
This is the loss of cohesion and efficiency which mysteriously manifests
itself in most social organisations and businesses when the figure of
150 employees is exceeded. In our own experience, the larger the animal
welfare institution, the less effective is the expenditure of funds.
So let us apply Gladwell’s three fundamentals to animal rights. There
is widespread acceptance of the notion that ethical people have a moral
duty to avoid inflicting suffering upon sentient beings, but even people
who are sensitive to the needs of animals are apathetic and need to be
roused to action. The social context of animal rights, meaning how the
issue is framed and perceived, is often not conducive to the growth of
the cause.
Mainstream support for animal rights at present amounts mostly to an amorphous
pool of goodwill which has yet to be mobilized. Clearly what are needed
are more Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople with credibility and influence.
William Dawes was as well-known and well-respected around Boston in 1776
as Paul Revere, but he did not have a memorable dog. Paul Revere’s
dog made the difference.
Paul Revere in his memoirs wrote that when the need arose for him to make
his famous ride, on April 18, 1775, he was caught without his spurs, on
the wrong side of the British troops. He sent his dog home through the
soldiers with a note to his wife, and back the dog came, the spurs tied
to her collar.
The dog then drove back the redcoats when they tried to seize Revere for
alleged drunken horseback riding, and raced on ahead to awaken Lexington
and Concord to hear Revere’s alarm.
Revere was so grateful for the rather small brown dog’s help that
he included the dog in the foreground of his famous engraving of the Boston
Massacre.
With all due respect to the horses who carried Dawes, Revere, and Prescott,
the most remarkable horse story involved in the subsequent relay to spread
the word throughout the 13 Colonies was probably the ride of of Sybil
Ludington, whose 16th birthday was April 5, 1776.
“On April 26, 1777, a messenger reached the Ludington house with
news of Governor William Tryon’s attack on Danbury, Connecticut,
some 15 miles to the southeast, where the munitions and stores for the
militia of the entire region were stored. Colonel Ludington began immediately
to organize the local militia,” states the web site <www.catskill.net/purple/sybil.htm>.
“The messenger and his horse being exhausted, Sybil volunteered to
rouse the countryside. Through the night the 16-year-old girl rode her
horse nearly 40 miles on unfamiliar roads around Putnam county, spreading
the alarm.”
A 40-mile ride over icy, muddy roads on a cold New England spring night
would be an outstanding feat of endurance for any person and any horse,
even today.
Ludington’s life and mission depended upon her horse, and the horse
rewarded her confidence.
