ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: June 2006

NOAH’s ark on Puget Sound

STANWOOD, Washington––A starling swooped through the last daylight across the northbound lane of I-5, toward a gap in the young alders on the inland side. Braking to avoid the starling, I saw the sunset glinting off a sign through the trees, saying something about spay/neuter––and beyond the sign, caught a glimpse of a new animal shelter.

Just short of the Snohomish/Skagit county line, as close to the middle of nowhere as I-5 goes between Seattle and British Columbia, the starling had helped ANIMAL PEOPLE to quite accidentally discover the three-year-old NOAH Center.

It looked like a must to turn around and investigate.

Approaching past a cluster of off-leash dog exercise yards, I met executive director Austin Gates walking one last dog before locking up for the evening. Other late-working staff were just going home.

A public obedience class was ending in the NOAH Center training arena.

Many executive directors would have said, “Now that you know the way here, come back another time.”

Gates said, “Come on in.”

Built by the Northwest Organization for Animal Help with substantial support from the Edson Foundation, the no-kill NOAH Center went through a few years of shakedown, testing and improving the new facilities and developing programs.

Now the NOAH Center is ready, Gates explained, to grow into the teaching and training mission that the shelter directors had in mind all along. Hosting a recent visit by 35 members of the Washington Animal Control Association was the start, the directors hope, of inspiring a whole new approach to animal sheltering in the Puget Sound region and perhaps beyond.

Accomplishments include averaging more than 2,500 dog and cat sterilizations per year, and more than 1,000 adoptions, recruiting and managing 280 volunteers with a paid staff of just 13.

The human population of Stanwood, the nearest town, is only 4,000, with only 50,000 people in the four nearest towns.

Inconspicuous and seemingly out-of-the-way as it is, the NOAH Center draws adopters and volunteers from well beyond the usual service radius of an animal shelter, even without advertising, by offering a combination of attractive facilities, positive energy, and convenient access, once one knows about it.

The importance of education to the NOAH mission is immediately evident. The adoption desk is straight ahead from the main entrance, a pet supply boutique is to the right, and behind the adoption desk, visible through a corridor, is a classroom-and-library area occupying half or more of the space between the two wings of a building resembling a National Park lodge.

The NOAH board members traveled extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad, Gates explained, collecting ideas.

The closest apparent inspiration is the much larger five-year-old Oregon Humane Society shelter in Portland. Other probable sources of ideas include the nine-year-old Maddie’s Adoption Center in San Francisco; the five-year-old Pet Network of North Lake Tahoe shelter in Incline Village, Nevada; the Hong Kong SPCA; and the Best Friends Animal Society, of Kanab, Utah.

Gates attributes to Best Friends much of the management philosophy, and also credits her own early experience with the Denver Dumb Friends League. A 17-year shelter veteran, Gates later directed both the Ottawa Shores Humane Society and the animal control department in Grand Rapids, Michi-gan, before coming to NOAH.

Gates found the serve-the-public Dumb Friends League attitude particularly hard to instill in the Grand Rapids animal control staff, she admits, where many of the staff were career civil servants.

Coming to NOAH with the opportunity to build a first-rate organization from the start was, Gates says, the big break every animal shelter director dreams of.

“Shopping mall”

The NOAH Center houses cats to the left of the main entrance, dogs to the right.

“There’s no stench here,” marveled Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter M.L. Lyke in 2003, when the NOAH Center opened. “Industrial-size laundry machines and constant scrubdowns make sure of that. And there is none of the dead-end dog-pound blues yelping heard at other shelters. NOAH dogs are trained to de-stress through calming exercises. There is also no euthanasia room.”

The building is still library-quiet and odor-free, demonstrating the advantages of using storefront-grade window glass instead of chain link to divide animal quarters, maintaining constant air exchange, ducting air from the bottoms of rooms instead of the tops, and using well-placed sound baffles.

The NOAH staff rules include immediate poop removal at all times and no use of the term “cages” to refer to animal housing on the premises. Indeed, there are no animal quarters resembling cages.

The design concept, Gates said, is for the NOAH Center to resemble a shopping mall as much as possible: clean, quiet, comfortable, a place where neither animals nor staff nor visitors feel stressed.

A separate entrance for the public low-cost sterilization clinic is entered from the far end of the cat wing, where animals are least likely to become aware of the presence of other animals.

How low is low-cost?

“We will perform the procedure on pets of qualifying families for $25,” Gates said. “We do feral cats for $25, or for 25¢ on Monday mornings.”

The NOAH Center also loans out traps to feral cat colony caretakers.

Matchmaking

Animals for adoption are drawn from local animal control agencies, where most were on death row after exhausting their holding time. The NOAH Center does not accept animals directly from the public.

“Not every pound pup is NOAH material,” Lyke explained. “The staff carefully screens incoming animals to make sure they’re family-friendly. A healthy animal with three legs and one eye might make the grade. But an aggressive dog that fails the center’s temperament test is out of luck.

“The animals may get more screening than the families who come to adopt them,” Lyke wrote with evident surprise. “NOAH has a guilt-free adoption policy that avoids human interrogation. There are no investigations into animals who passed away, no requests for character references from three vets. The NOAH process simply involves meeting with a matchmaker to find the right two-legged and four-legged connection.”

As most incoming animals have not yet been sterilized, they arrive through the clinic. Cats then go through the back door into comfortable “kitty condominiums.” Dogs get their first walk through part of the 17-acre NOAH grounds. Later, volunteers will take them for at least one walk per day and usually several, over looping nature trails.

The 4,800-square-foot dog training area is just beyond a British-style parasol kennel that forms a turret at the north end of the dog wing. The training area was recently refloored at cost of $10,000 with a material made from recycled tires, usually used to surface indoor tracks. The price is competitive for the area covered, and the floor is at once soft on dogs’ paws and resistant to wear.

Gates points out that a soft floor was a necessity for offering agility training, in which dogs jump a lot.

How it came about

While the NOAH Center is only three years old, the Northwest Organization for Animal Help “was founded in 1986 by Nancy Gebhardt, Anne Belovich, Fran Osawa and a group of caring volunteers,” the NOAH Center web site acknowledges. Belovich is now listed as director emeritus.

Initially a shelterless rescue network, NOAH eventually ran a small shelter on Camano Island, outgrew it, and opened a thrift store in Stanwood to raise funds for bigger premises. The going was slow until early 2000, when Bayliner boat company founders Orin and Charlene Edson donated $1.5 million toward the construction of the NOAH Center, and put up a $1.5 million matching challenge grant to start an endowment fund.

Though that sounds like a lot of money, the NOAH Center actually cost no more to build than many conventional shelters of comparable size––and cost much less than most of the shelters from which the NOAH Center borrows ideas.

Gates told ANIMAL PEOPLE that the NOAH Center will provide sets of blueprints to other organizations for $50, which is their cost per set.

The NOAH Center scored 100 on the ANIMAL PEOPLE point scale, detailed 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 scale is designed to evaluate all types of shelter on an equal footing, regardless of size, function, or budget. ––Merritt Clifton

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