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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: July-August 2007
U.S. shelter killing toll drops to 3.7 million dogs & cats
U.S. animal shelters as of mid-2007
are killing fewer dogs and cats than at any time in at least the past
37 years, according to the 15th annual ANIMAL PEOPLE evaluation of the
most recent available shelter data.
The rate of shelter killing per 1,000
Americans, now at 12.5, is the lowest since data collected by John Marbanks
in 1947-1950 suggested a rate of about 13.5--at a time when animal control
in much of the U.S. was still handled by private contractors, who often
simply killed strays or sold them to laboratories instead of taking them
to shelters, and unwanted puppies and kittens were frequently drowned.
The ANIMAL PEOPLE projection each year
is based on compilations of the tolls from every open admission shelter
handling significant numbers of animals in specific cities, counties,
or states. The sample base each year is proportionately weighted to ensure
regional balance. Only data from the preceding three fiscal years is included.
Using a three-year rolling projection
tends to level out flukes that might result from including different cities,
counties, and states each year, but has the disadvantage of sometimes
not showing significant changes in trends until a year or two after they
start. Thus the effects of the post-2001 slump in funding for dog and
cat sterilization programs only became evident in 2004. Comparably, trends
involving Internet-assisted adoption, adoption transport, feral cats and
pit bull terriers that were just gathering momentum in 2004 are major
influences on the 2007 findings.
As of 2004, about a third of all U.S.
dog and cat adoptions were believed to be Internet-assisted, via web sites
where animals' photographs and descriptions are posted. Anecdotally, at
least two thirds of adoptions are Internet-assisted today, with dogs benefitting
most, since dog adopters are more likely to be seeking a specific breed
or mix, who may be readily found only through web-searching.
Adoption transport also chiefly benefits
dogs, since cats are still abundant in all parts of the U.S., but small
dogs, puppies, and purebreds are relatively scarce in shelters along both
coasts and in the northern Midwest.
Soaring shelter receipts of pit bull terriers
in 2001-2004 outraced progress in sterilizing feral cats, causing total
shelter killing to soar by the end of 2004 to the highest level since
1997. For the first and only time since ANIMAL PEOPLE began quantifying
shelter killing, more dogs were killed in 2004 than cats. The 1997 toll
was 53% cats, 47% dogs, about the same balance as had prevailed since
the mid-1980s, but the 2004 toll was reversed, at 47% cats, 53% dogs.
About half of the dogs who were killed
in 2004 were pit bull terriers, ANIMAL PEOPLE confirmed by surveying shelter
directors in 23 representative metropolitan areas.
Salathia Bryant of the Houston Chronicle
was shocked in February 2007 to discover that local shelter intakes of
pit bulls had increased from 5% of all dogs in 2000 to 15% in 2002 and
27% in 2006. Actually this was right on the national norms found by ANIMAL
PEOPLE nearly two years earlier.
Los Angeles residents were shocked in
June 2007 when Department of Animal Regulation chief Ed Boks lamented
that 40% of the dogs who were killed in the city shelters during the preceding
year were pit bulls. Yet as many as 70% of the dogs killed in some other
major cities are pit bulls--who are reportedly 65% of the animal control
dog intake in Milwaukee, and may account for more than two-thirds of the
dog intake in Detroit and Philadelphia.
While pit bull intake has not slowed down
since 2004, and appears to be still rising, the total canine death toll
in U.S. shelters has fallen by more than 750,000 since 2004, with pit
bulls the main beneficiaries.
Increasing use of standardized temperament
tests to determine whether dogs are safe for adoption appears to be driving
the change. Traditionally, behavioral suitability for adoption tended
to be judged from anecdotal assessments by animal control officers, kennel
workers, and people who surrendered animals to shelters. Relatively few
shelters ever categorically refused to adopt out pit bulls and other breeds
of dog who are considered high-risk, though some did and still do, but
the breeds of dogs tended to weigh heavily, if not always consciously,
in the judgments.
When most shelters were killing a relatively
high percentage of the dogs received, and no one breed predominated, this
was not an issue. As pit bulls came to disproportionately fill shelters,
however, concern about "breed discrimination" on the one hand
and soaring liability insurance costs on the other caused shelter directors
to seek ways to support their decisions. Standardized temperament tests
offer shelters a way to explain in relatively objective terms why a particular
dog may be unsuitable for adoption, and to adopt out some pit bulls with
confidence that the adoptions will succeed.
Whether temperament tests really prevent
dog attacks and liability is still a matter of debate, with several relevant
court cases pending. ANIMAL PEOPLE in January/February 2002 published
data suggesting that the breed-specific patterns of fatal and disfiguring
attacks among dogs who have cleared behavioral screening are the same
as among all dogs.
However, though pit bulls tend to flunk
the most popular standardized behavioral tests more often than any other
breed, enough pit bulls pass that they have become the breed most often
adopted in New York City and Los Angeles. Despite several high-profile
failures of pit bull adoption programs in the 1990s, many other cities
are now trying similar approaches, based on checklists of behavior that
can be taken into a courtroom more persuasively than the intuitive and
subjective opinions of animal handlers.
Currently, U.S. shelters kill about 1.4
million dogs per year, including about 750,000 pit bulls and close mixes
of pit bull.
While fewer pit bulls are dying in U.S.
shelters, the cat toll is rising again for the first time since neuter/return
feral cat control caught on in 1991-1992. Across the U.S., the shelter
toll is now 63% cats, 37% dogs--the most lopsided that it has ever been.
Tweety & Sylvester
The 2006 projected total of 2.3 million
cats killed in shelters represents an increase of about 300,000 from the
level of the preceding several years,
Yet this is not because there are more
cats at large. Repeatedly applying various different yardsticks to measure
the U.S. feral cat population, including shelter data, roadkill counts,
and surveys of cat feeders, ANIMAL PEOPLE has found since 2003 that the
projections consistently converge on estimates of about six million feral
cats at large in the dead of winter, with about twice that many after
the early summer peak of "kitten season." This is down by more
than 75% from the feral cat population of circa 1990, which was up by
about a third from the total indicated in the studies done by John Marbanks
in 1947-1950.
Data collected for the National Council
on Pet Population Study indicates that the U.S. pet cat population has
not reproduced in excess of self-replacement since approximately 1994.
The marked increase in the U.S. pet cat population over this time, from
just over 60 million to about 90 million, has been driven by adoptions
of feral cats--mostly feral-born kittens. Kitten removals from the feral
population, together with neuter/return, has reduced feral cat reproductive
capacity to substantially less than replacement. Taking feral cats' places
are other mid-sized predators including growing populations of urban and
suburban coyotes, foxes, bobcats, hawks, owls, and eagles.
But intolerance of free-roaming cats,
especially feral cats, is the longtime official policy of all U.S. federal
government agencies, as well as many state agencies responsible for managing
property where feral cats formerly dwelled. Under intense pressure from
birders and conservationists trying to save endangered species of birds
and small mammals, federal and state agencies have intensified efforts
to extirpate feral cats.
Organized opposition to neuter/ return
feral cat management before 2003 came chiefly from the Humane Society
of the U.S. and PETA, which held that feral cats were suffering and should
therefore be killed to end their misery, and the American Bird Conserv-ancy,
a relatively small organization that originated as a project of the World
Wildlife Fund. Soon thereafter, HSUS adopted policies favoring carefully
managed neuter/return--but in April 2003 the National Wildlife Federation
membership magazine National Wildlife came out strongly against neuter/return.
Only The Nature Conservancy, whose policy is to extirpate all nonnative
species from their land holdings if possible, has more influence among
U.S. wildlife policymakers.
Feral cat colony caretakers have often
not helped their cause by maintaining colonies near sensitive wildlife
habitats, and by not sterilizing enough cats, fast enough, to reduce the
visible population to none within the three-to-five-year average lifespan
of a feral cat who survives kittenhood.
Cape May, New Jersey, for example, has
has an active neuter/return network since 1992, encouraged by animal control
chief John Queenan. ANIMAL PEOPLE mentioned the Cape May project as a
model for other communities in 1993. But Cape May is perhaps the most
frequented resting and feeding area for migratory birds along the entire
Atlantic flyway. Many visiting species are in decline, including the tiny
red knot, which flies each year all the way from the Antarctic to the
Arctic and back. Cape May is also among the nesting habitats of the endangered
piping plover.
The Cape May economy is driven by birders'
visits. When Cape May still had an estimated 500 feral cats in 2003, ten
years into the neuter/return program, the city allowed neuter/return advocates
to maintain 10 cat feeding stations and weather shelters, but the U.S.
Fish & Wildlife Service began demanding that feral cat feeding be
ended.
Many cats were removed from sensitive
areas and housed in two trailers, one belonging to Cape May Animal Control
and the other to Animal Outreach of Cape May County, the primary local
cat rescue group since 1995. On May 19, 2007, however, the trailers caught
fire, killing 37 cats.
Cape May is currently considering withdrawing
support for neuter/return and prohibiting feeding cats outdoors.
A similar situation may have a happier
outcome on Big Pine Key, Florida, home of the endangered Hefner rabbit,
Sylivilagus palustris hefneri. The rabbit was named for Playboy magazine
founder Hugh Hefner after he funded the study that put it on the U.S.
endangered species list more than 20 years ago. Blaming feral cats for
a catastrophic collapse in rabbit numbers at the National Key Deer Refuge,
refuge manager Anne Morkill in June 2007 announced that the cats would
be trapped and taken to animal control shelters, where they would probably
be killed. Hefner then donated $5,000 to Stand Up For Animals, whose founder,
Linda Gottwald, told Stephanie Garry of the St. Petersburg Times that
she would use the funding to sterilize and relocate as many of the cats
as possible.
Among the regional variations of note
in the 2007 ANIMAL PEOPLE roundup of shelter killing data are that the
dog/cat balance is 72/28 in the Northeast, 65/35 in the Midwest, 63/35
in the Mid-Atlantic region, and 60/40 along the West Coast, but is 54/46
in the South, where intakes and killing of both dogs and cats are highest.
Among the possible explanations are that Southern animal control agencies
may put more emphasis on picking up dogs, and that communities with more
dogs at large tend to have fewer feral cats.
Virginia and Florida data, however, more
resembles the data from the rest of the U.S., reflecting the demographic
influences of Washington D.C. and migration to Florida from other parts
of the country.
Midwest progress
The Midwest has made the most impressive
recent gains, almost catching up to the West Coast in reduction of dog
and cat overpopulation through high-volume low-cost sterilization. Many
of the most ambitious dog-and-cat sterilization projects started within
the past decade are in the Midwest, including Pets Are Worth Saving, founded
by Paula Fasseas in Chicago, and the Foundation Against Companion Animal
Euthanasia, founded by Scott Robinson, M.D., in Indianapolis.
A global veterinary shortage is especially
acute in the Midwest, where organizations including the Michigan Humane
Society, based in Detroit, and M'Shoogy's Animal Rescue, near Kansas City,
have at times had to cut back services simply because they could not find
vets to fill their open positions.
The same problem afflicts the Appalachian
states, where progress achieved in the 1990s has largely been lost, most
markedly in Knoxville. Handling both city and county animal control sheltering
out of a World War II-vintage Quonset hut, and operating a major local
dog and cat sterilization program, the Humane Society of the Tennessee
Valley had reduced shelter killing to 24.5 dogs and cats per 1,000 humans
by 1999--well above the then-national average of 16.6, but among the best
records in the South.
A coalition of local no-kill rescue groups
then convinced Knoxville officials that a city-and-county-run shelter
working cooperatively with them could operate on less money and save more
animals. ANIMAL PEOPLE warned at the time that Knoxville could not realistically
try to achieve no-kill sheltering until the animal control intake volume
fell by at least half. Instead of lowering the shelter toll, the first
five years of animal control under the new agency saw shelter killing
increase by 22%.
Regions quit counting
A frustrating aspect of the 2007 ANIMAL
PEOPLE shelter toll analysis is that while we received enough data from
both the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions to project reliable totals
and trends by comparison to past data, including the dog/cat balance,
no individual or agency relayed complete enough new data from cities other
than New York City and Philadelphia--the biggest cities in those regions--for
us to list totals for any others.
This is markedly different from the first
years of our annual updates, when the most complete counts we received
were from the New England states, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland.
As shelter killing rates in those states
have stabilized at very low levels, many of the agencies that formerly
collected shelter tolls appear to have refocused on collecting information
about adoption transport programs, a very small part of shelter activity
15 years ago, but now the source of half or more of the animals many shelters
offer for adoption.
--Merritt Clifton
U.S. animal shelter data broken down by
city, county, state, and region
Animals killed YEAR 1,000s Animals
per 1,000 people of people killed
New York City 2.0 2007 8,143 16,489
NORTHEAST (24%) 1.7 33,495 56,857
NEW JERSEY 4.7 2005 8,725 40,706
Philadelphia 19.9 2006 1,448 28,774
MID-ATLANTIC (33%) 7.3 30,759 225,116
Broward County 7.3 2006 1,788 13,000
Richmond, VA 8.3 2006 194 1,615
West Palm Beach 13.5 2005 1,216 16,411
Palm Beach County 15.5 2006 1,288 20,000
VIRGINIA 17.5 2005 7,568 132,400
Alachua Cty, FL 18.2 2006 224 4,071
Orlando/Orange Cty 18.6 2005 1,023 19,000
Tampa area 19.9 2006 2,489 49,557
Tallahassee 22.4 2004 239 5,350
Duval County 22.6 2006 826 18,672
Coweta Cty, GA 22.6 2004 101 2,288
NORTH CAROLINA 27.9 2005 8,683 242,935
Columbia, SC 37.0 2004 332 12,275
Polk County, FL 40.3 2005 511 20,566
Augusta, GA 45.3 2004 198 8,967
Orangeburg Cty, SC 49.5 2006 91 4,500
SO. ATLANTIC (56%) 22.3 47,368 1,021,048
Dallas 10.8 2005 2,306 25,000
Dallas/FtWorth rgn 14.2 2005 5,753 82,000
Austin/Travis Cty. 17.4 2005 888 15,411
Houston 22.2 2004 3,596 80,000
Birmingham 23.8 2005 818 19,438
Fort Worth 24.9 2005 603 15,000
Conroe area, TX 26.8 2006 378 10,120
Lafayette, LA 28.0 2004 195 5,439
Mobile 30.1 2005 401 12,071
Tuskaloosa, AL 30.1 2006 169 4,982
El Paso, TX 31.4 2004 700 22,000
Gulfport 31.8 2006 194 6,16
Baldwin County, AL 33.3 2006 163 5,432
Blount County, AL 38.6 2006 56 2,153
San Marcos 43.9 2004 43 1,888
Shreveport/Caddo 48.0 2005 250 12,000
Tupelo, MS 55.4 2006 78 4,320
Longview, TX 70.8 2005 114 8,070
GULF COAST (41%) 21.3 34,863 742,582
Mission Viejo, CA 1.0 2005 166 113
Santa Cruz Cty, CA 2.0 2005 251 5,000
San Francisco 2.2 2005 744 1,646
Snohomish Cty, WA 4.7 2005 639 3,000
Santa Barbara 5.0 2004 403 2,002
San Diego 5.9 2004 2,931 17,421
Tehama County, CA 6.8 2006 62 421
Los Angeles 7.2 2006 9,948 71,357
Portland/Multnomah 7.2 2005 673 4,841
Silicon Valley 8.5 2005 1,668 14,097
OREGON 8.9 2005 3,641 32,235
Eugene, OR 10.1 2005 336 3,378
WASHINGTON [prjtd] 11.1 2005 6,132 68,054
Merced Cty, CA 12.2 2006 246 3,011
Lodi, CA 13.9 2005 57 788
Monterey County, CA 14.4 2006 412 5,912
Lindsay/Porterville 14.6 2005 56 817
Visalia, CA 15.5 2006 420 6,521
Kern County, CA 20.4 2006 780 15,922
Douglas County 24.0 2005 104 2,519
Valley Oak, CA 25.4 2005 210 5,336
Bakersfield, CA 26.2 2005 644 16,904
Kings County, CA 27.2 2005 147 4,013
Clovis, CA 27.5 2005 90 2,471
Modesto 30.5 2004 489 14,903
Madera County, CA 35.2 2005 144 5,071
Tulare Cty, CA 40.3 2005 154 6,203
Fresno, CA 42.3 2005 787 33,255
PACIFIC (64%) 11.0 48,000 528,000
Terre Haute 4.6 2005 169 78
Milwaukee 4.8 2005 1,700 8,162
Chicago 6.9 2005 2,869 19,706
MICHIGAN 11.7 2006 10,096 117,919
Indianapolis 18.5 2005 783 14,444
Winnebago Cty, IL 19.2 2004 284 5,449
Kansas City, KS 21.6 2004 158 3,412
Oklahoma City 22.2 2004 677 15,000
Fort Wayne, IN 28.6 2004 340 9,724
Athens, OH 46.6 2004 64 3,000
MIDWEST (27%) 11.5 63,810 733,815
Nashville, TN 18.9 2004 511 9,647
Chattanooga 22.5 2004 307 6,918
Knoxville 29.9 2006 405 12,090
Spartanburg TN 32.8 2004 261 8,562
Louisville 42.9 2005 700 30,000
APPALACHIA (17%) 30.1 12,915 388,742
Salt Lake City 6.0 2005 1,016 6,094
Weld County, CO 8.5 2005 211 1,800
Larimer Count, CO 11.6 2005 267 3,093
Billings 14.6 2004 133 1,941
UTAH 14.4 2005 2,352 33,854
Phoenix/Maricopa 16.3 2006 3,636 59,093
Albuquerque 26.9 2004 581 15,600
Santa Fe, NM 38.2 2005 130 5,000
WEST (41%) 17.3 17,721 306,573U.S.
TOTAL 12.5 296,410 3,696,160
(The regional and national totals appearing in bold are not tallies of
the data used to produce them, but are rather estimates proportionately
weighted to reflect demography. The percentage figure in parenthesis is
the percentage of the human population encompassed within the shelter
service areas from which the totals were derived. The stated U.S. population
is the median 2004-2007, not the 2007 total.)
U.S. progress vs. shelter killing
Year Millions of dogs Killed per
& cats killed 1,000 humans
1970 23.4 115.0
1985 17.8 74.8
1997 4.9 21.1
1998 4.9 19.4
1999 4.5 16.6
2000 4.5 16.8
2001 4.4 15.7
2002 4.2 15.3
2003 4.5 14.8
2004 4.9 17.4
2005 4.4 14.8
2006 3.7 12.5