No kill nation?

Mainstream animal welfare practitioners and theorists generally condemn (or ignore) Nathan Winograd, who wrote the book that has largely defined the "no kill” movement.

The attacks on Winograd come not from people who dislike animals or who believe animal welfare is an unimportant cause. Instead, they come from people who spend a lot of time working in the field and thinking about it. Winograd has earned their hostility with two basic assertions. First, the killing of millions of dogs and cats in American animal shelters every year is unnecessary. Second, the primary reason for the killings is not, as mainstream, "pet overpopulation." Instead, according to Winograd, shelter killing "is the result of shelter managers who find it easier to kill animals than to save them.”

In sum, Winograd attacks two of animal welfare’s most fundamental claims: first, that “there aren’t enough homes for them all,” and second, that the primary problem is “irresponsible” owners who let their dogs and cats make babies.

No wonder they don’t like him.

Because so many people I respect dismiss Winograd’s work, I avoided reading it until recently. He is worth taking seriously, both for his serious contributions to a better shelter system and for a broader understanding of the theory and practice of the animal rescue movement.

The most common complaints from within the animal welfare movement are that Winograd is unrealistic, radical, and divisive. It’s worth reflecting on each of these terms.

If Winograd is unrealistic, he is in good company. The same belief that the U.S. can virtually end the killing of shelter animals within a few years is at the heart of the mission of the largest animal charity in the world, Maddie’s Fund. Last summer, I met with Richard Avanzino, the president of Maddie’s Fund, who is patently neither a fluffy-headed sentimentalist nor a wild-eyed lunatic. However, he believes that by 2015, the U.S. can stop killing healthy companion animals.

Both Avanzino and Winograd have specific strategies for achieving this goal. Maddie’s Fund focuses on low-cost, high-volume spay/neuter, investing in university shelter medicine programs, community collaborations, and data collection and dissemination, aiming for transparency and accountability. Winograd takes a slightly different, though not conflicting, approach, which he calls the “no-kill equation.” This model has many different facets, but its core elements center on changes in shelters themselves, which he says should
* become more proactive in reuniting stray pets with their owners
* become more proactive in seeking adoptive homes for shelter pets, by offering off-site adoption centers, expanded operating hours, and more customer-friendly service
* offer help with behavior issues and counseling to prevent owner surrenders
* initiative feral cat trap-neuter-release programs
* collaborate with private rescue groups and individual volunteers (e.g., enabling fostering directly from the shelter)

These strategies have been implemented and succeeded in many places, from San Francisco (which almost 20 years ago became the first declared “no kill” city in the US while Avanzino as director of the SF SPCA) to rural and small-town shelters in many regions, including those – the south and southwest – that mainstream animal welfare advocates usually write off. The numbers are impressive, and I don’t think either Winograd or Avanzino have cooked them. (In our area, both TNR and low-cost spay/neuter programs have been very effective; there has not been as much effort at some of the other initiatives.)
Many shelter directors and other animal welfare professionals complain that “no kill” shelters are possible only because nearby open-admission shelters take in the leftovers. However, Winograd gives numerous examples (and more have been added since his book was published) of shelters that are open-admission and still refuse to kill animals in order to make space.

So maybe Winograd and Avanzino are not entirely unrealistic, but are they sentimental? Avanzino clearly loves animals deeply (he had his elderly dog in the office with him when we talked) but he is a hard-headed lawyer and executive. His belief that we can stop killing healthy animals in shelters is not the result of rose-colored glasses. He has analyzed the data, seen the reports, and decided that they add up.

(It is also worth pointing out that “sentimental” and similar adjectives like naive or immature have long been used to trivialize serious challenges to the status quo: Don’t like the way things are going? You’ll grow out of it.)

The last negative adjective associated with the no kill movement, “divisive,” is tricky. In one sense, it is absolutely true. As Winograd himself puts it, “We are not, and have never been, a united movement.” No social movement ever has been, including the most effective ones, such as the civil rights and feminist movements. Too often, the accusation of “divisiveness” is used by one faction to tell their challengers to shut up and join the program. Even those who sincerely believe they are following the best possible approach are condescending, at best, when they assert that all the hard thinking has been done and that the rest of us should just write checks, follow instructions, and stay “on the same page.”

Winograd puts people off, in part, because there is an impression that he wants to shift all the blame away from ordinary folks and place it on the people who work in shelters. In fact, he never blames shelter workers but only their directors and the city or county agencies that supervise them. Most of all, he attacks an institutional culture that fails to see the possibility of doing things differently.

Winograd may downplay the problems of irresponsibility and downright cruelty, but his argument is interesting: animal welfare professionals overplay these problems because they see only the worst, and thus can ignore the vast majority of pet owners who love their animals and take good care of them and who, further, would like to help other animals.

While Winograd surely is mistaken on some points, he deserves to be taken seriously. This is true, first, for practical reasons: he offers concrete, not very difficult or expensive strategies to reach the goal we say we all share: reducing the killing. If he can show us some ways to do this, why not listen to him, regardless of how he says it?

Even more, Winograd is worth reading for his philosophical and moral challenge:

“It is an inherent contradiction to use ‘killing’ as a means to ‘not killing.’”

As Martin Luther King Jr and countless other activists have reminded us, a complete divorce between the means and the ends, in any social movement, has never worked out very well. (Remember that war to end all wars?)

Winograd asks what happens if we take killing off the table as an option for all but the most seriously ill or injured animals. In that situation, he says, people will find other solutions, which do not seem possible at present because mass killing is not only allowed but encouraged. Many social movements have made progress only when they took seriously an option that the conventional wisdom called unrealistic.