Dogged Blog

Pet Connection is back - did you miss it?

A couple of months ago, my friend (sister with different DNA, really) Gina Spadafori regained the right to use her PetConnection.com domain again. We discussed opening up the old Pet Connection archive there (my posts were all copied over to this blog, but the PC archive itself, including everyone else's posts, was inaccessible). And once we started down that road, we thought: Should we start blogging there again?

We decided HELL YES, and then we invited two of our favorite dog people on Planet Earth, Kim Campbell Thornton and Liz Palika, to come back, along with our beloved Dr. Tony Johnson.

All said yes, although Tony will only be an infrequent contributor. And we also made the vow: NO ads. NO sponsors. NO mealy mouthed BS. This is just all of us blogging about animal issues for no reason other than a desire to communicate.

So I hope those of you who missed Pet Connection will visit the blog once again, and those of you who missed its heyday will stop by and help us make a new one!

PetConnection.com

Looking for the Pet Connection blog?

If you're looking for the Pet Connection blog, where I've been writing since 2006... it's gone, and yes, I've been crying my eyes out for days now. Thanks for asking.

But! All is not lost!

All the Pet Connection bloggers have come together and are aggregating links to our blogging and other work on Petted and Vetted! We may do something more formal down the road, but for now, we're over there, and that's the best place to follow us.

When I say "us," I mean the entire Pet Connection blogging team -- me, of course, along with Pet Connection founder Gina Spadafori (she bought the domain name using my computer one New Year's Eve night long ago), David Greene, Kim Campbell Thornton, Dr. Tony Johnson, Therese Kopiwoda, Liz Palika, Dr. Robin Downing, Dr. Nancy Kay, Ericka Basile, Dr. Laurie Hess (our resident exotic pet specialist), Ingrid King, Mary Cvetan, and top dog writer Arden Moore!

I hope you'll head over to Petted and Vetted and give us a "like," and that you'll stick with us through whatever the future brings. In the meantime, you'll definitely be seeing a lot more of me here at Dogged.

I moved all my Pet Connection posts over here, too. You can find them in the "Pet Connection" category at right. (Excuse the mess -- when we moved the posts over, it brought all the tags and turned them into categories on this blog. I'm deleting as fast as I can!)

The only exception is my posts from the 2007 pet food recall, which are in their own category.

See you on Petted and Vetted!

Memphis: It doesn't have to be this way

You know, I can barely stand to read Yes Biscuit! these days, because all the Memphis Animal Shelter webcam pictures of dogs being dragged to the kill room gut me.

But this afternoon I was thinking about how people say those webcams make doing their jobs so much harder for the staff at the facility, and make them worry about their personal safety, and give Memphis a bad name and could be taken out of context and all the other things they say about the webcams.

I typically responded to that by saying, "Yeah, well, at least you're not being dragged to your death under horrible circumstances," but you know what?

What we're seeing on those cameras is cruelty to animals, but it's also cruelty to the people who work at MAS. If it's not making them wake up screaming every night with terror-filled dreams, then it's eroding their compassion and deadening their empathy. It's consuming their humanity, one needle full of Fatal-Plus at a time.

We know this because we've been told again and again by people who do it what the effect of shelter killing is on them. We can see it right in front of us when we look at those webcam shots, and imagine how the shelter workers have to shut their eyes to the terror of the dogs they drag down that hall.

Have to watch a garbage can full of squirmy puppies grow still and stop moving.

Have to see the rigid terror of the cat at the end of the catchpole relax into death.

Have to do it over and over again, hundreds of pets a week, an avalanche of death and fear and piss and shit. It never ends. Three out of four dogs and cats who come in the doors of the building where they work are going to be fed by them and watered by them and then dragged or carried down that long hallway, step by fearful step, until they're killed.

And one day, they just can't care anymore. And that's the day a part of them dies, too.

So even if you think that Memphis is doing the best it can for the animals -- which it's not -- tell me, do you think it's doing the best it can for the people who work there?

Imagine for a few minutes that instead of experiencing this:

... the staff at the Memphis Animal Shelter, like their counterparts at the Nevada Humane Society, could feel like this:

It's not impossible. It could happen.

Here's how.

Photos: Top, a MAS staffer and a terrified dog. Bottom, two Nevada Humane Society staffers celebrating an adoption.

Miami Herald has bad advice for shelter reformers

It may be time to come together to save the animals in Miami, but what exactly is the community supposed to come together and do?

This morning the Miami Herald published an editorial exhorting local activists to "put down their signs" and unite to help the new shelter director do a better job for the animals of Miami-Dade.

Specifically, it urged them to abandon their current form of activism -- organized protest -- and instead work to implement and support spay/neuter programs, calling them "the only proven method to bring down the shelter population."

To paraphrase Senator Daniel Moynihan, the Miami Herald, like all of us, is entitled to its own opinions -- but not its own facts.

Spay/neuter programs, while essential, are not the "only proven method" of reducing shelter population.

Innovative return to owner programs -- like those in Reno, Nev., and Calgary, Alberta -- have been proven to bring down shelter population.

Foster care programs have been proven to bring down shelter population.

Aggressive, creative adoption programs have been proven to bring down shelter population.

Owner retention programs -- support and assistance to pet-owners who are struggling to keep, feed or get vet care for their pets -- have been proven to bring down shelter population.

Great community relations so you can have lots of rescue groups, volunteers, supporters and donors to help get pets rehabbed, treated and adopted have been proven to bring down shelter population.

Bringing in great people who know how to get community and local government support has been proven to bring down shelter population.

A good relationship with the media, in order to get the word out to the community about adoptions as well as spay/neuter and owner retention support, has been proven to bring down shelter population.

Putting the entire burden of improving shelter intake and shelter numbers on spay/neuter just creates a sense of helplessness in everyone currently working to save animals, from the local government to the shelter director to the local media to the volunteers, staff and rescue groups all the way out to the entire community.

That's because spay/neuter is always "someday." It does nothing to save the lives of animals already born, nor those in the shelter right now. This means people put all their effort and energy into something without any immediate reduction in the suffering and death of their community's animals. It's demoralizing.

All those other proven programs, on the other hand, create excitement. They give people a sense of purpose. They create immediate gratification, thus rewarding volunteers, activists, employees, fosterers and rescuers for their efforts -- which typically causes people to try even harder.

The animals those programs save are also pretty glad about it.

It's possible, Miami Herald, to ask your community to come together and get a job done without asserting as a proven truth something that isn't so, and asking them to embrace a paradigm that is both ineffective and demoralizing.

By all means, beg them to keep your community's low-cost spay/neuter program in place. But to say that's the whole game? You are doing your community, its animals and the shelter staff and director a huge, huge disservice.

Regime change at Memphis Animal Shelter

Embattled Memphis Animal Shelter administrator Matthew Pepper threw in the towel on August 9. The story broke this evening on WMC-TV; h/t to Ryan Clinton:

Pepper sent his letter of resignation to Director Janet Hooks on August 9.

Pepper was named to the position in February of 2010.  In the year since he took the job, the shelter has been plagued with problems, including employees charged with animal cruelty.

Blogger Shirley Thistlewaite at Yes Biscuit!, who has been covering problems at MAS relentlessly for more than a year now, had this to say:

He leaves in his wake a city pound in turmoil, with one ACO facing criminal charges on multiple counts of animal cruelty, daily webcam images which appear to show needless killing and abuse, and locks on the doors to the stray area where hundreds of dogs languish without hope.

I hope, with all my heart, that the annual slaughter of thousands of healthy, friendly Memphis pets ends here.

[....]

This is your moment Memphis.  You have a choice.  Please, stop the abuse.  Stop the killing.

From your keyboard to Dog's ears, Shirley.

Photo: Just one of thousands of heartbreaking images from the MAS webcam, as published on Yes Biscuit!

Dear kill shelters: Please close your 'open' doors

If a person were taking in 10 pets a day and killing 7 or 8 of them every night, then taking 10 more in the next day, would you call them an "open admission pet-owner," or a serial habitual animal abuser?

Seriously -- if I see one more "shelter" defend their killing rate by proudly pointing out they're "open admission," I'm going to scream. I think continuing to take in animals you have no room for is stupid and immoral, and ten times more so when you then turn around and kill them. And to brag about it? Are you nuts?

Take the Michigan Humane Society, which kills nearly three-quarters of the animals it takes in, does not hold an animal control contract, and proudly brags that it's "open admission." I have a suggestion for you, MHS: Close your freaking door and stop killing all those animals.

That goes for Memphis Animal Shelter, too. They recently justified their kill rate, also around 75 percent, by saying they are the only  "open admission" shelter in their entire region.

Using the term "open admission" this way is the latest iteration of the "there's no such thing as 'no-kill,' it's just 'someone else kill'" defense. Essentially it's the implication that as long as strays are taken in and people are given the option of seeking shelter for a pet anytime and for any reason, the only possible outcome is that some -- often most -- of those animals will be killed by the very organization that takes them in. If they were "no kill," by this logic, they'd say "no" to some pet owners, who would just head for the "shelter" up the road that would say "yes" and then kill them.

Why do they think it's moral to take in animals you're only going to turn around and kill? Because of the "fate worse than death" defense.

Essentially organizations like this contend that an "open door" to animals who will be killed is preferable to an uncertain fate on the other side of that door.

Are there really only two options for these pets, death or "a fate worse than death"? Of course not.

Just look at Washoe County, Nev., and Calgary in Alberta, Canada, where innovative return-to-owner programs have reduced the intake and sheltering of stray dogs to such low numbers that the community can save the few who aren't able to go back to their families.

And look at shelters experimenting with making appointments for owner surrenders, places like PAWS Chicago. They save enough space in their program so they can take in urgent cases on the spot. However, they ask other pet owners to make arrangements for a future surrender date.

What they've found is that that most people are fine with that, knowing that if things become urgent the door is open, but happy to know that their pet will be given the shelter's full attention and a careful, loving re-homing at a planned, future moment.

Anecdotally, and this is something I think most rescuers have seen, I've observed that once a person knows there is an "out" from the pressure and stress of whatever is leading them to give up their pet, they sometimes see their way clear to keeping the pet, or become more able to find the pet a home themselves, or at least, they get enough relief from the stress of worrying about it that they're okay waiting for a little while.

Since there's no data that I'm aware of -- and if you know of some, I'd like to see it! -- demonstrating that the "open door" does  a better job of preventing these pets from being abandoned than programs like that do, you'd think it would be a moral imperative for self-described "shelters" to not take in animals they're going to turn around and kill, and give those programs a try.

Instead, they keep that damn door open as wide as possible and then brag about it -- even though what they're really bragging about is bad management, a lack of planning, and a failure to implement creative alternative strategies that are working in other communities.

All in the name of finding a scrap of moral high-ground to stand on while taking another pull from the bottle of Fatal-Plus.

Death, illnesses from salmonella, but no recall

You think the way the pet food industry and FDA handle pet food recalls stinks? Take a walk on the human side, where the Centers for Disease Control have been investigating ground turkey contaminated with salmonella that has caused one death and at least 76 illnesses in 26 states since March, and the government agency still hasn't announced a recall nor identified the producer of the contaminated food.

From the Associated Press:

The illnesses date back to March, and the CDC said Monday that cultures of ground turkey from four retail locations between March 7 and June 27 showed salmonella contamination. The agency said preliminary information showed that three of the samples have been linked to the same production establishment but did not name the retailers or the manufacturers.

The Agriculture Department oversees meat safety and would be the agency to announce a recall. The department sent out an alert about the illnesses late last week telling consumers to properly cook their turkey, which can decrease the chances of salmonella poisoning. But the department has not given consumers any further warnings about the source of the tainted meat.

The USDA has not responded to requests for comment on why there has not been a recall. The CDC said it and the USDA were "vigorously working to identify the specific contaminated product or products that are causing illnesses and will update the public on the progress of this investigation as information becomes available."

Food safety advocate Bill Marler, an attorney who has represented victims of the nation's biggest food-borne illness outbreaks, said he believes the three positive samples should prompt a recall.

"Consumers have no idea what to do except not eat ground turkey," he said.

Remember during the 2007 pet food recall when we kept saying, "If this was people food, you'd be doing a better job?" Not so much.

Read the whole story here.

No Kill Conference 2011: Social media

Alan Rosenblatt, Ph.D., of the Center for American Progress is doing a presentation on social media advocacy. Not particularly animal-related.

Talks about additive summation. Used Pres. Obama asking everyone to call congressional reps last week, they call -- and crash the phone system -- but they also post to reps' Facebook pages, protest outside of their offices, etc. Hit them everywhere, they're more likely to budge.

Same for us if we want to mobilize people we know. Reach with Twitter, Facebook, signage, talking in coffee shop, house parties, dog-washing parties. Bring people together, spread the message. We know repetition works with messaging. When we hear from more than one source, there's this thing called "source amnesia," they may not remember where they heard the message, but they remember the message.

Social media. "Here Comes Everybody."

The way things were: Talks about email lists of the past. Email is a closed communication loop.

The way things are now: Eg, Congress can't ignore FB, Twitter, etc. on social networks is because the world can see. Because the reason most people are there is to share what they find.

Social is not intrusive. It's not in your email box. It's just in your news stream. That is the nature of the platform. It's there, then it's gone, you don't have to do anything about it if you don't want to.

Members of Congress may not care to hear from non-constituents by email, phone, via web contact, but they have to care that people from anywhere can shut down their Facebook page with posts, or organize to raise money for their opponent.

You can't target everyone. You have to focus your message and pick key people. (I AGREE!!!!)

A 9-second sound bite = around 140 characters, Twitter limit.

He's never found a haiku longer than 80 characters, and they can describe the universe. "Imagine what you can describe with 140." But he says stay at 120 if you want people to re-tweet -- 80 percent RT manually, so they can add their own comments or hashtags.

Discussion of hashtags. This conference is #nkc2011, but people on #nokill don't seem to know. Need to announce a new or event-specific hashtag by announcing to more widely-used hashtag what the new hashtag is. Eg, tweet to #nokill and mention that #nkc2011 is the hashtag for this conference.

Long discussion about using "Facebook page takeovers" and the "etiquette" of removing posts on your wall and comments that you don't like. Your shutting down your critics can hurt you. Big time.

The movement of sophistication on these platforms is different from old time PR (how to make you LOOK good, not be good) to new PR, where they're really being told they have to  BE good, DO good, to walk the talk.

I just noticed David is reading this liveblog while he's sitting next to me listening to it in real time. I AM DEAD OF THE META.

Interesting that most interest at this presentation from the audience is about Twitter!

Question from audience: Do hashtags have RSS feeds? Answer: Yes.

Q: How to find someone's Twitter name? A: He recommends searching on Google with the person's name and the word Twitter rather than searching on Twitter.

Twitter reaches INFLUENCERS, Facebook better for grassroots.

Experts are more trusted than the most trusted institutions, so not just your organization should be on Twitter and FB, YOU and YOUR PEOPLE should be on FB and Twitter.

Better to have a few influential followers than many more who aren't.

To get more followers:

Step one: Make a connection. Fan or friend them, follow them.  Talk with them on social media -- it's SOCIAL. wefollow.com. listorius.com. keyword search or location search on search.twitter.com.

Step two: Engage the people you want to get in your audience. Share their stuff with your audience. Ask them for their expertise so they can help you, which massages their ego.

Step three: Recommend them. #followfriday or #ff. Create lists who are influencers in your field, then rec the list. On FB, like a post, or comment, and share on your wall. Once they follow you, keep repeating "engage" and "recommend." The more you give the more you get.

Web is altruistic. We draw people to us to send everyone to other places.

No Kill Conference 2011: Advocacy blogging

This is so meta -- our own David Greene and me, liveblogging the presentation by bloggers Brent Toellner of KC Dog Blog and Shirley Thistlewaite of YesBiscuit! talking about advocacy blogging at the No Kill Conference in Washington, DC. That's Brent, Shirley and David in the photo.

All the usual disclaimers apply: I'm doing this live, there will be typos, and I'll be updating a few times during the presentation so use your refresh button to check for new material.

By the way, there is a persistent rumor that Shirley is going to sing for us. Brent started that rumor. Shirley says if she does, it will be at the end.

The session starts at 10:45 AM Eastern, so stay tuned!

Brent and Shirley are introducing all the bloggers in the audience. Kathy Pobloskie of Wisconsin Watchdog, the Pets Alive blog, SavingShelterPets.wordpress.com, No Kill Nation, Valerie Hayes from coolcrazybeautifulworld.com, David and me  from PetConnection.com, new blogger from Prince Georges, MD (georgeofdenmarkscounty.blogspot.com), straycatalliance.org (Los Angeles).

Brent has been blogging at KC Dog Blog for around 5 years, Shirley at YesBiscuit!

Brent: How get news has changed. From over the fence to papers to TV news to 24 hour news channels, to media conglomerates.

People losing faith in the news media now. 57 percent have little to no trust in mainstream media (Gallup).

Online news is growing. 41 percent of Americans get news from Internet. Online is single biggest news source, more than TV and newspaper.

This is great for us. Your start up costs of an online community are zero. Go to Blogger or WordPress, it's free. We can be on the same playing field as maimstream media and cover things they aren't.

Trust in bloggers we "know" is growing -- and we define "know" very broadly these days.

Citizen journalists are doing journalism.

Reviewed basics of setting up blog.

Typepad, WordPress, Blogger, Examiner.

Looking at how to get content for blog. More basics. Some in audience interested in getting started with blogging.

Discussion of freedom of information act requests. How to get info from animal control and from private orgs doing animal control. Even when they don't want you to. Brent says you'll be amazed at how much people will tell you -- including animal control officers who want things to change but feel they have no voice. Also gets data just by putting "FOI request" in the subject line of his emails -- not an official request that way, but signals to clerk that he knows he has the right to the info.

Promoting blog. SEO, be involved in the community, provide links, reach out to others, use other social media tools like Facebook and Twitter.

Just looked around -- this session is JAMMED. Yay, Brent and Shirley!

Discussion of various platforms that track web traffic. Google Analytics, etc.

Now to Shirley. Kind of things you can do on a blog.

Alabama 44. HSUS got owner to surrender these dogs. Shirley wanted to find out what happened to the dogs. Online newspaper in South Carolina said they'd rescued some dogs from Alabama. She wanted to find out where the rest went.

HSUS did not want to release the info. So she started digging.

The three dogs sent to Lincoln County in SC were put in a gas chamber. "This was not a rescue."  This, she says, is why HSUS did no promo of this "rescue."

Some of the dogs ran away from small groups HSUS farmed them out to, without any support. Dogs were scared, unsocialized.

How she ended up finding out what happened. Readers helped. Digging, digging, digging. "Where did these dogs go?"

Several had been killed by "shelters" they were sent to, several ran away, and some were adopted It was very hard to find the info and couldn't have done it without help from readers. Ultimately HSUS did issue a statement on website about case, "of course they told it a little differently than I told it."

HSUS said/implied were all unsocialized, feral. Would be no good to anybody.

Shirley eventually tracked 41 of the dogs. Put last 3 as unaccounted for, presumed dead.

Back to Brent. Story of Fay, which we also covered here on Pet Connection.

HSUS sent out a fundraising letter using Fay's picture "to help dogs like Faye (sic)." "HSUS in the end raised about $1.4 million with this." A small organization in St. Louis was really caring for Fay, and until furor erupted, Brent does not think the people really caring for Fay would have seen a penny.

"This one was my Twitter moment, because it exploded on Twitter." Within a couple of days, HSUS had donated $5K and then went up to $10K, and when Fay died during one of her surgeries they tried to get some of the money back.

Comment from audience: Reading Shirley and Brent's blogs has helped her put the pieces together in her own community.

Brent: We're trying to hold people accountable and providing an alternative information source to the official press release.

Back to Shirley, and Memphis Animal Services saga.

"It's sort of become the blog's focus in the last few months."

Recapped history -- "shelter" raided by sheriff's deputies for animal cruelty and neglect ("starving dogs to death"). New mayor said he would right the animal shelter, and put web cams in place. Transparency.

She showed some of the disturbing webcam images. Says she's found out they tie all the dogs to the wall in the kill room and they have to watch each other die. Dragged on choke poles into the kill room, terrified.

Started letter writing campaign to ask city for reform. "The more we became active asking the city to clean up its act, the more they resisted."

Stray area is only visible on webcams. Public is not allowed in stray area. They ahve hundreds of dogs there and never get out of their cages until it's time for them to be killed. Public has no way of knowing. Literally behind locked doors. Select a couple dozen chosen for adoption hallway. Rest of them get three day mandatory hold and go to kill room.

Shirley wrote to shelter director about a dog she saw on webcam and offered to get dog veterinary care, but dog had already been killled. Shelter director told him they killed the dog "to prevent suffering."

Filed FOIA request for records on this dog. Brought in as a stray. Noted in record by time vet saw her, she'd been there a couple of days, vet noted , "The dog is suffering," but nothing was done until they killed her.

A reader posted a webcam photo of litter of pups being transported to kill room in a garbage can. Another of a cat being hung by neck by tongs. She said mayor continues to stand by director even so.

Locals have mobilized. Billboard. But the more they push, the more they resist. Now saying they'll remove webcams. Closing shelter advisory council meetings to public, and have added new members to council who are supportive of shelter status quo.

Local advocates still fighting, but Memphis doing everything they can to shut people out. Say they may privatize the shelter. Shirley says she's suspicious they're trying to privatize to get out of FOIA requests.

Should still be subject, but based on track record with city attorney threatening her because she was trying to help and fundraise for animals rescued from MAS, not optimistic about laws being interpreted and followed in accordance with public rights.

Shirley says these cases can burn you out. "It's very hard to do this, to keep with something like this, especially when you are seeing the images and they're so horrific and so heartbreaking. You have to know when to give yourself a break. If you get to the point where you're heartbroken and can't do it anymore, you have to step back.... " Make happy posts, talk about your pets.

Brent: May take you a while to build readership, stick with it, it will come. Think of yourself as a citizen journalist, covering the news no one else is. No ranting.

A log of blogs are constantly ranting, and it's not helpful. Get photos and data, and present solutions.

Involve your readers. Get a lot of data sources, even those you oppose. More info you have, more blog ideas you'll have, more accurate your info will be.

Grab screenshot in case it's changed in the future.

Verify tips. Can get bad information, even false info.

Time posts for optimal readership. News cycles.

How to win friends. You're going to make enemies. Have a thick skin. Be prepared.

You can't spay/neuter your way out of pet over-population

It’s often said that “we can’t adopt our way out of pet over-population.” I say we can't spay/neuter our way out of it.

I'm not even entirely sure what people mean when they talk about not being able to adopt our way out of pet over-population.

If they mean we have to have a big-picture view of the issue of pets being killed in shelters across the country, and not focus on just one piece of the puzzle, I can go along with that.

But I don't think most people who use that sentence mean it that way. They seem to mean one of two things.

The first is, "There is no point in trying to adopt out all these pets and we should just kill them instead, because if we find homes for these we'll just get more in to take their place." (True also of killing them, but they don't seem to consider that.)

The second is, "The only way to stop killing pets in shelters is to spay and neuter more of them."

Now, low-cost/free and accessible spay/neuter is one of the steps to no-kill, and I support and applaud any community that has that in place. Yay.

But I think it's kind of obvious that spaying and neutering will do absolutely nothing to save the lives of the pets who are homeless right now, nor the ones who will come into your shelter tomorrow or the next day.

The options are death and adoption. Spay/neuter isn't going to help these pets, and rushing past adoption and waving your little speuter flag is going to mean those pets get dead. And the ones who come in the next day to take their place? Also dead.

I think it's great that you have an upstream, supply-side plan. Don't get rid of it. Near-universal spay/neuter has almost certainly accounted for a lot of the gains we've made in reducing shelter killing in the last two decades, even if there aren't really any studies out there to support that. But I'm more than willing to believe that's the case.

But if you don't also have an equally strong demand-side plan, you're going to continue to have the kind of killing rates in shelters that we have today, which are -- or should be -- absolutely unacceptable to anyone who cares about animals.

Although there are places in the country where there's still a good amount of lifesaving potential in increasing spay/neuter accessibility and prevalence, in most communities, we've already harvested the low-hanging fruit. Most pet dogs and cats are already spayed or neutered, and spending huge resources chasing down the tiny number who aren't is going to result in ever-dwindling returns, particularly when it's done at the expense of better sheltering and better adoption, as is so often the case *cough* Los Angeles *cough*.

But adoption? Building better adoption systems is all low-hanging fruit. That's because there are millions more people every year who get new dogs and cats than there are pets in shelters. Most of them are willing to consider adopting a shelter pet -- and millions of them already have, and plan to again. Shelter and rescue group adoption accounts for more than one-fifth of all new dog and cat acquisitions in this country already.

It would take a very small increase in that rate -- just up to around one-quarter -- to save the lives of every healthy pet, as well as every pet with a treatable or manageable health or behavior problem, in every shelter in America.

Creating better, more appealing ways to get pets adopted doesn't just help those pets or your shelter, either;  it raises the profile of adoption in general and creates more social acceptance and awareness of adoption.

It both saves lives now, and builds infrastructure to keep saving them in the future. And even more importantly, it builds that infrastructure on a cultural level, not just for that one agency or community.

That's why adoption is so critical, and in most places is the silver bullet, while spay/neuter is not. As long as you have high rates of spay/neuter in your community already, and a free/low cost and accessible spay/neuter program, all your low-hanging fruit is in adoptions, not surgery.

And if you're in an area with very low rates of spay/neuter and no services, then yes, you need to get those s/n programs in place immediately. But that's no reason to ignore adoptions. Those surgeries will only reduce future shelter intake; it takes adoption programs, and better sheltering practices, to save the lives of the homeless animals in your community right now, and the ones who will need your help in the near future.

The next time someone tells you that "you can't adopt your way out of pet over-population," don't believe it. If they tell you that you can't stop the killing with adoption, believe it even less. Because finding homes for homeless pets is the only way to save their lives.