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Curious Iowa: Are local animal shelters considered no-kill?
No-kill shelters use euthanasia as a last resort, when animals have complex medical or behavioral issues
Dec. 11, 2023 5:00 am, Updated: Dec. 11, 2023 8:11 am
Many animals shelters across the United States have been working in recent years to achieve a no-kill standard, meaning that euthanasia of animals is used only as a last resort for severe medical or behavioral issues, and never used simply as a means of saving space or resources.
The no-kill movement started in the 1980s, but has gained traction recently, with help from Best Friends Animals Society, a Utah-based nonprofit that has set a goal for all U.S. shelters to be no-kill by 2025.
Rene Anderson, a Gazette reader who has worked and volunteered in multiple shelters in the area and regularly donates to Best Friends, wrote to Curious Iowa to ask whether local animal shelters in Eastern Iowa are considered no-kill, and how they work toward that goal.
Curious Iowa is a series from The Gazette that seeks to answer Iowans’ questions about the state, its culture and the people who live here.
To answer Anderson’s question, we examined data from animal shelters in Linn and Johnson Counties and talked with staff at a couple of the shelters about the work they do and how they are able to use their resources to protect the animals they serve.
What makes a shelter no-kill?
Best Friends defines no-kill as saving every animal that can be saved in a shelter. If animals have uncurable health issues that cause them pain, or have behavioral issues that can’t be fixed and make them dangerous to themselves or others, they may be euthanized under a no-kill philosophy.
“We would not euthanize for space, time, any of that. You’re going to see euthanasia for danger to the public, that sort of thing, or for health of the animal if it’s suffering and we’ve exhausted all options,” said Hannah McFarlane, the program director at Cedar Valley Humane Society, a no-kill shelter in Linn County.
Since the causes of deaths and motivation for each euthanasia is hard to track, animal rights groups usually set a benchmark of a 90 percent live release rate in order for a shelter to be considered no-kill for data collection purposes.
Best Friends collects data from shelters across the country to keep track of how close the U.S. is to achieving a universal no-kill standard.
Linn and Johnson County shelters
There are three municipal shelters in Linn and Johnson Counties: Iowa City Animal Care and Adoption Center, Cedar Rapids Animals Care and Control, and the Cedar Valley Humane Society. The Iowa City and Cedar Rapids shelters are both funded and operated using city tax dollars.
The Cedar Valley Humane Society is a nonprofit that contracts with 47 municipalities in Eastern Iowa. It is paid by the municipalities per service, but funded mostly through donations, according to McFarlane.
The Cedar Valley Humane Society is the only one of the three shelters that is currently no-kill, having met the 90 percent standard every year since 2016. So far this year the shelter has had a 96 percent live release rate. Last year it was 97 percent, and in 2021 it was 96 percent, according to McFarlane.
The numbers that Best Friends has collected for the Cedar Valley Humane Society puts the shelter at just below 90 percent for the last couple years. McFarlane said she believes that is because the shelter sometimes performs euthanasia for pet owners who bring their pets in for that service, and those animals sometimes get recorded as shelter animals who are killed.
“Our live release number is strictly the number of animals that come into the shelter, whether as a stray, an owner surrender or whatever, and then how many are released alive,” McFarlane said. “That’s going to be whether they left here through adoption, they were returned to their owner, or they were transferred to another rescue organization.”
Achieving that no-kill status has required a lot of community support in order to have the proper resources to take care of any animals that come into the shelter, McFarlane said.
The nonprofit has several programs designed to help pet owners so pets don’t have to be surrendered to the shelter in first place, like providing financial assistance with pet food and other animal needs, and providing obedience classes to help animals that may have behavior issues.
“We try and help those owners before that pet might come to us,” McFarlane said. “Keeping the pet out of the shelter, obviously, is going to be our ideal outcome for any pet.”
Once animals have been surrendered, the nonprofit doesn’t put limits on how long it can stay, and will work to make sure it gets what it needs to stay healthy and happy. The shelter has animal foster programs, through which community members can host pets in their homes for a period of time without committing to fully adopt those pets. The foster program is helpful when the shelter has more animals than it has capacity for, or when there are animals that are comfortable in a home environment but don’t interact well with other animals at the shelter.
Currently the shelter has more than 90 pets in its care, and 33 of them are in foster homes.
The Iowa City Animal Care and Adoption Center also has a foster program, and other programs like dog training assistance, which are funded with help from the Friends of the Animal Center Foundation, a nonprofit in Iowa City that is dedicated to raising money to supplement city funding for the Iowa City animal shelter. The Iowa City shelter is close to achieving no-kill status with an 86.39 percent live release rate in 2022.
Chris Whitmore, the Iowa City Animal Services Coordinator, said the shelter is working toward that 90 percent survival threshold, but she doesn’t believe it’ll be achieved this year.
The Iowa City shelter’s resources have been strained this year, especially after it took in 131 dogs from a Johnson County puppy farm that didn’t pass inspection by the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. Nine of those dogs died shortly after arriving at the shelter. Many were eventually transferred to other shelters across the Midwest.
“We believe that every dog is an individual. We try to set them up for success,” Whitmore said.
The Iowa City shelter also doesn’t have a time limit on how long animals can stay. If any animal that is brought in as a stray isn’t claimed by an owner within five days, the shelter will start the process of evaluating the animal’s health and behavior and whether it is suitable for adoption. If the animal can’t be adopted, the shelter will try to get health treatments or training to remedy what they can.
Whitmore said the shelter has to perform a bit of a balancing act between avoiding euthanasia, having space in the shelter for all the animals it takes in, and keeping unsafe animals from being in the community.
“We feel that these dogs have to be safe for our community. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be safe for our community at the beginning. We have dog trainers here that will work with the dogs. If we can get to the point where we figure out what the trigger is or what is the issue, we’ll keep them here and get them adopted,” Whitmore said.
Whitmore said she knows of some animal rescues that are no-kill but will put animals up for adoption that aren’t safe because they don’t have the resources or funding to work with those animals but don’t want to euthanize them and risk losing the no-kill status.
“No-kill gets us a bad rap, because we feel our animals have to be 100 percent safe for our community,” Whitmore said. “I don’t want to euthanize anything, if it’s aggressive or not. That’s not what we’re here in this line of work for, but we definitely would do it. With dog to dog aggression, a lot of times rescues will put those dogs up for adoption. We don’t feel that’s a safe thing either. Not only is it not safe for our community dogs that are already out there. It’s not safe because if that dog attacked another dog, usually people get involved, and then there’s a bite.”
Whitmore said that a trap-neuter-return, or TNR, ordinance passed in Iowa City in 2019, which allows feral and community cats to be neutered and then released back into the city, has also helped with the effort to become a no-kill shelter. Before the ordinance, if unadoptable, feral cats were brought in, the shelter would try to find a barn for them to live in. If they didn’t have somewhere to go, those cats had to be euthanized.
Cedar Rapids is currently working on developing an ordinance legalizing TNR efforts in the city, but an initial proposal raised concerns within animal rights communities about the requirements for community members wanting to perform TNR work.
According to Best Friends’ website, the Cedar Rapids Animal Care & Control shelter had a 73.76 percent live release rate in 2020, which is the most recent year Best Friends had available data from the shelter.
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Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com
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