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Conducting transfers requires time, resources, and "a comfort with ambiguity"
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| © Stuart Armstrong |
Before pulling out of the driveway, a responsible driver makes certain basic safety checks: Are her car’s tires properly inflated? Is the rear-view mirror adjusted to her height? Is her seat belt on? Does she have enough gas in the tank?
Cruising from community to community to save more animals’ lives is an emotional rush, and the thrill of seeing the cats and dogs you’ve been caring for end up in good homes—even ones far away—can be enough to make anyone want to hit the road right away. But determining whether your organization is ready for a transfer program takes more than a metaphorical oil check. It requires an organization-wide survey of potential obstacles, both practical and philosophical, and a thorough consideration of what can and can’t—and should and shouldn’t—be done.
The staff of the Marin Humane Society in Novato, California, have been considering those questions for some time, ensuring that their own organizational practices and policies get regular tune-ups. After nearly 100 years of working for animals, Marin now has a placement rate of 95 percent for the animals it takes in. And close to half of the animals the group places now come from other communities—from cooperating shelters or rescue groups that know the organization provides the best chance for some of their own cats and dogs to find good homes.
Marin began taking in animals from other groups after staff noticed that their own kennels were going empty for long periods of time, says Diane Allevato, executive director. “[We had] a discomfort level with the fact that healthy animals are dying within a half hour’s driving from the shelter, and ... we had an empty shelter,” Allevato says. “And it wasn’t just puppies [we were out of], and now it’s not even just these small dogs anymore, it’s also cats and kittens for at least a good part of the winter.”
Achieving such success was rewarding for Marin’s staff, but lower intake numbers made for new complications, too. The huge intake numbers of the past had actually made euthanasia decisions easier to come to; while the numbers were overwhelming, they necessitated that staff develop certain clearly defined criteria for which animals wouldn’t be put up for adoption. “It always feels better when you can just go down a checklist and say, ‘Dog, 14 years old. Over our limit. Euthanasia,’” says Allevato.
Now that so few animals have to be euthanized and kennel space is empty enough that the organization can actually reach out to other communities to offer their space and care to other animals, each euthanasia decision actually becomes more difficult—more personal, more painful, more contentious, says Allevato. “Because if you can save almost all of them, why not all of them?” she says. “When you euthanize fewer and fewer animals, you wander out of the black and white and into the gray, and that is where every animal is an individual and every decision becomes a conversation rather than just looking at the list and ticking off the pros and cons.”
It’s a practical and ethical balancing act, says Allevato. Every time the organization considers bringing in animals from another group, they “draw a wheel of life,” weighing the decision to use their resources to take in and adopt out those animals against other options—paying for an expensive veterinary procedure for a sick or injured animal who’s already in the shelter, for example.
Bringing in animals from other communities has raised complex questions for Marin’s staff, and the employees involved in animal care and the transfer program have regular meetings to discuss their evolving policies about which animals to bring in and where to get them. Are resources being routed appropriately? they wonder. Who’s going to pick up the next group of dogs? Can the shelter that wants to transfer animals to us afford to vaccinate all of them prior to transfer?
The philosophical and practical questions never cease, requiring a high level of communication and trust among the people who oversee adoption decisions; a shelter suffering from low staff morale or high turnover should deal with those human issues before launching a transfer program that will make things even more complex. “When you deal in the gray areas, it requires [you to have] some people who have a comfort with ambiguity,” says Allevato. “You have to be flexible; otherwise you’ll feel very uncomfortable working here.”
For Marin, it’s become less a matter of whether or not to take in animals from other communities, and more a question of how to focus their transfer program so that it will make the greatest impact. The organization takes in animals from 35 shelters all over the state, but these days, staff are putting more energy into their relationship with one shelter in a less wealthy area of California. The scope of that cooperation has broadened from a mere transfer of animals to a mentoring relationship, in which Marin also provides other kinds of assistance designed to help the poorer agency reach a point where transfers will no longer be necessary. (For more on this program, see “The Marin Humane Society and Madera Animal Control: Partnering for Pets and People”)
Wrangling Over Resources
If you’ve already started to make connections with potential transfer partners and are eager to launch a program, it’s time for an organization-wide discussion about the merits and downsides. Everyone in the shelter has the potential to be affected by a transfer program; you need staff buy-in to ensure its success.
Ask yourself and your colleagues whether a transfer program is an appropriate use of resources. Space is a resource. Money is a resource. But the most precious resource in an animal shelter is the staff’s time and energy. While the staff turnover rate in many shelters is high, many of the folks who survive the stress embody the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The world belongs to the energetic.”
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| © Stuart Armstrong |
Setting up and maintaining a responsible transfer program is difficult, and therefore understandably appealing to challenge-junkies, but even the most dedicated and ambitious staffers don’t want to spend their time tilting at windmills. Getting together to brainstorm may help you identify possible problems and settle future disagreements before they even arise.
If an organization simply wants to help another local shelter now and then by taking in a few animals, resources will be less strained than they would under an arrangement calling for a regular influx of new animals. The more animals, the harder it will be; the farther away they come from, the more time and energy it will take—and the more helpers a shelter will need, says Anne Lindsay, public relations and special projects director for the Northeast Animal Shelter in Salem, Massachusetts.
Lindsay’s shelter regularly brings in puppies by plane from shelters as far away as Nebraska and Puerto Rico; Northeast has the money and staff to handle the program, but Lindsay wouldn’t recommend it to an organization that isn’t financially solvent and doesn’t have total staff and community support.
“You have to have somebody who is available at midnight,” she says. “Because what if a plane gets held up in Chicago and it doesn’t get to Boston until 10 o’clock at night? By the time the puppies get out of cargo, it’s 11:15 and you don’t even get to the shelter until midnight. You have to have somebody to pick that puppy up. You have to have a van that can hold all those crates. ... You have to have somebody at the shelter ... because you don’t just plop them in a cage. You take their temperature, you check them for everything. You have to do a whole intake procedure. ... It’s a big job. So you have to have the kind of staff that is willing to jump.”
Being “willing to jump” is a quality possessed by shelter folks everywhere—after all, they work day after day, often against seemingly impossible odds. But regardless of how committed and passionate they are about animal protection, not everyone should jump for a transfer program—especially one that involves long distances. If you’re interested in transfers, you should always look locally first, says Lindsay.
As challenging and rewarding as bringing in animals from other areas can be, the time and money spent caring for, housing, and adopting out another community’s animals is time and money a shelter can never get back. A shelter shouldn’t do transfers because it’s the latest fad or to make money on puppy adoptions. The world belongs to the energetic, but the energetic should try to spend their energy where it’s best used and will have the greatest impact.
Prioritizing the Home Front
Imagine your shelter’s resources—your money, time, space, energy—as a big bucket of water. Animal homelessness is the fire shelters are trying to extinguish. You’ve got a big bucket, but it does have a bottom, so you’ve got to figure out where to throw your water where it’ll do the most good. If the fire is at your door, it’s only common sense to use your bucket of water to put that fire out first. But if there are only little fires all over your community, and the neighboring town is in flames, the situation gets more complicated; should you use your water to help extinguish the little fires in your town, or send the water to the town that’s still in danger of burning down to ashes?
That depends on how your colleagues, supporters, and donors interpret your mission. Many shelters have found they can spread their resources around, and that supporters are all too happy to hear that their work and funds are helping animals locally and farther away. But problems can arise if the community perceives transfer as a distraction to an organization already overburdened by the animals in its own community. One executive director in New England reports that residents in her area are frequently angry at a local animal control agency that brings in puppies but refuses to answer calls about stray dogs because they don’t have space to house them.
Keep in mind, too, the inevitable truth about puppies: All of them, regardless of breed, grow into adult dogs.
“Well, duh,” you might say. But if intake statistics show that more adult dogs than juveniles are relinquished to shelters in your area, you may want to first put your energies and resources towards programs that address the causes of those surrenders before you bring in more animals who will eventually face the same bond-breakers. Your community might be better served by a good behavior training program for adult ne’er-do-wells, or by working with local property managers to develop more animal-friendly policies that help keep animals in lifelong homes.
Shelters that already have programs addressing these sorts of bond-breaking issues between people and pets, however, may find that having puppies available for adopters can be a boon to pet-owner education programs: people coming in to look at baby animals become aware of everything else the shelter has to offer.
That’s what’s happened at the Humane Society of Seattle/King County, where staff try to balance the public’s demand for puppies and kittens with efforts to promote adoption and responsible care of adult animals. Baby animals are a major draw for adopters, but the shelter’s president, Nancy McKenney, is cautious about turning her organization into a substitute pet store; she doesn’t want to bring in so many juveniles that people will be more inclined to pass over adult dogs and cats who are just as deserving of homes. Often adoption counselors will try to steer the puppy-crazed towards young adult dogs.
Bringing in Little Babies—and Old Ladies
But many adopters are insistent, and McKenney and her staff have brought in adoptable puppies from overcrowded shelters in Spokane and other places around Washington state to meet client demand. By providing puppies to adopters, McKenney says, her shelter isn’t just meeting the community desire for juveniles; it’s also setting itself up to help guide those adopters along the road of responsible pet ownership.
“Our strategic plan is to get customers back once they adopt to take advantage of other services,” says McKenney. “Not just for future adoptions, but to come back for our workshops, come back for our dog training, [and] we actually do dog boarding,” says McKenney. The Humane Society of Seattle/King County uses puppies as a launchpad, nurturing puppy adopters into responsible pet owners, ensuring that animals are spayed or neutered, and providing a positive experience that will encourage people to become supporters of the shelter.
While many shelters have made puppies the first passengers on transfer expeditions, other organizations have found they’re as much in need of different sizes and shapes and colors of dog as they are of different ages. Many shelters don’t focus solely on bringing in babies. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for example, the SPCA is more likely to bring in adults and senior citizens, says executive director Anne Irwin.
One of Irwin’s primary concerns about shelters that are bringing in so many juveniles is that middle-aged animals may be eclipsed by kennels full of squirming fur-kids. “Recently, someone did a little fluff piece in the local paper about an unsheltered foster group ... that was doing this wonderful service by bringing in puppies from down south and finding homes for them. ... We don’t really need that. Let’s find homes for all the gangly five-month-old shepherd mixes from Pennsylvania before we start importing puppies.”
But Bucks County has experienced “empty kennel syndrome,” too, and brings in animals from several cooperating agencies in the area. Keeping it local has meant that the transfers require fewer resources—of time and money—and has kept the organization’s staff feeling comfortable about how their energy is being used. Instead of focusing on puppies, the shelter tries to bring in the animals that aren’t as likely to find homes in other facilities. “I think that’s one way we’ve been fortunate,” says Irwin. “Since we don’t get in as many animals ... we’ve been able to find homes and create interest for people in adopting older animals. Sometimes we can take animals from other shelters that would be too old for them to find a home for.”
For shelters on the other side of the equation—those still bursting with animals both old and young—the question “To transfer or not to transfer?” may seem like a no-brainer. A shelter struggling with low adoption rates and the burden of high levels of euthanasia may see animal transfers as a fast ticket out of that difficult place and a way to save many more lives.
But since the shelters in communities that are still producing litter upon litter of critters are frequently also the shelters that have the fewest resources, it’s even more important that every dollar be spent wisely, every working hour be used effectively. If an organization bursting with puppies has a thousand dollars to spend and can choose between sending some of the puppies to another part of the country for placement or launching a community education campaign for spay and neuter (thus potentially reducing the number of puppies they’ll have to take in next year, and the year after), the latter may be the better use of its resources.
Working for Long-Term Solutions
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| © Stuart Armstrong |
Mathematically speaking, moving one group of animals from one place to another doesn’t reduce the number of homeless animals. It merely relocates the number, the way a sleight-of-hand magician just palms his penny and puts it where the audience doesn’t see it anymore. And some critics say that transfers can turn into the equivalent of this kind of false magic.
Bringing in animals from the places that still suffer from genuine pet overpopulation can help a few animals find homes. It can help overburdened shelters temporarily reduce their euthanasia rates and open more space in their facilities, and it can greatly increase staff morale. That’s no small thing. But if nothing is being done to get at the root causes, to address the community-based problems that are causing these shelters to be overrun with animals, then animal transfer programs risk being merely expensive, time-consuming tricks and not genuine solutions.
The most effective transfer programs are those that go beyond exchange of animals and try to address the root causes of the problem. The Dumb Friends League in Denver brings in animals from shelters around Colorado—but it also helped set up a statewide spay/neuter fund so that poorer communities will have more resources to stem the tide of animal births (see “Confronting the Puppy Problem”). The Marin Humane Society takes in animals from overburdened shelters all over California—but it’s also developed a “big sister” relationship with Madera Animal Control, helping that agency with funding, donations, and mentoring so that its need to transfer animals out will gradually be reduced.
When Northeast Animal Shelter started bringing in puppies from a Nebraska shelter in the early ‘90s, the Massachusetts organization stipulated that it wouldn’t take litter after litter from the same animals. Northeast insisted that the mother of any puppies coming its way be spayed. That’s helped start a culture of spaying and neutering at the sending shelter, Lindsay says, adding that any organization wanting to bring in juveniles should be adamant about that requirement. “Any organization worth its salt is going to do that,” Lindsay says.
Keep track of what kind of dent is being made in the problem, Lindsay says. Follow up on how transfers are affecting intake numbers on the sending side. “You have to measure this stuff. You can’t just willy-nilly say two years later, ‘Oh yeah, we made a big difference’—be a little more specific, please,” says Lindsay. “So you have to start with some numbers. Get a sense of where you are so you can measure ... down the road, so you can tell whether [the program] is making a difference.”
Following up with your partner can be one of the most rewarding parts of the program, says Lindsay. “Last time I was talking with [the director in Nebraska], she was having to drive an hour away to get puppies,” she says. “That’s because there are no puppies within an hour’s radius of her shelter now. That’s a success part of this that is very important people understand—you don’t just keep going and getting the product of the source—you have to get at the source, too.”
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