A battle is brewing in local animal shelters over which animals should be tracked for adoption and which ones should be put to death.
Montgomery County’s Animal Shelter claims a 96 percent adoption rate. Prince William County’s shelter has been under fire for killing 53 percent of the animals in its custody.
But critics say that because there is no common standard for how shelters decide which animals live or die and which health or behavioral problems will be treated — or how to report those decisions — numbers like the ones from Montgomery and Prince William are largely meaningless.
There is no regionwide standard for how to classify animals that are too sick or vicious to put up for adoption. Neither is there a standard for what information is made available to the public. If a shelter is quick to place an animal on track for euthanasia, a high adoption rate would be easier to maintain. Conversely, if a shelter allows more animals with illnesses or behavioral problems to be up for adoption, keeping numbers up may be more difficult.
In August 2004, leaders of the Humane Society of the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and more than 10 other groups met at California’s Asilomar retreat and developed standards for how animals are categorized when they arrive at a shelter and provide a consistent formula for reporting how many leave the shelter alive.
To date, more than 300 shelter groups across the country have implemented the accords.
Three local county shelters plus ones in Alexandria and the District participated in a pilot project to use the standards. But in cash-strapped jurisdictions, most shelters have struggled to maintain the difficult and time-consuming standards.
In wealthy Montgomery County, though, Melissa Rubin, who works as a vice president of the U.S. Humane Society, left the board of the county shelter after unsuccessfully pushing shelter President J.C. Crist to use the Asilomar Accords.
In addition to a 96 percent adoption rate, Crist says the shelter’s euthanasia rate has dropped 30 percent since he took over the facility in 2005. Rubin says his refusal to use standard reporting makes his numbers useless.
“My concern is what is really happening there; it doesn’t seem like anybody has a grasp on how many animals are being euthanized,” Rubin said. “He’s been quoted saying he’s a national leader, but if you’re not keeping statistics in a certain way, you’re comparing apples to oranges.”
Crist says he worries that revealing the health or behavioral problems of animals being kept alive could make shelters an easy target during budget cuts, adding that “people could say why should we be paying to keep a cat with this or that — we don’t want a measurement system for budget criteria to dictate who lives and dies.”
He says the new methods don’t really standardize things because they direct shelters to consider the standards for animal care in each individual community — a nod to the fact that people in a wealthy county are more likely to spend significant money to care for a pet than a rural location where illness could equal euthanasia.
Kay Speerstra, executive director of the Animal Welfare League of Arlington, uses the accords and wishes more of her colleagues in the region would join her. She acknowledges, however, that it is easier for her shelter to track the data than shelters with far larger animal populations. She also knows it’s risky to relinquish control over how statistics will be presented.
“Shelters are sensitive to putting information out there because over the years we’ve been beaten bloody,” Speerstra said. “You make the best decisions you can, but then somebody’s knocking on your door saying you’re horrible people.”
