ARCHIVE SEARCH

The idea to form an alliance came three years ago, when people from Utah's Best Friends Animal Sanctuary came to Denver and said that local shelters needed to work together to end euthanasia. (While shelters in other cities tend to fight like cats and dogs, the ones in Denver have a long history of collaboration.) To demonstrate their solidarity, the shelters decided to create the new group.

The Alliance's biggest task so far has been to change the "no-kill" terminology, which its members say is both divisive and misleading. The hope is that by using the same terms, shelters will get a better handle on the problem of unwanted pets -- something that Rohde emphasizes is a community problem, not a shelter problem. Although the community has made great gains in reducing the number of animals euthanized annually -- more than 70,000 pets in Colorado were put down fifteen years ago, compared with 38,551 last year -- the effort has reached a plateau in recent years. To get past that and save even more animals, Martha Smith, president of both All Breed Rescue Network and the Colorado Federation of Animal Welfare Agencies, says, "We need to look at the problem in a more sophisticated way. If the big problem is overpopulation, let's spay and neuter them, but if the real problem is that people don't know how to treat and train animals so they can keep them, we need to work on that."

Before that sophisticated discussion can even take place, Smith says, shelters have to come up with more reliable numbers. Right now, different shelters calculate the number of saved adoptable pets differently. "Some shelters change the definition of Œadoptable' depending on the resources they have on a given day. For example, if a five-year-old spayed black Lab with a good temperament has been up for adoption for a week, and then a dozen one- or two-year-old dogs with good temperaments come in, the black Lab may not be adoptable anymore, even though she's the same dog she was the week before. That's why the system doesn't work," Smith explains. "What we in the Alliance agreed on is that if the animal was adoptable at one time and you have to euthanize it, it's still considered adoptable, so now you can't include that animal in your unadoptable numbers."

The very notion of labeling animals as adoptable or not is part of the problem, according to Meghan Hughes, who sits on the board of the Animal Rescue and Adoption Society. "The term 'limited admission' says we pick and choose which animals we take," Hughes says, explaining that ARAS, which is a cat-only shelter, doesn't discriminate based on an animal's age, health or disposition. "It really doesn't represent our mission. It only benefits those that euthanize. People have a right to know what happens to the animal they relinquish. If we take the animal, you can be sure it won't be euthanized unless it's suffering and a vet recommends it."

Although Alliance members haven't received the cooperation of ARAS and MaxFund, they're going ahead with the changes and are training their staffs about what the new terms mean.

The question now is, will pet owners be even more confused than ever?