Q: Coalitions of animal care agencies, rescue groups and veterinarians are popping up all around the country. Do you think they will succeed in reducing the number of animals killed in shelters or are they just a passing trend?

Marsh: I hope they're an idea whose time has come, a forerunner of what we'll see a lot of in the future. No one person or group can solve pet overpopulation alone. It takes a community.

Last week a shelter worker I know said to me "I don't see how we ever expected we'd be able to rescue and place the thousands of pets who become homeless in our part of the world every year. A dozen people working in a small building with a few hundred thousand dollars a year. The numbers don't add up."

He's right. They don't. It would be great if we could place all the animals who enter shelters in good homes, but it just isn't possible. No matter how hard we work at it and how much we spend. The past fifty years have shown us that. Across the country, every year public and private shelters adopt out about six dogs and cats for every thousand people. Aggressive and well-funded adoption programs in affluent communities can get that number up to about eight per thousand people, as they have in San Francisco. If all the stars lined up right, maybe that number could be bumped up to ten a year. But unless well-funded and -targeted preventive programs are in place, twenty five cats and dogs are going to enter the shelter during that year. So fifteen of them will die there. That's, as Lincoln once said about the Civil War, "the awful mathematics."

It would be a wonderful world if we could adopt our way out of pet overpopulation, but it just isn't in the cards. Prevention is the only way out. And that has to happen in the community. By the time an animal enters the shelter, it's too late. You've already lost the battle.

Q: Is there anyone who's winning the battle?

Peter: Two parts of the country have reduced the number of animals killed in their shelters to less than four dogs and cats killed for every thousand people. The national average is about four times higher. Both did it through coalitions. In San Francisco, it was collaboration between the City's Department of Animal Care and Control and the San Francisco SPCA that did it. In New Hampshire it was a true community-wide coalition made up of everyone who was interested in trying to help -- dog and cat fanciers, shelters, rescue groups, animal control officers, veterinarians, municipal officials, and people who belonged to no special group but just wanted to pitch in. The New Hampshire coalition was established in 1993 by the State Legislature as the Pet Overpopulation Committee. So the approach was a little different in each place but the common denominator was that the entire community became so engaged in the struggle that public officials joined, too.

New Hampshire Euthanasia Rate Decrease

Q: How effective has the New Hampshire coalition been in cutting down the number of cats and dogs killed in shelters?

Peter: Better than anyone ever expected. The number of animals killed in shelters dropped 30% in 1995 and has kept falling farther every year since. We had been killing about twelve thousand cats and dogs a year in our shelters, year in and year out, since the early 1980's. Last year, it had fallen to less than 3,500, a drop of 70% in six years. Almost all of this has come from a steep drop in shelter admissions, even though we've gone all out to increase adoptions, too. Like everywhere else, shelter admission rates drive our euthanasia rates up or down, almost one to one. That's why good prevention and intervention programs are the key to driving euthanasia rates down.

Q: But hasn't the state's neutering program had a lot to do with the drop in the euthanasia rate?

Peter: Sure, but without the coalition, the state program would not have been nearly as effective as it's been. For the first two years, the program ran out of money each spring, the worst time of year for us, just when kitten season began. A city clerk from the coalition came up with a way to solve this by putting together legislation through which veterinarians would send copies of rabies immunization records to the municipal officials who keep track of dog licensing in each city or town, so they could follow up people who had gotten rabies shots for their dogs but hadn't licensed them. Since that law passed, the number of dog licenses in the state has gone up by 50%, giving us more than enough money to operate the program year round.

In many other ways, too, the coalition has become the state program's chief benefactor. And it's worked to get a lot of other legislation passed, too, like felony cruelty legislation, a "dogs-in-pick-up trucks" bill, and a dog shelter bill. Before the coalition, shelters had not been able to get any of these bills passed by themselves. So it's been a great example of how coalitions can accomplish things that individual groups can't get done alone.

Q: Are there any drawbacks to coalitions or things to watch out for?

Peter: Absolutely. Like anything worthwhile. They take a lot of time and energy, especially at first. Getting to know people and learning how to work well with them takes a lot of sweat and tears. There's no getting around it.

When our coalition began, we'd just come out of a two year battle in which the shelters and veterinarians succeeded in getting a publicly funded neutering program set up over the objections of almost everyone else. So there were alot of hard feelings all around. Our first get-togethers were slow going. It took a long time. The more we talked, though, the clearer it became that everyone hated the idea that thousands of healthy cats and dogs were being killed in our shelters every year. Everyone hated that. We came to see that in our own ways we were all animal people. And to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

The turning point came when we got past talking and began working on projects together. The first one was a bill sponsored by the trappers to give them legal protection if someone's dog or cat got caught in one of their traps. A really harebrained idea. We got together to stop that from getting passed. Working side by side on projects seemed to be the key to building the coalition.

But it doesn't come easy. And I know several coalitions that have fallen apart recently. Some of them were put together to apply for grants from foundations. When they didn't get the grant, which happens more often than not, they broke up. It's a case of having the right idea but for the wrong reason.

Coalitions are the only way to go, forgetting all about grants for the time being. If people invest the time and energy to build a healthy coalition, the money will come. Maybe through grants, but more likely through public funding, which in the long run can provide more money than a foundation ever could. This year, for instance, our spay neuter group raised almost five thousand dollars from yard sales, our best year ever. We knocked ourselves to get that money and, don't get me wrong, we got a lot done with it. But that amounted to about two per cent of the funding the state provided for neutering assistance this year, which gives you some idea of the leveraging that coalitions can achieve.

Q: Which groups need to be part of a successful coalition? Is there any rule of thumb?

Peter: The starting point is to set some goals and then ask yourself what programs you need to reach them. The answer to that will determine who you need in the coalition.

Q: For example?

Peter: Only two things drive down the number of cats and dogs killed in shelters. Cutting down the number who enter shelters in the first place and increasing the number who are placed in quality homes. To cut down shelter admissions, you have to look at all the reasons cats and dogs end up there. Some are surplus kittens and puppies, straight up pet overpopulation. Others are given up by their caretakers or stray away from home and don't have ID, what is coming to be called shelter overpopulation.

When you look at all the ways pets reach shelters, it jumps out at you how important vets are to preventive programs, which, in the end, is the key to success, as we discussed before.

Q: What makes veterinarians so important?

Peter: Well, they're in a position to help with all sources of overpopulation and they see pet owners before problems occur or have become so serious that they've put the animal at risk. Seeing people early also increases the chance of success because the pet caretaker's motivation is still high, before they've become worn out by it all. In your phrase, vets are the centurions who are in the best place to spot problems early and help fix them before it's too late.

The core of all our preventive work is still neutering. A recent survey of almost 200 shelters across the country found that only 13% of all the dogs entering these shelters were puppies and only 14% of the cats were kittens, prompting the authors to suggest that neutering assistance programs may no longer be as important as they were when shelters were flooded with kittens and puppies.

I think this misses the impact that neutering programs have in reducing all the sources of shelter overpopulation, not just the kittens and puppies from pet overpopulation. Relinquishment studies done by Dr. Gary Patronek and others have found that fully a third of all the cat and dog surrenders are because of behaviors related to the animal's being sexually intact. And intact pets are much more likely to leave home looking for adventure and end up in a shelter.

All you have to do is look at the shelter admission data to see how critical neutering is in preventing shelter admissions. Two-thirds of the dogs who enter shelters are sexually intact while only about a third of the total dog population is. For cats, about a half of those who enter shelters are intact compared to less than a fifth of the entire household cat population.

If you step back and try to figure out what's going on here, a major factor is that over the last fifty years, cats and dogs have come to be seen as companion animals in our part of the world. Being sexually active is much more incompatible with this new role than it was when they were generally kept outside and allowed to roam at will and weren't thought of as members of the family. Different role, different expectations. And neutered pets are much more likely to be able to meet those expectations.

Whatever the reason, neutering is still our best defense against all the sources of shelter overpopulation. And neutering requires just two things -- a pet and a vet.

Second, veterinarians are enormously well-respected. The relinquishment studies I mentioned earlier found that pet owners pay much more attention to what vets say than what anyone else does. No big surprise, I guess.

You may remember an article you gave me this summer in which a British veterinarian, Dr. Bruce Fogle, pointed out that vets in North America and Northern Europe will have more opportunities to save pets' lives by giving their clients good behavioral counseling than through medical intervention, no matter how sophisticated. Even in the most advanced veterinary practices, where most cat and dogs die as a result of old age or disease, it turns out that five out of every hundred deaths is a euthanasia for behavioral problems. So the greatest chance vets have to save lives is to counsel their clients about solutions to their pet's behavioral problems.

It's another step in the amazingly rapid evolution of small animal veterinary practice. Just as vets now routinely provide their clients' pets with a package of immunizations to prevent disease, coalitions must accelerate the time when they will also provide them with a package of preventive services to protect them from behaviors that will lead to their death in a shelter.

Q: So veterinarians need to be key members of the coalition. Who else?

Peter: Dog behaviorists can help with behavioral problems, too, and cat and dog fanciers can play a much greater role --over and above the excellent work already done by many breed rescue groups--through more foster care and adoptions.

Feral cat caretakers and protection groups need to be included, too. Their level of commitment is unmatched. And the population they serve is enormous. They often do their work in even greater isolation from the community than other rescue groups, making it even more important to bring them into the fold.

One of the great advantages of coalitions is that the good ones include people who look at the world from a different point of view than you do. They expand your world, if you'll let them. It's not just you changing them, they change you, too. Including feral cat advocates will help everyone recognize that the struggle to make the world a better place for cats and dogs extends far beyond shelter overpopulation. For every cat or dog killed in a shelter, there are several free-roaming cats who deserve our help, too. Including feral cat protection groups in the alliance will help broaden its perspective to consider all the animals in the community. To borrow a phrase from children's advocates, it will help us make sure that no companion animal is left behind.

Speaking of leaving groups behind, it is important to include animal care and control agencies in the coalition, too, like they've done in San Francisco. Because they work in the trenches every day, animal control staff know as much about the root causes of shelter overpopulation as anybody. And their day-to-day work in the community gives them deep roots there. Which a coalition desperately needs.

In the end, shelter overpopulation is a social problem -- not a shelter problem -- and successfully engaging animal control staff in the coalition is the first step toward having the public accept its responsibility to help find--and pay for--community-wide solutions. We need to follow in the footsteps of children's advocates, many of whom helped found humane societies in the first place. Protecting our children has become accepted as the community's responsibility. It takes a village for companion animals, too.

Because it's a public problem, a good share of the solutions for shelter overpopulation should be publicly-funded. So legislators and other public officials should be included in the coalition, too.

In the past people fighting pet overpopulation have often worked at cross purposes, like an engine whose timing is a little off. It's got all the horsepower it needs but just coughs and sputters along. A good coalition can help all the cylinders to fire at the top dead center.

But we still need fuel to run it. The fuel here is money. Not as much of it as you would think. Probably about a quarter of what we are already spending on reactive animal control programs and sheltering would do the trick, if it were spent on proactive programs. Effective programs turn out to be a great investment of public funds. Everyone benefits, not the least being taxpayers. In the six years that the New Hampshire program has operated, the impoundment of cats and dogs across the state has dropped by more that 30,000 compared to the six years before the program began. That's saved more than three million dollars in impoundment costs alone. The program has cost a little more than a million dollars to operate during this time, so we've saved three dollars or more for every dollar we've spent. And the savings get greater and greater as time goes on. It's one of those great situations where ethics and economics point in the same direction.

Q: Where do you see all of this heading?

Peter: Sometimes people and their pets come to be a lot alike. Act alike. Even look alike. That's happened with shelter animals and shelter staff. For more than a century shelters have fought the good fight against pet overpopulation almost alone. No one else seemed to care. Certainly few others cared as much as they did.

So in some ways shelter staff came to see their shelters as island of safety in a hostile world, like the old asylums. And in the process, they became isolated from the community. All of which really limited their ability to do preventive work, so for the most part all they could do was react to a tragic problem that only kept getting worse and worse, further frustrating them and estranging them even more from their communities.