From the CEO
I RECENTLY MET WITH the mayor of Sandy, Utah, the sixth largest city in the state. Sandy is a no-kill community and proud of it. They latched onto Best Friends’ No-Kill Utah (NKUT) initiative and made it their own. The city parks have signs advising visitors not to disturb the community cat colonies and local real estate agents promote the city’s no-kill status on their business cards. It’s a thing. Sandy may be small compared to other no-kill communities like Los Angeles, but the message it sends is powerful and really encapsulates the bottom line of the no-kill movement.
Most of the discussion about Best Friends’ goal to make the country no-kill by 2025 focuses on the challenge of leading every shelter to a save rate of at least 90%, the accepted threshold metric for achieving no-kill. There’s a lot to be excited about on that front and the latest dataset has just been released. For example, since 2016, when we declared our goal, more than 3.4 million pets have been saved nationwide, there has been a 76% reduction in killing over that time, and almost half of all U.S. shelters are now no-kill. That 90% benchmark is not something achieved by accident. It reflects a passionate commitment to lifesaving by shelter staff.
There is another, equally important discussion that we should be having, however: what no-kill means socially and culturally. That’s what is so cool about Sandy and the many other communities of all sizes embracing no-kill. They see it not just as a set of statistics describing the local shelter but as a measure of community compassion and a gold star on their quality-of-life résumé. A 2017 study by the Institute for Human-Animal Connection at the University of Denver on the social and economic impacts of being a no-kill community found that Austin, Texas, was attractive to Google company executives because of the city’s young, vibrant, pet-loving workforce.
In 1984, when the founders of Best Friends created what would become the largest no-kill sanctuary in the country, they came at it with a fully formed worldview and a way of life that held kindness toward animals, the natural world and each other as the highest of values. Taking the life of healthy or treatable animals was a completely alien idea to them. They didn’t adopt no-kill as a policy or program; they were living it before there was a name for it. And, when the term first came into use, it wasn’t attached to a number or a 90% threshold of achievement. It meant the absolute refutation of killing as an acceptable shelter management practice, and to Best Friends and those involved in the no-kill movement, it still does.
The no-kill movement is, at root, about societal change and not simply about the policies and practices we employ to save lives. It is about why we value lifesaving in the first place. Kindness is a powerful force that not only feels good, it does good. Places like Sandy are showing how attractive kindness really is — as demonstrated by being a no-kill community. For the Sandys of America, no-kill is so much more than a number. Together, we will Save Them All.
Yours in faithfulness to the animals,
Julie Castle
Best Friends CEO