On a warm July day this past summer Aubrie Kavanaugh, an outspoken No Kill advocate and I walked into the cat adoption room at Huntsville Animal Services in Huntsville, Alabama. It was spacious, quiet and lined with clean cages. One friendly kitten in the front row sat in a cage that had an “I’m adopted” sign on it. The rest of the cages were empty. The only other cats relaxed in their cages in an employee’s only area. I suddenly went into a quiet panic—it was the middle of kitten season so where were all the cats?
Later while we toured the dog area of the shelter Aubrie stopped an employee and asked about the mostly empty cat room, “They’ve all been adopted. We just had a big event this weekend,” he stated proudly. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Huntsville Alabama has raised it’s live release rate above 90% for the past several years and the progress shows.
A kennel worker cuddles a dog before releasing her into a dog run.
On Thursday, November 1, 2018 the Huntsville Alabama city council went further and passed an ordinance written to preserve this progress the shelter has made in increasing life saving from 40% to 90%. It was the first time any legislation had been passed in the city that required life saving strategies to continue to be employed at the shelter.
Aubrie Kavanaugh holds a sign advertising an event she and others organized to promote No Kill in Huntsville.
And yet, it was a bittersweet moment for No Kill activist Aubrie Kavanaugh who spearheaded the movement to make the Huntsville shelter go No Kill nearly twelve years ago and formed the advocacy group No Kill Huntsville almost 8 years ago. “We got 80% of what we wanted,” she says. The new ordinance mandates a lot of the strategies that have helped raise the live release rate.” Some of the highlights are the shelter promising to continue a robust program for volunteers, emphasizing adoption over euthanasia and continuing to publish statistical data that can be closely monitored.
“It’s still a big success and it means that the shelter will hang onto the progress they’ve made,” says Kavanaugh. However, even with so much progress now being the law, the shelter is not being absolutely held accountable.
“What the ordinance fell short of is mandating a Live Release Rate of 90%,” Kavanaugh says. She favored the stronger language contained in what is known as the Companion Animal Protection Act (CAPA) authored by Nathan Winograd at the No Kill Advocacy Center. Her group had hoped to pass a version of this law as the Huntsville Animal Protection Act (HAPA) prior to the vote this week.
One of the key elements of HAPA legislation was the requirement that a shelter achieve a Live Release Rate of over 90% every year. If the shelter falls short, it must submit a report detailing the reasons why to the city council.
The Huntsville city council was not interested in this absolute requirement at this time, “we don’t want to legislate outcomes,” city officials told her. As a result, while the new ordinance mandates a certain level of services, if the live release rate slides, there is no consequence for anyone at the shelter including the director, Dr. Karen Hill Sheppard.
But Kavanaugh thinks there may be other forces at work that will keep the Live Release Rate high. After all, by saving so many more animals the shelter has now become a point of community pride. “Public expectation is so high, it will be difficult for the city to backslide to the old days of population control killing. The people in the community are much more engaged in the shelter operation now and they’ve become invested emotionally in the outcome,” she says. In addition, the director has received a lot of national attention and praise which provides another incentive to maintain the progress achieved to date. “People are looking to her as an example of how a shelter can change by adopting new programs and a new focus on life saving.”
Kavanaugh remains a regular volunteer at the shelter.
Still, the shelter of Huntsville is today vastly different from what it was before Kavanaugh and her advocacy group began their campaign. “If someone had told us when we first met in January of 2012 that the city would enact an ordinance to codify goals and standards and the live release rate would be above 90%, we would have signed up for that with no hesitation.” “Our road to this point has been difficult and there was a lot of opposition,” Kavanaugh adds, “but every member of our coalition knows that we made a difference in the community by speaking out for the greater good even thought it came with some personal costs.”
One of the problems that the Huntsville shelter faces now is that people living in neighboring counties try to surrender their animals there because they know that there is a much better chance of them making it out of the shelter alive. For now the Huntsville shelter is focusing on turning these people away but perhaps it should follow in the footsteps of the Nevada Humane Society and extend its reach to neighboring counties.
Kavanaugh and her group plan to maintain their website and monitor the city’s performance as well as conducting a couple of community events each year. The have suspended promoting the HAPA for now but may revisit the issue in the future. Right now she is thinking of writing a book about her struggle for No Kill in Huntsville. Much of it would be based on work she has already published on her blog Paws 4 Change. The other members of No Kill Huntsville are Nina Beal of The Ark, Karen Borden of Dixie Dachshund Rescue, Dianne Burch of World of Pawsabilities, Susan Burlingame of Challenger’s House and Jane Jattuso of the North Alabama Spay and Neuter Clinic.
These committed activists prove once again that No Kill can happen when members of the community stand up for the animals and ask for change.