Today, an animal entering an average American animal shelter has a roughly 40 percent chance of being killed, and in some communities it is as high as 99 percent, with shelters blaming a lack of available homes as the cause of death. But is pet overpopulation real? And are shelters doing all they can to save lives? If you believe traditional sheltering dogma, the answer to both those questions is “yes.” The next logical question is: How do we know? To adherents of the “we have no choice but to kill because of pet overpopulation” school, pet overpopulation is real because animals are being killed, a logical fallacy based on backwards reasoning and circular illogic. As to whether shelters are doing all they can, the answer here too, is long on cliché and short on evidence: because “no one wants to kill.”
In truth, and at the heart of the No Kill philosophy, is the understanding that the reasons we have historically been given for why animals are being killed in shelters—that there are too many for too few homes available, shelters are doing all they can, and the American public is uncaring and irresponsible—have been proven wrong in the face of irrefutable evidence: not only the data, but the experience of communities that have achieved No Kill level placement rates in six months or less (and many overnight). In other words, we know pet overpopulation is a myth because both statistics themselves and the experience of progressive shelters in communities across the country prove it is.