What's the problem with Austin, Texas's animal shelter?

Too many animals, or not enough good leadership?

Back in 2015, when I was rescuing dogs, and a few cats, from the high-kill pounds and deadly streets of California’s central valley, I saw the “No Kill” city of Austin, Texas as a beacon of hope. My husband and I actually moved to the region to be part of that No Kill community—to save dogs with the shelter instead of having to save them from the shelter. From the very beginning, the red flags were there: we didn’t move to the city of Austin because we couldn’t find the kind of rental housing we wanted with our three big dogs, so we had to find a place in neighboring, more rural, Hays County. And when I started volunteering at the Austin city shelter, the tensions were palpable, though I didn’t know at the time what they meant.

Now, ten years later, I’m intimately familiar with the problems, and with the false dichotomies involved in how those problems are framed. A new Austin Monthly article does a pretty good job of describing the conflicting perspectives, but it doesn’t—and really can’t—interpret those or find a way forward. And that’s my purpose here: to highlight some of the conflicts and propose solutions.

Let’s start with the conflicting mental models: is the overcrowding of Austin Animal Center and the past five years of restricted intake due to “too many animals, not enough homes” or is it a failure of shelter management? In other words, is the locus of control external to the Animal Services department, meaning that No Kill is doomed until a critical mass of people decide to spay, neuter, and become responsible pet owners? Or is the locus of control internal, meaning that Animal Services’ and city policies and programs can create a No Kill community?

My answer to this question is that the locus of control is internal: the City of Austin, Travis County, and Austin Animal Services’ policies and practices have enormous influence over the state of animal welfare and the success of the shelter. High volume/low cost sterilization is one of the programs that make up Nathan Winograd’s No Kill Equation, and the taxpayer-funded animal services department should be the hub of affordable, high volume sterilization. It can do that through tax incentives for private veterinarians who provide low cost or free spay and neuter, through mobile spay and neuter clinics (it is doing some of those, a good move, but needs more), and maybe even through partnerships with veterinary schools and veterinary technician programs in order to ramp up the volume. In a city where spay or neuter surgery at a private clinic can cost upward of $800, it doesn’t make sense to wait for pet owners to magically prioritize that bill over rent, mortgage, and groceries. So if we want to improve animal welfare, it needs to become a priority of the municipal shelter to be the hub of activity to make it happen.

But it’s not a matter of sterilization first, and then attention to the safety and quality of life of animals who have already been born and need a shelter. The No Kill Equation is so named because it is a set of programs that work together to replace convenience killing with safety and quality of life. We need to do all the hard work up front, and then it will become easier, and that’s where attention to the most challenging dogs comes in. That’s the next post.