What Does Best Friends Animal Society’s ‘No-Kill’ Push Mean for Animals?
- Best Friends Animal Society pushes for “no-kill” policies that actually harm animals who depend on shelters for help and endanger the public.
- Best Friends Animal Society bullies and attacks shelters that accept every animal in need and make difficult decisions in animals’ and the community’s best interests.
- The group’s unrealistic and absurd “no-kill” agenda misleads the public and has inhumane and dangerous consequences for animals and communities.
Best Friends Animal Society—a Utah-based group whose last reported annual revenue was $173 million—has for years misled the public, promising Americans a “no-kill” nation by 2025, an absurd claim not based on any semblance of reality. A recent opinion piece by the organization’s CEO conceded that its position is that “keeping pets out of shelters should be a first-choice management protocol.” This philosophy, which Best Friends Animal Society has pressured shelters across the nation to embrace, has deprived countless animals and people who care about them of desperately needed help. Using bullying tactics and personal attacks, including the frequent use of the divisive term “no kill” and referring to compassionate euthanasia in animal shelters as “killing,” Best Friends Animal Society has created a culture of hate and resentment toward individuals who dedicate their lives to helping homeless animals, including by alleviating their suffering when that is the most humane option. Due to funding from well-meaning, caring people like you, who may have believed that “no kill” by 2025 was a genuine promise, the organization’s influence has been significant, and the group has spawned additional, similar if less well-known entities that push the same harmful policies, which lead to terrible animal suffering and even more death—though not painless or peaceful. Animals left out of shelter statistics may not be counted, but they count.
At face value, “no-kill” sounds appealing: Who doesn’t want to save animals? The problem is that “no-kill” policies, like those that Best Friends pushes, don’t save animals. They may make shelters’ statistics look appealing to donors and to uninformed people—but they harm the very animals who depend on shelters for help (i.e., sheltering) as well as the people who care about and for those animals.
Leaving Animals on the Streets and Placing Them in Neglectful or Abusive Homes
Best Friends pushes for policies that keep animals out of shelters so that shelters can claim that they have high “live release rates.” But animals who are turned away from shelters or indiscriminately adopted out without any screening aren’t “saved.”
They suffer and die on the streets or at the hands of neglectful—or even cruel and violent—people. Many end up hoarded in miserably cruel conditions or trapped at the end of a chain or in a pen outdoors 24/7, spending a life sentence in solitary confinement.
Bullying Shelters for Keeping Their Doors Open and Making Tough Decisions
Best Friends leads a national effort to target and vilify open-admission shelters (those that accept every animal in need). Best Friends attacks these shelters for having to make difficult decisions, even when those are in animals’ and the community’s best interests. This includes having to euthanize animals who, through no fault of their own, cannot be safely or humanely offered for adoption because they have known bite histories or are suffering from severe psychological damage, chronic illness, severe injuries, or irremediable neglect. For these animals, euthanasia—while certainly sad—is a kindness, as the alternative is suffering.
The Real-World Results of Best Friends’ Recommended Policies
What are the policies that Best Friends is pressuring shelters to implement, and what has happened in communities that have followed such recommendations? Here are some of the practices Best Friends and other proponents of “no-kill” policies impose on shelters and what they truly mean for animals on a day-to-day basis, in real life.
Turning away animals in need. Facilities with “no-kill” policies routinely refuse to accept unwanted, lost, and homeless animals. Some even stop accepting or picking up strays or addressing reports of neglect and cruelty. This leaves animals to suffer and endure slow, agonizing deaths on the streets, in pseudo-“rescue” hoarding situations, or at the hands of people who don’t want them and can’t or won’t care for them.
- In Las Vegas, three dogs were abandoned in the parking lot of a publicly funded animal shelter—a Best Friends partner—after it refused to accept them. One dog was run over and so badly injured that he had to be euthanized.
- A kitten who was rejected by another shelter in Florida was dumped in the facility’s parking lot, where a vehicle ran over him, crushing his skull. He died days later. The facility is a Best Friends partner.
- Up to 50 cats were reportedly left in a hoarder’s home in New York because area shelters—including a Best Friends partner facility—had no space for them.
Instructing people to leave animals on the streets and shifting animal care and control responsibilities to the public. Best Friends encourages even taxpayer-funded shelters to tell residents who find stray or homeless animals to leave them outside (to fend for themselves), rather than taking them to a shelter. This is not only terribly inhumane but in violation of law in many (if not most) cases, as it constitutes animal abandonment. Many facilities also tell people who find strays to keep the animals and try to find them guardians themselves, which endangers both animals and good Samaritans who try to help them.
In Georgia, a woman was attacked by two stray dogs she had found in the middle of a road, leaving her with two broken arms. The dogs had also attacked another resident hours earlier, but even though animal services had reportedly been notified of the first attack, the dogs remained on the streets, leading to the second attack. The county’s animal control department is evidently operated through a contract with a self-professed “no-kill” group doing business as LifeLine Animal Project and is a partner of Best Friends.
Abandoning cats outdoors. Another common “no-kill” practice is dumping unadopted cats onto the streets or in rural areas. Best Friends uses the marketing term “return to field,” a misleading euphemism for abandoning domesticated animals. Many cats who are abandoned in these programs were formerly someone’s companion and lived indoors. They are no different from the cats who share our homes—and they stand no chance against starvation, diseases, weather extremes, attacks by roaming dogs or cruel humans, being hit by cars, and countless other dangers. All cats are domesticated and depend on humans for their basic needs. Laws in most states require that cats be provided with food, water, shelter, and veterinary care, but cats who are dumped on the streets suffer badly and die violently or in prolonged and agonizing ways for lack of these necessities. In San Diego, a judge recently ruled that a shelter that was abandoning cats in this way was violating the law.
Indiscriminately placing animals. Many shelters with “no-kill” policies give away animals for free with little, if any, attempt to ensure that they end up in responsible loving homes. Some even fail to screen to ensure that convicted animal abusers aren’t handed more victims—just to move animals out of shelters’ doors.
In Indianapolis, a shelter that partnered with Best Friends fired two staff members because of their efforts to protect animals from being adopted to individuals convicted of violent crimes, including cruelty to animals. According to reports, one of the former employees said that she had become alarmed when she “learned a dog, named Champagne, [had been] adopted out to a couple with five animal cruelty or abandonment violations on MyCase (a publicly available criminal background check system). The dogs had also been previously adopted by the same couple and later confiscated before the two came back into Animal Care Services to re-adopt them.” The facility had started using MyCase to screen potential adopters after it adopted a dog named Deron to an individual who hanged, stabbed, and tortured him to death less than a week after adopting him—but said that Best Friends recommended that it stop using MyCase.
Warehousing animals in cages indefinitely. Animals are often confined for weeks, months, years, or even the rest of their lives to crates and other inhumane makeshift quarters in hallways, offices, garages, and bathrooms.
- In Austin, Texas, the city’s self-professed “no-kill” shelter is a Best Friends partner and has implemented the dangerous policies that the group recommends. It is frequently touted as a “model” by “no-kill” campaigners. However, the chronically overcrowded facility was accused of warehousing more than 560 dogs under a carport in wire crates for over 23 hours a day during a triple-digit heatwave. A city council member who visited the facility stated, “I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to be treated in that condition.”
- In Los Angeles, where the publicly funded animal sheltering system is a Best Friends partner, dogs were reportedly kept in filthy cages, deprived of walks for months, and forced to drink from moldy water bowls.
In its push to make the U.S. “no-kill,” Best Friends recommends that communities implement these policies at publicly funded animal shelters, which prevents shelters from fulfilling their mission and doing the job they were created to do for taxpayers—protecting animals and human residents.
Ignoring Reality and Failing Animals
Shelters across the country are facing unprecedented challenges, including an unrelenting flood of dogs, cats, and other animals in need. Millions of animals are struggling to survive on the streets, many of them after having been denied entry to shelters. Yet Best Friends sets arbitrary and unrealistic deadlines for its “no-kill” goal—and then must keep pushing those deadlines back. That’s because “no-kill” simply isn’t possible until the runaway animal birth rate is controlled through spaying and neutering, a ban on breeding and sales in pet shops, and other preventive measures.
Is Best Friends pressuring your local shelter to change its policies? Please read on to learn more about the real-life consequences of the group’s agenda, which is, without a doubt, to close shelters’ doors to animals in need—just so that Best Friends can claim success in making the nation “no-kill.” This marketing scheme may be an effective fundraiser for the group, but it ignores the reality of the animal overpopulation and homelessness crisis, and it fails animals and communities.
These pages list examples of “no kill” gone wrong, often directly involving Best Friends Animal Society and sometimes other “no-kill” extremists.
