How You – Yes, You! – Can Help Solve Shelter Overpopulation

Most of us agree that prospective pet owners should try to adopt dogs from shelters whenever possible. Spay-and-neuter advocacy aims to reduce the number of dogs who are euthanized every year. While these are steps in the right direction, neither of them attempt to solve the actual issue of overpopulation.

Behavioral issues and poor training are the reasons most dogs end up in a shelter or rescue. These can include leg humping, being badly housetrained, or displaying increased reactivity and aggression. In addition, some dogs and owners may simply be a bad match. A high-energy, high-drive dog who lives with couch potatoes and is not given a productive job may become “self-employed,” patrolling the yard, constantly barking, or hiring himself as the resident interior designer and eating the couch.

I’d like to see a more proactive approach to the problem of shelter overpopulation. While I’m all for giving dogs a second chance, how about making sure that we give them an optimal first chance? Ideally, we want dogs to spend their lives in one home with one family. Don’t we want rescue to be an industry that puts itself out of business one day?

What can you do to prevent shelter overpopulation?

Train your dog
Start with early socialization — a well-taught puppy class is a must! — and continue training your dog throughout his life. Many dogs are given to shelters as adolescents, because far too many owners believe that attending a puppy class means you are done training your dog for the rest of his life.

Get help at the first sign of behavior problems
A dog that starts out barking occasionally in the yard will likely evolve into a dog that barks incessantly in the yard. It is much easier to address this problem with early intervention than it is to treat the issue once it has become well established.

Most dogs will not “grow out of” behavior problems; they get worse without intervention. What is easier? Quitting smoking after your first cigarette, or after decades and thousands of cigarettes? Bad habits are hard to break, and old habits are even harder to break!

Choose the right dog for you

No dog or breed is right for every family. Take a realistic look at your family’s activity level, grooming preferences, training goals, budget, and lifestyle to determine which dogs would be a good match. Some breeds tend to do better with small children, and some acclimate to a “couch potato” lifestyle more readily than others (yeah, I’m talking to you, greyhounds!).

If you don’t like brushing or don’t want to pay for professional grooming, an Old English Sheepdog may not be the right match. Shelties and terriers will be a poor fit if you don’t like barking. Enjoy sitting on the couch? If so, while you may like the look of a Malinois, a Pug may be a much better fit — that “Mali-gator” will likely drive you nuts! Want a socially gregarious pup who might make a good therapy dog? Avoid one of my favorite breeds, the Chow Chow. Like a clean house? Definitely avoid my other favorite breed, the Saint Bernard. This is all about setting yourself up for success.

Many trainers offer pet selection services and will interview you and your family and suggest one or more breeds that would be good candidates for further investigation. Do your own research — the Dogster breeds pages are a great place to start. Better yet, contact a rescue group or breed club in your area to talk with experienced handlers and meet the dogs.

Most dogs languishing in shelters are not puppies. They’re not even strays. They usually started out in a family home that for, whatever reason, neglected their training or were otherwise a bad match.

The simplest way to solve shelter overpopulation is responsible dog ownership. If you choose the right dog and train him for a lifetime of companionship, you’ll make sure you aren’t contributing to the problem!

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You can’t spay/neuter your way out of pet over-population

It’s often said that “we can’t adopt our way out of pet over-population.” I say we can’t spay/neuter our way out of it.

I’m not even entirely sure what people mean when they talk about not being able to adopt our way out of pet over-population.

If they mean we have to have a big-picture view of the issue of pets being killed in shelters across the country, and not focus on just one piece of the puzzle, I can go along with that.

But I don’t think most people who use that sentence mean it that way. They seem to mean one of two things.

The first is, “There is no point in trying to adopt out all these pets and we should just kill them instead, because if we find homes for these we’ll just get more in to take their place.” (True also of killing them, but they don’t seem to consider that.)

The second is, “The only way to stop killing pets in shelters is to spay and neuter more of them.”

Now, low-cost/free and accessible spay/neuter is one of the steps to no-kill, and I support and applaud any community that has that in place. Yay.

But I think it’s kind of obvious that spaying and neutering will do absolutely nothing to save the lives of the pets who are homeless right now, nor the ones who will come into your shelter tomorrow or the next day.

The options are death and adoption. Spay/neuter isn’t going to help these pets, and rushing past adoption and waving your little speuter flag is going to mean those pets get dead. And the ones who come in the next day to take their place? Also dead.

I think it’s great that you have an upstream, supply-side plan. Don’t get rid of it. Near-universal spay/neuter has almost certainly accounted for a lot of the gains we’ve made in reducing shelter killing in the last two decades, even if there aren’t really any studies out there to support that. But I’m more than willing to believe that’s the case.

But if you don’t also have an equally strong demand-side plan, you’re going to continue to have the kind of killing rates in shelters that we have today, which are — or should be — absolutely unacceptable to anyone who cares about animals.

Although there are places in the country where there’s still a good amount of lifesaving potential in increasing spay/neuter accessibility and prevalence, in most communities, we’ve already harvested the low-hanging fruit. Most pet dogs and cats are already spayed or neutered, and spending huge resources chasing down the tiny number who aren’t is going to result in ever-dwindling returns, particularly when it’s done at the expense of better sheltering and better adoption, as is so often the case *cough* Los Angeles *cough*.

But adoption? Building better adoption systems is all low-hanging fruit. That’s because there are millions more people every year who get new dogs and cats than there are pets in shelters. Most of them are willing to consider adopting a shelter pet — and millions of them already have, and plan to again. Shelter and rescue group adoption accounts for more than one-fifth of all new dog and cat acquisitions in this country already.

It would take a very small increase in that rate — just up to around one-quarter — to save the lives of every healthy pet, as well as every pet with a treatable or manageable health or behavior problem, in every shelter in America.

Creating better, more appealing ways to get pets adopted doesn’t just help those pets or your shelter, either;  it raises the profile of adoption in general and creates more social acceptance and awareness of adoption.

It both saves lives now, and builds infrastructure to keep saving them in the future. And even more importantly, it builds that infrastructure on a cultural level, not just for that one agency or community.

That’s why adoption is so critical, and in most places is the silver bullet, while spay/neuter is not. As long as you have high rates of spay/neuter in your community already, and a free/low cost and accessible spay/neuter program, all your low-hanging fruit is in adoptions, not surgery.

And if you’re in an area with very low rates of spay/neuter and no services, then yes, you need to get those s/n programs in place immediately. But that’s no reason to ignore adoptions. Those surgeries will only reduce future shelter intake; it takes adoption programs, and better sheltering practices, to save the lives of the homeless animals in your community right now, and the ones who will need your help in the near future.

The next time someone tells you that “you can’t adopt your way out of pet over-population,” don’t believe it. If they tell you that you can’t stop the killing with adoption, believe it even less. Because finding homes for homeless pets is the only way to save their lives.

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