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Interview! Nell Thompson - Coordinator of National Getting To Zero Program

“I’m passionate for improving outcomes for community cats. I believe TNR would work great with cooperation and collaboration to achieve community change."

Nell has worked for over 25 years in the industry and her background is exceptional, due to her veterinary technician experience and knowledge that has heavily influenced her work every since. Her journey was heavily influenced by her parents, who volunteered in shelters when she was a kid and fostered cats and dogs as a family when she was young.   The National Getting to Zero Program is in Australia and primarily focuses on homeless cats and dogs and they work to implement change in a respectful way. They work to increase responsibility for companion animals so that every community and municipality can achieve zero euthanasia of all healthy and treatable cats and dogs.   Because they are in Australia, they take many methodologies and philosophies that we use here in the United Stated, and work to implement them there, since our cultures are fairly similar.   However, the government been difficult to work with when it comes to community cats. For a variety of reasons, community cats are very maligned in Australia. While being aware of the environmental factors, all options for population management need to be looked at and best applied, but the government is more on board with killing the overpopulation numbers that are homeless. Community cats are persecuted in the country based on government standards.   In most states in Australia, TNR is illegal. A lot of work has been done by locals to try to change the culture and work in more positive collaboration with the government, but so far, it has been a difficult road. In 2015, the government passed legislation to kill 1,000,000 cats, so the Getting to Zero program has been working in overdrive to get TNR up and running and to manage the population in a better way.   What can you do to help? One of the biggest drivers of this program is communication. Just by talking to people it can help to alert them to what is happening in Australia and what the problems are. It can be hard to push through change, but sometimes you need to accept the discomfort that comes with this and push through it.   For more information, head over to www.g2z.org.au.

Interview! Cameron Moore, Program Manager, Million Cat Challenge

“Hurricane Irma’s reach was intense for shelters across Florida, but it will only help us to plan for future incidents."

Cameron is a return guest (head to Episode 61 for information on how she got started in the business) that is here today to discuss the hurricane relief efforts in Florida.

Cameron worked with Maddie’s Shelter Medicine Program to do pre and post-storm assessments for a majority of the 155 shelters in Florida. Volunteers were responsible for contacting shelters before the storm to find out what may be needed, evacuation plans and how to distribute supplies.

This also parlayed into working with shelters to get pre-storm animals out to safety so the shelter would have room for post-storm animals that would need a place to go. When it came time to moving these animals before the hurricane hit, it proved challenging because carriers were in short supply, gas was drying up because of the mass exodus out of Florida and traffic was so horrible it took hours to travel anywhere. It was a real eye-opener on how to operate things in the future.

However, they were able to get 73 animals out of a shelter and into safety before the storm even touched the ground.

Cameron stresses the importance of having a plan in place before the storm. It’s key. She also stresses how important shelters are who aren’t in the eye of the storm, because they can be in a position to take animals that need to be relocated. The key is never to be in a position where shelters have to euthanize pre-storm animals in order to make room for post-storm animals.

Overall, things went well and it caused a funding collaborative to come together in order to work smarter together for future events. Thanks to Petco and other charities, there are plans to set up a centralized website with a grant application to help post-storm shelters.

Cameron also discusses how to potentially approach hurricane season differently in the future, and how she loved seeing the increase in people being able to take their pets with them who were evacuated to other areas. It only makes it easier on a family and a shelter.

Here’s the link to the transport best practices webinar series. aspcapro.org/webinar-series-companion-animal-transport-best-practices

Interview! Ann Dunn, Founder of Cat Town, Oakland, CA

"Nobody wanted to be standing in a cafe making coffee, they wanted to be helping the cats. But now, we’re seeing how helpful it has been to forgotten kittens and see how successful it has been."

Ann Dunn founded Cat Town, which is a cat rescue organization focusing on helping the most vulnerable cats in local shelters. Cats that are too scared in that environment have a hard time showing their best selves and soon tend to be overlooked by potential adopters. After realizing this, she wanted to work with these cats that needed the most intervention and save them from being euthanized. She opened the first Cat Cafe in conjunction with Cat Town in 2014 and just opened an adoption center for the hardest to place cats.

She worked for over 20 years in public housing redevelopment in managing, funding and planning. While she didn’t grow up with cats, she did end up adopting 2 cats after college. It was in their memory that she started volunteering at the local animal shelter. She never imagined it would lead her to open her own rescue shelter and she soon became obsessed with helping cats. In this new venture, she saw opportunity to apply her professional skills to address the high euthanasia rate she saw with the higher risk cats who weren’t having luck find homes. In 2011, Oakland had a 42% euthanasia rate, but by focusing on cats most likely to be euthanized, she has helped place around 1,800 cats and reduced the euthanasia rate to 14%!

Ann brought a different perspective to the problem when looking at the variables that were in play at an animal shelter. She saw obstacles that were in place that prevented some cats from feeling safe enough to be confident, which in turn, led them to not be adopted and often times, euthanized. Instead, she wanted to find a way to help by finding a way to place these cats in something other than a cage, where people could get to see them open up more. She originally was thinking this would happen in the form of a quasi sanctuary/adoption center/ cat cafe, so people would be able to spend time with these types of cats in an easier environment for the animals. She wanted to see these troubled cats find a “safe place” where they would transform into confident cats that people would want to adopt.

She now works on the Forgotten Kitten Project, as well. She uses a different approach with kittens that come in who may not be socialized because they are a little older. She brings them in and lets them become desensitized to an active environment, where they are amazingly resilient. It helps boost their confidence and gives them the skills they need to become more adoptable cats. She received a grant from Maddie’s Fund for this, where she documents her findings in order to hopefully inspire other organizations to do the same thing and replicate this approach elsewhere.

Ann also participates in an apprenticeship program through Maddie’s Fun, where she shares innovative ideas with other organizations. Cat Town is a host organization, where they have different organizations come in and shadow them, to see how they are doing things and what they can do to implement their ideas and success in their own organizations.

Find out Ann’s thoughts on the Cat Cafe and what she would do differently if she had to do it again. Would she even open a cat cafe if she was starting all over?

Learn more at www.cattownoakland.org

Interview! Part 1 - Dr. Sara Pizano, Veterinarian and Animal Welfare Consultant

“Northern Kentucky will be no-kill for cats this year, absolutely, hands-down!”

Dr. Sara Pizano, who joined us previously on Episode 171, is a veterinarian who has been involved in animal welfare for over thirty years. She has extensive experience helping shelters move away from euthanasia as a means of population control and helping municipalities revise public policy to be more animal friendly. Dr. Pizano now has her own consulting company, Team Shelter USA, and she serves on steering committees for both Best Friends and the Million Cat Challenge.

In Part 1 of this two-part episode, Dr. Pizano joined us to talk about a recent project in northern Kentucky, where she worked with a district consisting of eight counties, four of which accepted cats in their municipal shelters. These shelters had a very low live outcome rate for cats when the project began, and the goal was to increase that rate dramatically through intensive spay/neuter for community cats.

The project’s spay/neuter efforts were focused on two areas, “shelter/neuter/return” and then “in-field TNR.” Dr. Pizano explains shelter/neuter/return as taking healthy cats and kittens that are brought to the shelter as “found” and instead of having them enter the shelter, they are sterilized, vaccinated, and returned to where they were found. Dr. Pizano believes that spay/neuter of this group of cats is the number one priority in decreasing euthanasia rates.

The next step is to TNR high-intake area to get to the core of the problem and end the constant flow of community cats and their offspring into the shelters. The next steps are managed intake and targeted spay/neuter. With all of these pieces in place, over time, shelters will be dealing with far fewer cats!

It is safe to say that Dr. Pizano’s Kentucky project was a success, as she reports that in 2015, the four shelters that accepted cats took in 5,200 cats and euthanized 3,400 of those—but in 2017, the first full year of the grant-funded project, those same shelters took in 4,000 cats and euthanized just 400 of those! Eight thousand cat surgeries were completed during the first year of the project! Today, three of the four shelters in the Kentucky project are at a 90% live outcome rate, and the other is at 82%!

Dr. Pizano is very excited about the progress that’s been made in Kentucky, and about the resources that are available to other shelters that need help ending euthanasia as a means of population control. Programs like Million Cat Challenge are great sources of support for those groups, and she encourages everyone to join if they haven’t already!

To get in touch with Dr. Pizano, email her at drpizano@teamshelterusa.com. To learn more about Million Cat Challenge, visit millioncatchallenge.org. To learn more about Best Friends and their partner program, visit bestfriends.org.

Dr. Mikel Maria Delgado, a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist with a Ph.D. in psychology, has quite a list of accomplishments under her belt. She has co-authored the book Total Cat Mojowith Jackson Galaxy, and she currently co-owns a cat behavior consulting business called Feline Minds, which assists both pet owners and shelters. Mikel is also a post doc fellow at the University of California at Davis doing research on cat behavior in multi-cat households and on the health and development of orphaned neonatal kittens.

Mikel was, in her own words, “obsessed with cats” even as a child, though she never had particular aspirations toward being a vet, and it never really occurred to her until much later in life that she could have a job working with cats. Soon after the death of a beloved pet cat, Mikel began volunteering at the San Francisco SPCA, an organization with a robust cat behavior program. Mikel was hooked and ended up working for the SFSPCA for eight years before leaving to pursue her education.

Today, Mikel and her business partner work on many feline behavior cases, most of which, Mikel tells us, are due to an under-stimulating environment. She explains that keeping cats indoors restricts their experiences, and if you don’t replace those outdoor experiences with something else stimulating, it will lead to behavior problems.

Mikel is also conducting some fascinating research on cats—all of it either on pet cats in their homes or on foster kittens in the pre-existing UC Davis neonatal kitten foster program. (In other words, there are no lab cats here!) Tune in to hear the details of Mikel’s research and how it may help future cats and kittens in homes and shelters.

For more information,visit Mikel’s website, or you can follow her on Twitter @mikel_maria.

Steve Lawrence, an award-winning filmmaker previously interviewed by Stacy on CCP Episode 178, returns to CCP to discuss the documentary film he co-directed, The Cat Rescuers. The film premiered in October 2018 at the Hamptons International Film Festival, where it won an award for “giving voice to the voiceless.”

Since then, Steve and his production company have set about making the film available for community screenings that can be used as fundraisers for rescue and TNR groups. This can be done either directly through the filmmakers, or through an online platform called Tugg, which will take care of the logistical details for you.

Steve tells Stacy that his intention with this film was to make something that would help raise awareness about TNR and adoptions. One of the other points of the film was to make the point that much of this work that is being done to help cats is done on a volunteer basis and that the groups around the country need ways to sustain themselves. Steve hopes that the film allows people to raise awareness in their own communities about what it takes to do this kind of work, and also about why and how TNR is effective.

“Our intention was to make a film that would be of use to the rescue community not only in the U.S. but around the world—but we also wanted to make a film that would be emotionally engaging and sufficiently entertaining that it would grab an average viewer who’s just looking for a good story, for an interesting story with compelling characters—and I think we’ve achieved both.”

To learn more about The Cat Rescuers, including where/how to attend or host a screening, visit the film’s website. To host a screening where the details (like finding a location and ticket sales) are all taken care of for you, go can go through Tugg’s online booking interface.

Gary Willoughby, the President and CEO of the SPCA Serving Erie County in West Seneca, New York, joins Stacy to talk about what’s going on at the nation’s second oldest humane society. A passionate life-long learner, Gary joined the SPCA in 2016, after several animal welfare roles, as well as several roles in other fields.

Among other topics, Gary talks with Stacy about the SPCA’s full-service wildlife clinic, and how having that clinic alongside a more traditional animal shelter has informed both the SPCA’s work with and data collection around cats and trap-neuter-vaccinate-return programs. Over the years, Gary tells us, they have been able to measure the successful impact of local TNVR programs through decreased intakes into the shelter, as well as through a decrease in the number of wild animals brought into the wildlife clinic with cat-related injuries.

The SPCA Serving Erie County is big on education, including helping folks understand why just feeding stray or feral cats is only the first step (and then helping them find a way to make that next step happen). “It’s so easy to love animals and just to put out some food and water for a cat,” Gary says, “but taking the next steps, there’s always barriers in the way.” One of the ways Gary hopes to continue removing those barriers in the future is by adding a transportation component to their partnership with a local high-quality, high-volume spay/neuter clinic. He believes that this will make spay/neuter more accessible to people in more rural parts of the county.

Above all, Gary believes that groups must collaborate to come up with a strategic plan to improve communities together. “No one person or group can do it alone,” he tells us, and he recommends getting to know – and then getting together regularly with – other groups in your area to discuss what’s working, and putting your heads together to come up with new solutions as well.

To learn more about the work being done at the SPCA Serving Erie County, visit yourspca.org, or check them out on Twitter or Facebook.