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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.

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.