Can a Law Make Shelters Go No Kill?

In this episode, you’ll learn: 

• What “no-kill” actually means — and why the question to ask about any shelter isn’t whether they euthanize, but whether they’re doing everything possible to reduce it
• How California’s Hayden Law became the model for right-to-rescue legislation — and why euthanasia numbers are still high there decades later
• Why laws that restrict when shelters can euthanize create serious problems around professional judgment, rescue capacity, and animal safety
• Why Utah’s law may make sense for Utah specifically — and why that doesn’t mean it’s ready to export everywhere
• What actually reduces euthanasia over time, and what advocates should be pushing for instead
• How to respond when someone is criticizing your local shelter on social media

Key Takeaway

Euthanasia isn’t the root problem — it’s what happens when the real problems driving animals into shelters go unsolved. Legislation can help, but not with a quick mandate. It takes funding, upstream investment, and sustained commitment from communities and lawmakers alike.

Episode Highlights

Resources Mentioned:

The Four C’s of Legislative Advocacy for Animals

Related Episode:

Transcript

About 14 years ago, I started leading volunteer sessions at an open-intake shelter, and I learned what timestamped meant—at least what it meant at that shelter. It meant that the animal had a deadline to find a safe exit or he’d be euthanized. At that time, those deadlines fell in the evening, so I was constantly checking in, hoping against hope that a safe exit had been found. During that time, the shelter had what they called a pen pal program. Pen pals were assigned to a particular dog, working with them to help them become more adoptable. And one of the saddest things I have ever seen was when a pen pal would sit outside the shelter at 6 o’clock with her dog, hoping an adopter would show up and hoping she could talk them into considering her dog before they even got inside the building. Because her dog had an hour left on his timestamp.

 Sometimes euthanasia is necessary. When an animal is suffering or unsafe, it’s the responsible choice. But euthanizing happy, healthy animals because there’s simply no more room is soul-crushing.

For some people, the first instinct is to demand a law. The city should just require the shelter to be no-kill. I understand that impulse, but the law is not a magic wand. Today, let’s talk about what it looks like when advocates try to use it as one, and what we should be asking for instead.

Welcome to The Animal Advocate, where we arm animal lovers with the information and inspiration you need to become effective advocates. I’m your host, Penny Ellison, and I’ve taught animal law and advocacy at the University of Pennsylvania since 2006. If you’ve ever thought, “Someone should do something about that,” I’m here to guide you on your journey to being that someone. You can find us on the web at AnimalAdvocacyAcademy.com. And that’s where you’ll find show notes and resources, and you can send us your comments on episodes and ideas for topics you’d like to hear on future shows. So, onto today’s topic.

 Before we get into it, I want to say up front, shelter euthanasia is a topic we’re going to return to more than once. It’s too big for one episode. What everyone in animal welfare agrees on is that we want euthanasia numbers to come down. Where people disagree, and where the important conversations happen, is how to get there.

The short answer, for me, is there’s no single solution. You have to work on reducing the number of animals coming into shelters, and at the same time work on getting more animals out safely, through adoption, transfers to rescue partners, and returning lost animals to their families. Legislation is one tool that’s been tried, with mixed results, to push shelters towards saving more animals by regulating when euthanasia is allowed and how shelters have to work with rescues before it happens. That’s what today’s episode is about.

 But first, let’s talk about what no-kill actually means, because a lot of the confusion around this topic starts right there. No-kill does not mean a shelter never euthanizes an animal. What that term means in practice is that a shelter saves 90% or more of the animals who come through its doors. That other 10% accounts for animals who are medically beyond help or pose a genuine safety risk that can’t be managed. No-kill still involves some euthanasia. What it doesn’t involve is euthanizing adoptable animals simply because there’s no more room. The question you should ask about any shelter isn’t whether they euthanize. It’s whether they’re doing everything possible to keep that number down, and whether their community is giving them the resources to do it.

The idea of using legislation to push shelters towards no-kill isn’t new. The most prominent example is a California law passed in 1998, the Hayden Law. It established that adoptable and treatable animals shouldn’t be euthanized when alternatives exist, and it gave rescue organizations the right to pull animals from shelters before euthanasia decisions were made. That right-to-rescue provision, giving qualified rescues a formal opportunity to step in, was at the heart of the law.

Did it work? When the Hayden Law passed, California shelters were euthanizing an estimated 531,000 dogs and cats a year. By 2018, 20 years later, that number had dropped to roughly 180,000, about a two-thirds reduction. That’s real progress, and the Hayden Law contributed to it. But California shelters still euthanize tens of thousands of animals every year. Why? Because the right-to-rescue mechanism addresses one piece of the problem. It ensures that shelters give rescues a chance to pull animals before euthanasia. It doesn’t address why shelters are overflowing in the first place. Rescues can pull animals, but if there aren’t enough rescues with capacity, enough adopters, enough support for families trying to keep their pets, the pressure on shelters doesn’t go away.

Now, California wasn’t the only state to try this approach of limiting euthanasia through passing a law. Arizona, Virginia, Florida, and Illinois have each adopted some version of a rescue access requirement. And a handful of other states have addressed it through administrative policy or statewide shelter standards. The right-to-rescue idea has spread. The question we’re asking here is about whether each new version has learned from what the earlier ones got right and what they got wrong, and whether this is an issue that’s best addressed through a law.

 I’ve been thinking a lot about whether we can legislate our way to no-kill, because Utah just passed its own right-to-rescue law. The basic idea is the same as California’s: before a shelter can euthanize an animal, it has to notify rescue organizations that want to be contacted about at-risk animals, and give them a window to step in. Utah’s law was developed with the help of Best Friends Animal Society, one of the largest animal welfare organizations in the country, and they’re based in Utah. Now, Best Friends does important work, but there’s a difference between how a large, well-funded organization with deep rescue infrastructure experiences this work and how a small, underfunded shelter experiences this work. And when you look at how this kind of law works in practice, real challenges emerge when we think about adopting this kind of law in more jurisdictions.

 But before I get into those problems, I want to be clear about something. The instinct behind this law is right. Rescues do save animals who would otherwise be euthanized. There are shelters that have been slow to build rescue partnerships, that have made it harder than it needed to be for rescues to pull animals from their shelter. The people pushing for these laws have seen that firsthand, and their frustration is legitimate. The question I’m asking isn’t whether rescues should have access to at-risk animals. Of course they should. The question is whether imposing legal requirements on when shelters can euthanize does more good for animals than harm.

 So what are the problems with trying to legislate this? First, shelter work doesn’t lend itself to bright-line rules. What most people who haven’t worked in a shelter don’t realize is that a shelter’s situation changes, not just day to day, but hour to hour. You can start a morning with empty kennels and by afternoon be dealing with a cruelty seizure, a dozen strays picked up by animal control, and multiple families surrendering animals at once in your lobby. Staff are constantly weighing capacity, disease risk, and what they can realistically provide for the animals in their care. Animals in crowded conditions are more vulnerable to illness. Animals who spend too long in kennels can deteriorate in ways that make them harder to adopt out. These decisions can’t be reduced to a checklist. They require professional judgment, made in real time, by people who know their facility and their animals.

The second issue is that the key terms are almost always undefined. Utah’s law requires shelters to exhaust reasonable alternatives before euthanasia. But never defines what that means. What counts as a reasonable alternative? When has a shelter genuinely exhausted them? Leaving that undefined creates real legal uncertainty for shelter staff that are making hard decisions under pressure.

 The third problem I see is about when a shelter can say no to a specific rescue, and I want to explain this one carefully because it sounds counterintuitive but hear me out. Shelters work with rescue organizations every day. That relationship is usually close, collaborative, and it’s vital to the animals at the shelter. So shelter staff know their rescue partners well. They know which rescues have capacity and which ones are stretched thin, which ones are managing their own health crises, and which ones are in a good position to take on a challenging animal. I know locally we have rescues that are run by vets, so they’re much better positioned than most to take on a seriously injured or ill animal. Others will put animals in boarding because they want to save one more life, but they don’t have a foster home lined up. Under Utah’s new law, almost none of that knowledge on the part of shelter staff counts. The only grounds on which a shelter can refuse to release an animal to a rescue are a criminal conviction or pending charges for animal cruelty, or a court order preventing them from taking animals. That’s the complete list. A shelter can’t say no because the rescue has no available foster homes, can’t say no because the rescue is managing its own disease outbreak, can’t say no because the rescue is already over capacity and doesn’t have the capacity to manage more challenging animals. The professional judgment built up over years of working relationships has been written out of the decision.

These laws also remove shelter professionals’ ability to act on their own safety judgment about specific animals. Take a dog with a known bite history. The owner mentioned it to staff when they were surrendering the dog, or the animal lunged at staff members during intake. Under this new law, none of that counts either. The exemption for dangerous dogs only applies if the dog has already been formally declared dangerous through a legal process, which in Utah varies by jurisdiction, but it can take days or weeks, and in some places it doesn’t exist at all. Meanwhile, a shelter is legally required to offer that dog to a rescue.

And because Utah has strict liability for dog bites, a rescue that accepts a dog with a dangerous history could face legal exposure if that animal injures someone. As an example, Los Angeles Animal Services has paid more than $31 million in settlements in cases where dogs with known bite histories were transferred out and later seriously injured people. Just think what that money could have done for animals if it hadn’t needed to be spent settling dog bite cases because the shelter felt pressured to hit a specific live release number. That’s the real-world version of what happens when professional safety judgment gets overridden. And one more thing: if a shelter faces a serious bite claim, they will almost certainly lose their liability insurance. Insurance for foster-based animal rescues is getting harder and harder to get. And without insurance, they can’t operate. So the law that was meant to save one dog may just have ended that rescue’s ability to save any more.

And finally, there’s typically no funding attached to these kinds of laws. Every additional process these laws require falls on shelters that are already, in most cases, running without adequate resources. Mandating new processes and longer hold periods, even for dogs they think are not safe to place, without giving the shelters any more resources, is a pattern that has not served shelter animals well anywhere it’s been tried. You know, there’s a saying, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.” Euthanasia is a very visible problem to advocates. When they look to their government for a solution, all legislators have is a hammer: pass a law. But euthanasia isn’t the root problem. It’s what happens when the real problems driving animals into shelters go unsolved. Legislation can address those problems, too, but not with a quick mandate. It takes funding, and sustained commitment, and that’s a much harder ask than passing a law that tells shelters what they can’t do. Animals come in because of unplanned litters, unaffordable vet care, housing that doesn’t allow animals, and a wide range of economic pressures on families. When intake is high, shelters are strained. When intake comes down, the whole system gets more manageable. Staff have more time for medical care, behavioral work, connecting animals with adopters and rescue partners, so euthanasia numbers fall—not because of a mandate, but because there’s room for the system to function the way the people inside it want it to.

Maybe I’m biased, but my local open-intake shelter works incredibly hard to place every animal they can. and they don’t need a legislative mandate to tell them how. And I suspect that’s true of most shelters. The ones that do need a push are a real problem, but I don’t think a blunt legal mandate that applies to everyone is likely to be the best solution.

Also, I don’t want to skip past the people doing this work, because they’re largely invisible in these policy debates. The staff making euthanasia decisions are not indifferent to the animals they’re making them about. Shelter work involves sustained emotional weight that most of the people criticizing shelters from the outside have never experienced. Compassion fatigue is real, burnout is widespread, and the turnover is high. When experienced staff leave because conditions are unsustainable, the animals pay the price. Any serious effort to reduce euthanasia has to include the humans doing this work.

 So what should advocates be pushing for? Funding that gives shelters real resources to do their jobs. Shelter policies that are transparent and publicly accountable. Upstream programs that reduce how many animals arrive in the first place. And legislators who stay engaged over time, not just when a bill is on the floor, but year after year asking whether shelters have what they need to succeed. Utah’s new law has a goal shared by every animal advocate: fewer animals dying in shelters. And it may push some shelters towards stronger rescue partnerships. I hope it does.

But before other states follow Utah’s lead, it’s worth understanding what makes Utah unusual. Best Friends Animal Society, the organization that helped draft this law, as I said, is headquartered in Utah. They launched their No Kill Utah initiative more than a decade ago, and they’ve spent years building relationships between shelters and rescue organizations across the state. When the law passed, Best Friends’ own data showed that Utah was fewer than 1,200 animals away from statewide no-kill status. In other words, the rescue infrastructure to absorb those animals was largely already in place before the law required shelters to use it. Most states aren’t starting from there. If your state doesn’t have that foundation—the rescue network, the partnerships, the years of relationship building—a law that tells shelters what they can’t do without building what they need may create more problems than it solves. The path to meaningful progress runs through the policies and investments that shape how animals and people live together in communities. Funding, upstream programs, sustained commitment from legislators who stay engaged. That’s where our advocacy makes the greatest long-term difference.

Today’s question comes from a listener named Jane who wrote: “My local open-intake shelter gets a lot of criticism on social media. People say the staff doesn’t try hard enough to find rescues, and animals who could be saved are being killed. I want to push back, but I don’t know what to say. “

 Well, Jane, I want to give you a real answer here, not a diplomatic one. First, the criticism is sometimes valid. There are open-intake shelters that are not doing everything they can. Not working rescue relationships as actively as they should, not marketing their animals well, not welcoming volunteers, not being transparent about their outcomes. If that’s your shelter, it’s worth pushing for improvement

But in many cases, and I think the majority of cases, the people doing the criticizing have never set foot inside a shelter. They don’t know what it looks like when the lobby is full of stray animals and people surrendering their pets and there’s nowhere to put all of them. They don’t know what a disease outbreak does to an animal population in crowded conditions. And they don’t understand that a rescue or foster saying they’re willing and a rescue or foster having the capacity to care for an animal are sometimes two different things. So my first piece of advice is for you, not for the person complaining. Go learn. Volunteer. Foster. Get inside the shelter and see what it looks like. Not only will you be a far more effective advocate for it, you’ll be able to speak from firsthand experience when you push back, and that matters.

When it comes to the social media pile-on, don’t get drawn into an argument with a person posting. Instead, post correct information yourself. Explain what open intake means. Explain what staff are dealing with. You probably won’t change the mind of the person doing the complaining. In my experience, someone who wants to run the shelter from behind their keyboard isn’t usually looking for information.But your response will be read by everyone else who sees that thread. And when those people realize the criticism is coming from someone with no firsthand knowledge of what they’re talking about, they’ll give it the weight it deserves.

If you do want to engage the complainer directly, ask them questions. Are they volunteering? Have they fostered? Have they ever attended a public meeting about the shelter’s budget? Let their answers speak for themselves—publicly. And if the shelter genuinely isn’t doing its best, direct engagement is still how you change it, not a comment thread.

 For today’s Be the Change segment, find out who funds your local open-intake shelter and how much they get. Is it a municipal contract? If so, that budget goes through your city or county government, and your elected officials vote on it. Look up your council member and send them one email letting them know that shelter funding matters to you and that you’re paying attention to it  You don’t need to know the details of the budget to do this. You just need them to know you exist. Legislators respond to constituents who show up, even by email. The shelters with the resources to reduce euthanasia are the ones whose communities decided to fund that outcome. That decision gets made by elected officials, and elected officials listen when enough people ask.

That’s it for today. The Animal Advocate podcast is brought to you by the Animal Advocacy Academy. You can find episodes and show notes at AnimalAdvocacyAcademy.com, along with a link to our Facebook and LinkedIn pages, where we discuss our podcasts, and we’d love to discuss your thoughts and experiences there. If you’re interested in learning more about protecting animals, subscribe to the show so you get every episode when it comes out. If you have any questions on this or any other topic related to animal law, email them to podcast@animaladvocacyacademy.com and we’ll make sure to get them answered. We’ll either email you back or feature them in a future episode or both. And remember, Remember, compassion is great, but compassionate action is infinitely better. Until next week, live with compassion.

That’s it for today. The Animal Advocate podcast is brought to you by the Animal Advocacy Academy. You can find episodes and show notes at animaladvocacyacademy.com along with a link to our Facebook and LinkedIn pages where we discuss our podcasts and we’d love to discuss your thoughts and experiences there. If you’re interested in learning more about protecting animals, subscribe to the show so you get every episode when it comes out. If you have any questions on this or any other topic, related to animal law, email them to podcast@animaladvocacyacademy.com and we’ll make sure to get them answered. We’ll either email you back or feature them in a future episode, or both. And remember, compassion is great, but compassionate action is infinitely better. Until next week, Live With Compassion.`