Somewhere today, a shelter director is going to be told online that she likes killing animals. She doesn’t. She runs the one shelter in her city that isn’t allowed to say no — to any stray, any surrender, any animal too sick or too dangerous for anyone else to take. And she still gets most of them out alive.
So why can’t she save them all?
In this episode, I take the question seriously, because the answer is almost never the one in the comments section. It isn’t that the shelter staff don’t care. It’s the job we’ve handed open-intake shelters, the animals they’re required to accept, and the resources and support they get from the community. I take my home city as an example and look at ACCT Philly’s 2025 numbers. I tell the story of a rural Georgia shelter that went from a place animals came to die to one with playgroups and toys and a realistic way out, without a bigger budget. And I end with the one thing you can do this month that helps.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- What “open intake” means, and why it removes a shelter’s control over how many animals arrive and which ones it must accept
- Why some of the animals who don’t make it were never any shelter’s failure to begin with
- What a shelter’s live release rate does and doesn’t tell you about how hard its job was
- Why more animals often leave a shelter through rescue transfers than through public adoption
- How a live release rate is really a fraction, and the two directions you can push it
- How one under-resourced rural shelter changed its outcomes without a bigger budget
- The specific, finite, social way you can start helping your local shelter save more lives
Key Takeaway
A shelter can’t save every animal because it can’t refuse intake, can’t choose the easy cases, and can’t do the work alone — and the last of those is the one you can change.
Episode Highlights
00:00 — The real reason animals die in shelters, and why it’s almost never that the staff don’t care
01:52 — What “open intake” means, and how it differs from a limited-admission shelter
02:42 — The space problem: a shelter can’t control how many animals arrive or add kennels when it’s full
03:33 — The hardest cases: the sick, injured, and dangerous animals no one else will accept
04:33 — ACCT Philly’s 2025 numbers, and how rescue transfers outpaced public adoptions
05:46 — What online shaming does to shelters, and how it turns people away
06:49 — The live release rate as a fraction, and the two ways a community can change it
09:17 — How the City of Quitman Animal Shelter in rural Georgia turned things around without a bigger budget
11:35 — How a few people taking action pulls a whole community in
12:41 — Be the Change: the one finite, doable thing you can start with
16:09 — Why one afternoon, one ride, or one phone call is never small to the animal who gets it
Transcript
People ask me some version of this question all the time: why can’t shelters save every animal? Usually, I hear it after they’ve seen a post online about an animal who didn’t make it out. And almost immediately, someone in the comments says something like, well, that shelter likes to kill animals, or the people who work there just don’t care enough.
But in my experience, that’s almost never the real reason animals die in shelters. The real reason has much more to do with the job we’ve asked open-intake shelters to do, the animals they have to take, and the resources available to them. And once you understand that answer, you’ll see both the problem and the possibilities much differently.
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, on to today’s topic. Let’s start with the core question: why can’t an open-intake shelter save every animal who comes in? Let’s start with what open intake means. These are usually shelters operated directly by a city or county, or private organizations like nonprofit shelters hired by the government to provide animal control and sheltering services. Either way, they have a public responsibility or a contractual responsibility to accept animals from their community.
And that means every stray dog picked up by animal control, every cat found injured on the side of the road, and every pet whose owner arrives saying they have nowhere else to turn. Not when there’s room, not only when the animal is healthy and easy to place, every single one. Now, a private, limited-admission shelter can say, we’re full today, call again next week. An open-intake shelter usually can’t.
So the shelter doesn’t control how many animals arrive. They come whether or not there’s a kennel open that morning. And that space is fixed. A building has the kennels it has. When every kennel is full and the animal control truck pulls in with 6 more dogs, no amount of concern adds another kennel. Now, some shelters start doubling up dogs or cats or putting up temporary crates because they’re trying to make more space. But that creates its own problems: more stress, more disease transmission, and worse living conditions for the animals. At that point, more animals are coming in than the building can safely hold.
And limited space is only part of the problem. Open-intake shelters also get many of the animals who are the hardest to save. When you’re the shelter that can’t refuse animals, you take cases that other organizations may decline. Animals who arrive critically ill, badly injured, or with behavior that may present a danger to the community. Some can get better, recover with treatment or skilled handling, but some can’t. The point isn’t that those animals don’t deserve help. It’s that an open-intake shelter doesn’t get to select only the animals most likely to have good outcomes.
The shelter didn’t create the condition that the animal’s in, but it became responsible for dealing with circumstances no one else had to accept. And that’s very different from not caring.
Let’s make these ideas concrete with one real example. ACCT Philly is Philadelphia’s open-intake animal shelter. They have a contract with the city. They’re required to accept strays and owner surrenders from city residents. In 2025, it took in nearly 19,000 dogs and cats. According to ACCT Philly’s published figures, approximately 87% of those animals left alive.
That number, the live release rate, it matters, but it doesn’t tell the whole story by itself. It doesn’t tell you how sick the animals were when they arrived, how many had serious behavioral concerns, how crowded the building became, or what resources were available to help them. And there’s another number to notice that shows how much sheltering depends on an entire network: more animals left ACCT Philly through rescue transfers than through direct public adoptions.
Those transfers are part of the shelter doing its job well. ACCT takes the animal because it can’t say no, then a rescue with the right space and expertise takes over. Foster homes, transport volunteers, veterinarians, and community organizations all become part of that animal’s pathway out. Take those partners away, and the shelter has far fewer choices.
And yet, that same shelter is regularly accused online of liking to kill animals. An open-intake shelter like ACCT Philly can get the vast majority of its animals out alive and still be judged by some almost entirely by the ones it couldn’t save.
So, if shaming the shelter doesn’t save more animals — and it actually turns people away from the shelters — what helps? Well, there isn’t one solution or one program that suddenly fixes everything. Shelters save more animals when they build a real relationship with the community around them. They have to welcome volunteers, work with rescue groups, communicate with the public, and ask clearly for the help that they need. And then the community has to respond. That means you.
You can think of a shelter’s live release rate as a fraction. On the bottom are the animals coming in. On the top are the animals getting out alive. And there are lots of ways to change both numbers. You can prevent animals from entering the shelter through affordable veterinary care, spay and neuter services, pet-inclusive housing, pet food assistance, and temporary help for families in crisis. And you can create more ways out through adoption, fostering, rescue transfer, and reunification of families with lost pets.
But none of those things happens just because the shelter knows they’re needed. A shelter can create a foster program, but it still needs people willing to bring animals into their homes. It can schedule an adoption event, but it needs volunteers to transport animals, hold leashes, answer questions, and help potential adopters meet them. It can post a lost dog, but it needs people to share the post, check neighborhood groups for missing dogs, and help find the family. It can ask for rescue placement, but it needs rescue groups willing to answer, drivers willing to transport, and again, foster homes waiting at the other end. It can create a volunteer program, but people still have to show up — to walk dogs, socialize cats, take photographs, write adoption profiles, wash blankets, stuff Kongs, and help animals get noticed.
Each action may look small by itself, but one lost dog gets reunited with his family. One litter is prevented through an affordable spay appointment. One foster home opens a kennel. One volunteer gets a dog out of the kennel and in front of an adopter. Then another, and another, and another. That’s how the numbers change.
The shelters that improve don’t rely on one organization doing everything. They become the center of a network of people who share responsibility for the animals in their community. That network only exists when the shelter invites people in and the community says yes.
And you don’t need a big city budget to make that kind of change. This next story comes from Cara Achterberg, who some of you may remember from an earlier episode on managed intake and community sheltering. Cara runs an organization called Who Will Let the Dogs Out, and she’s spent years visiting shelters across the rural South and writing about what she finds. I’ll put a link to our earlier conversation in the show notes because she explains this work in much greater depth, including what many rural shelters are up against that may be foreign to a lot of the rest of us.
So one of the shelters she’s written about is the City of Quitman Animal Shelter in rural South Georgia. A few years ago, a local rescuer named Elana walked into a place that was still operating more like an old-fashioned pound than a modern animal shelter. Animals routinely died there. The conditions were bleak, and there wasn’t a big budget coming to fix them. Like a lot of places, South Georgia doesn’t have enough veterinarians. Spay and neuter still isn’t the norm in many communities. Now, the city pays for the building, the animal control truck, and one salary. Almost everything else has to come from donations and volunteers.
So Elana and a former veterinary technician named Anna started changing what they could. They moved dogs into local homes, more than 500 of them, and relied heavily on weekly adoption events in nearby Valdosta. They began coordinating with other small municipal shelters, so when one shelter filled up and another had a little room, dogs could move instead of being killed simply because there was nowhere to put them. They also started working on the reasons animals kept arriving, including spaying and neutering the animals that they could reach.
It’s still hard, make no mistake. The shelter still relies on donations, community service volunteers, and nowhere near enough money. But the place where dogs once had almost no chance is now a shelter where they have blankets, toys, playgroups, and most of the time, somewhere to go.
What changed was that a few determined people began creating options. They found adopters. They coordinated with other shelters. They brought in volunteers. They got donations. Then more of the community started showing up. People became aware of the shelter and began to see it as something that they could be part of. Instead of staying a sad place that people avoided, it began to become a center of community activity built around a shared commitment to animals. More people volunteered, more people donated, more people attended events, adopted animals, and helped spread the word. And every new person created another possibility for an animal who might not have had one before.
That’s what improved sheltering looks like. It’s not usually one dramatic fix. It’s the shelter and the community solving one problem and then another until the shelter has choices it didn’t have before.
And now we get to our Be the Change segment, and as usual, that means you. Because when I say the community, I don’t mean some vague group of other people. I mean you. Yep. You.
You don’t have to run a rescue. You don’t have to foster 20 dogs. You don’t have to reorganize your entire life. Start with one useful thing that’s social, manageable, and finite. Volunteer at one adoption event. That’s my first ask. Most shelters hold them, and many are short on help. Call your local shelter and ask whether it needs volunteers for an upcoming event. Complete whatever training it requires, grab a friend, and give the shelter one weekend afternoon.
You might help transport the dogs, answer questions, hold a leash and make sure an animal gets seen. You’ll spend a few hours with dogs who are thrilled to be anywhere other than their kennels. You’ll meet families who may have stopped by for something else and leave having met their next best friend. Then you and your friend can go get a drink and feel good about how you spent the day.
And I can’t stress this enough: shelter staff cannot do this work alone. When I first started volunteering inside shelters years ago, that was my biggest takeaway. The shelter hopefully has enough paid staff to handle intake and adoptions and clean the kennels and provide medical care. But all the extra attention you’re hoping the animals get — the walks, the playtime, the socialization, the photographs, the adoption events, and the help getting seen by potential adopters — much of that has to come from the community. And the community is us.
But an adoption event may not be the right fit for you. Maybe you’re antisocial. You can foster. You can drive an animal to a rescue. You can help reunite a lost pet with a family. You can take photos, organize a food donation drive to keep pets in homes, or help a neighbor solve a temporary problem before it leads to surrender. You don’t have to do all of it. Pick the part you can do. But you do have to stop thinking of the shelter as a place where other people are supposed to solve the community’s animal problems. They can’t. Not without us.
So, why can’t shelters save every animal? An open-intake shelter can’t control how many animals arrive. It can’t choose only the easiest ones to save. And it can’t create unlimited space inside the walls of a fixed building. It also can’t do this work alone. Every foster placement, adoption, rescue transfer, reunion, and prevented surrender depends on someone in the community stepping forward.
The people inside the shelter may care as much as anyone possibly can, but concern alone doesn’t create a foster home or reunite a lost cat with her family. People do that. Communities do that. You do that. So pick one way to help. Give it one afternoon, one ride, one spare room, or one phone call. It may seem small to you. To the animal who gets the kennel, the foster home, or the ride out, it isn’t small at all.
That’s it for today. The Animal Advocate is brought to you by the Animal Advocacy Academy. If today’s episode got you thinking about what you can do to change things for animals, I want to make sure you know about the four Cs of legislative advocacy for animals. It’s a free audio series I put together that gives you a real framework for making legislation happen. You can find it at animaladvocacyacademy.com/fourcs. and you can find all our episodes and show notes at animal advocacyacademy.com. Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode, and if you know another animal advocate who should be listening, send this one their way. Questions on today’s topic or anything else, just email us at podcast@animaladvocacyacademy.com. We’ll write back, or we’ll feature your question in a future episode.
Remember, compassion is great, but compassionate action is infinitely better. Until next week, Live with Compassion.
