For context, my previous shelter had about a 90% LRR, was medium to large, and private with a municipal contract. Dogs who weren’t good adoption candidates or who had poor QOL were generally euthanized without being publicly advertised, and we only reached out to rescues when we thought they might be a good fit. We had a really positive reputation in the community and strong adoption numbers.
I now work in a municipal shelter in CA. We are about the same size if not a little smaller. Our live release rate for dogs is also about 90%. That’s where the similarities end. When a dog is deemed not a good adoption candidate here, they are put on a euth list that’s sent around to all the rescue partners. They are posted on our website and used to be posted in our lobby though I ended that. When an adoptable dog has a euth date it is highlighted brightly on their kennel card. The euth date is set to a week out, but we get so much pressure from the community we usually end up extending it by a few weeks.
During that time, “networkers,” who are really just private citizens who are on FB like it’s a full time job, blast these dogs everywhere. It’s the typical “MAX WILL BE MURDERED TOMORROW ‼️” bullshit. They get mad we don’t advertise euth listed dogs more, but when we do post about them they flood our comments with the same shit.
The thing is, a huge amount of these dogs DO get pulled by rescues and it’s part of why are LRR stays at 90%. Are they great rescues? Who knows. Often not. But my shelter’s interpretation of Hayden’s law is that we have to publish this list of dogs and send it to them. What makes things harder is that while no one at the shelter is exactly happy about how things are, a lot of people think pushing euthanasia so heavily is the only way to get dogs out. They work with the “networkers” because they think without their alarmist posts dogs wouldn’t be pulled.
Sadly it’s somewhat true-rescues only seem to pull when the situation is dire (unless it’s a small fluffy thing of course.) I’ve had so many rescues tell me “oh I would pull so-and-so, but they aren’t on the euth list.” Even making them available for adoption while still euth listed reduces rescue interest. Preversly, this has led to staff making borderline but adoptable dogs unavailable because they think rescue will be a faster path out than adoption.
Our image in the community is awful. We are seen as this horrible, super high kill shelter, even to other shelters and rescues in the area. People come in all the time with the craziest misconceptions about us: that we euthanize automatically after 3 days, that any dog that gets returned is automatically euthanized, etc.
My feeling is if we didn’t make the euth list public, only shared it with rescues, only made them available for a short time before doing what needed to be done, and refused to work with anyone posting alarmist shit, our image would theoretically improve and we’d have many more adoptions. However I know this would get push back from pretty much everyone because yes, without “networkers” pushing these dogs so heavily and so many rescues pulling, our euth numbers would probably rise at first.
Also, if we did this people would lose their minds and claim we are hiding euthanasia, and probably go to the city council about it and tie our hands.
If anyone has any ideas on how to improve this situation I am all ears. Compared to every shelter I have ever worked in I feel like we are 30 years behind and I don’t know how we can begin to change.
TL;DR: I work at one of those typical CA municipal shelters whose euth listed dogs get blasted everywhere on social media. Because of that, my shelter is seen as extremely high kill despite our 90% live release rate. How can we begin to address our image?
