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Orange County Animal Services Sheltering Practices and Philosophies 41 communities and local governments, and proactive prevention programs that seek to keep pets in homes, we will not have to argue anymore about how to reach our utopia. We will have arrived, Part 1: We're All in This Together When Tammy Kirkpatrick stood before a packed room at the 2000 No Kill Conference in Tucson, she wasn't prepared for the reaction her words were about to elicit. Thinking hers would be just another presentation among many, she proceeded to explain the name of her workshop, "No Kill Doesn't Mean No Euthanasia." The talk proved to be even more provocative than the title, as Kirkpatrick went on to address those situations she considers to be abominable and contrary to everything she believes the "no kill" philosophy should represent, Attendees couldn't wait to return home and relay the details to their coworkers. Two years later, people are still talking about it. "A lot of people thought [itj was pretty controversial," says Kirkpatrick. "And I'm like, 'Hello?? Wake up!' ,,, I had a lot of big hitters in this business sitting in my audience, and I'm sweating bullets going, 'Oh my god, oh my god, I didn't think this was going to be that big of a deal,' But it turned out that it opened a lot of people's eyes-both 'traditional' and 'non-traditional,' " A Word On Terms Far the purposes of this article, to avoid the semantics issues we are trying to help solve, we are referring to individual organizations by the labels they use to define themselves. Because some organizations call themselves "open- admission" and others use the term "full- service," those words appear here interchangeably on general reference. "No kill" is often in quotes because it is the term that has been As the new producer of the conference, renamed last the subject of the most year to CHAMP (short for Conference on Homeless debate-and the one Animal Management and Policy), Kirkpatrick is still that is slowly being challenging "no kill" organizations and others to examine replaced by mare their policies and missicns, placing particular emphasis inclusive descriptions, on the fact that, regardless of what a group calls itself, the animals are the number-one pricrity, Through her articles in No Kill News, she has continued to address the same problems she discussed in her workshop. In one edition, she described an organization that had held two dangerous dogs for seven years, usurping resources and space that could have been devoted to "adaptable" dogs. In another edition, she told the story of another professed "no kill" group that had left its animals in the hands of caretakers who proceeded to destroy the animals' living quarters, take their food, and run off without telling anyone. Until animal control alerted the group members, they were not even aware that the animals had been abandoned.