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Qrange County Animal Services Sheltering Practices and Philosophies 44 Swinging on a Verbal Trapeze Unfortunately, the question that's most important to so many in the field is also the one that has caused the most rifts among them, says ~lim Bonner, executive director of the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society, "Qur approach, as it has been for many humane societies, is how can we do [things for] the greater good?" says Bonner, whose background in math, computer science, and avian care has helped shape his perspective on the argument since he first joined the field last August. "And then you have another core or camp that say, `Well, we're going to do the best we can far each individual, We're going to limit the number of individuals, but we are going to do the best we can for them,' Far some reason, those two sides don't seem to be able to communicate very well with each other, "And that's a shame, There is certainly enough work to do, Both sides can be quite valid, They are both doing good. They should not be combating with each other because they have a different principle," The arguments have dragged on ad nauseam, sometimes behind closed doors, sometimes in the public eye, often bitterly, and almost always to the detriment of the animals, And in the past the debate has been riddled with redundancy: a rehashing of the same old questions leading to the same old impasses, Ask a hundred people for their definitions of "no kill," and you'll get a hundred answers-and even more questions: What's the definition of "no"? What's the definition of "kill"? How do you define "euthanasia," and what makes one animal more "adoptable" than another? Further muddying the waters is the fact that the quest to define who is "adoptable" and who is "unadoptable" is often as much of a struggle internally as it is in the community at large, says Kate Pullen, director of Animal Sheltering Issues at The HSUS. "If the animals are constantly flipping back and forth between categories," says Pullen, "and if you don't have all your staff and volunteers on board so that you've diminished all those behind-the-scenes arguments, then you really confuse the public and confuse the other animal organizations," In some communities, the words require verbal contortions to justify their existence-one of the reasons Bonner's on the hunt for a new way to describe his shelter's role in Pittsburgh's "No Kill by 2005" campaign. "The phrase is bad because it's a misnomer," he says, "We have to qualify, I think, the word 'killing,' So we say, 'We'll be no-kill for all really adoptable animals,' or'We're no-kill for this,' or'We're no-kill for that.' So instead of rallying around a term that you have to then defend, why do that? This just positions you poorly in the future in the eyes of your constituents." The Western Pennsylvania Humane Society adopted the language the year before Bonner took over--with only a vague outline as to how it was going to