Agenda - 09-19-2006-7b - Laserfiche WebLink

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Orange County Animal Services Sheltering Practices and Philosophies 45 achieve the goal within five years. "It was something that San Francisco took the lead on, and we had to do it in self-defense," says Charlotte Grimme, the organization's development director. "To build this new shelter, it was just so easy to use those words 'no kill,' especially since the other two shelters were using them, It's almost like, `How can I raise this money-we need $3,2 million- without using those words when San Francisco, which has such a high national profile, and the other two shelters in Pittsburgh are using the words just constantly?' " The fact that organizations feeling backed into a corner can simply relabel themselves as a reactive measure renders the labels themselves almost meaningless, And as Julie Morris has discovered in her work as an ASPCA vice president, the interpretations, qualifications, and nuances churning around the words "no kill" vary so much from one community to the next that it's impossible to judge the quality of an organization by its label. In her travels to shelters around the country, her own preconceived notions have been turned upside dawn, she says, "I kind of almost assumed that in each community the full-service shelter would be the best .,. in terms of people care, animal care, and facility," says Morris, "and [that] animal control would be less so, and the no kill would be even less so. And that's totally untrue. It totally depends on the community, I've been to communities where the best facility is the 'na kill' by far, And I've gone to communities where the animal control by far is the best, .., Reading whether they're `municipally run,' 'no kill,' ar 'full service' tells me nothing about the quality of the facility." If seasoned veterans like Morris are confiased by the labels, it's little wonder that the public is, for the most part, utterly baffled. The media has found the term "no kill" hard to resist and even harder to explain; drafting one definition of "no kill" while remaining fair to all involved would result in footnotes and qualifications longer than the definition itself-and too detailed for the brief time or word limits media directors often place on what they consider to be "fluffy" or "feel-good" animal stories. As a result, explanations of the phrase-from bath its defenders and detractors-are usually reduced to one or two boilerplate sentences in the newspaper or on the TV screen, "You Kill Them in Here, Dontcha?" What the public has picked up from reductive news reports is something far too simplistic, a mental framework that creates a completely inaccurate impression: a good shelter is a "no kill" shelter; a bad one "kills" animals, Because of the human tendency to segregate the world into categories of good versus bad and right versus wrong, movements for change-whether political, cultural, or social-are usually perceived in terms of their extremes, And when splintered factions engage in a struggle to claim the higher ground, they forsake the chance