Group seeking changes to Augusta Animal Services evoke mixed reactions from around the country

On the surface the offer looks like a win-win for everyone. Best Friends Animal Society, a nonprofit based in Utah, wants to provide services with a grant it values at more than $910,000 to help Augusta Animal Services lower its high euthanasia rate.

But some animal shelter directors and volunteers who have worked with Best Friends say it’s not what it seems.

In May, Gina Burrows, Southeast regional strategist for Best Friends, told Augusta commissioners that in 2023 Augusta Animal Services had a save rate of 53.8%.

“It ranks No. 1 in Georgia and No. 32 nationwide for shelters with the highest lifesaving gaps,” she said.

Save rate is the percentage of animals brought into a shelter that are not euthanized. The grant would provide additional staff, training, and support to the Augusta shelter to improve the save rate.

Previously:Augusta officials ask animal shelter, animal welfare nonprofit to find way to work together

Best Friend’s stated goal is for every shelter to become no-kill by 2025. For a shelter to achieve what Best Friends considers no-kill, 90% of the cats and dogs coming into the shelter must be saved, according to the group’s website www.bestfriends.org.

But there’s a catch, said James Hill, director of Augusta Animal Services. To become a no-kill shelter, it would have to turn away many healthy owner-surrendered cats and dogs, he said. Because the Augusta shelter is taxpayer-funded, it cannot turn animals away.

The offer Best Friends made to Augusta would provide seven new staff positions, including a veterinary medical team, a community cat program coordinator, a Best Friends employee embedded with the shelter staff, virtual and in-person training, and mentorship to help build the program faster, Burrows told commissioners in May. Augusta officials are still considering the offer.

But some shelter directors urge caution when dealing with Best Friends.

Amy-Jo Sites, director for the Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, animal control, said Best Friends approached her in March about assessing the county-owned shelter. Later that month, representatives from the group went to the Fort Wayne City Council and the shelter’s commission with a proposal that was accepted.

Best Friends wanted her shelter to screen animals before accepting them, Sites said. But, like Augusta, it is a taxpayer-supported shelter, and she is obligated to take any animal.

When no-kill shelters are full, workers are forced to turn away people surrendering their animal – even in dire circumstances, Sites said.

Often it leads to more crowding in the shelter and more stress on the animals and on the staff, she said. And there would be more strays living in the streets creating a dangerous situation for the animals and humans.

Sites said she tried to work with Best Friends. The shelter began requiring appointments to surrender a pet. But because strays didn’t require an appointment, people started claiming surrenders were strays.

After COVID, Best Friends wanted Sites to apply for grants for new programs only, she said. But she said she doesn’t have the staff to add new programs. They pushed for a foster program, but Best Friends would only pay for supplies.

When she pushed back, representatives of Best Friends went to city leaders demanding new leadership in the shelter. And to elevate the over-crowding problem, the group wanted to house additional animals in crates stacked up in hallways.

Finally, “we basically divorced them,” she said.

In Danville, Virginia, Paulette Dean, executive director of the Danville Area Humane Society, said a Best Friends representative called her in November offering to take some of the overflow of cats Dean had in the shelter.

Dean said she told the representative she would be willing to send the cats, but wanted a written agreement that the cats would be kept indoors. The representative said Best Friends doesn’t usually agree to sign anything.

She researched Best Friends and found they advocated practices she disagreed with. In mid-February, she got a call that Best Friends was sending a support offer.

“I asked what would happen if we didn’t accept their offer and was told, ‘Make no mistake. We will not forget, and we will do what we need to do.’”

The agreement would require the shelter to limit the number of animals it accepts to adoptable animals, so the Humane Society declined, she said.

On June 1, Best Friends spearheaded an initiative called Danville Deserves Better, Dean said. The group has a web page that can be found at https://ddb-preview.webflow.io/ or search for ‘Danville Deserves Better’.

Their mission: “To save the lives of more Danville cats and dogs,” according to the website. The site includes a pre-written letter opposing the shelter that can be easily sent to city officials.

Dean acknowledged that the shelter had a terrible kill rate in 2023: 80% of the 3,000 animals entering the shelter were euthanized. Because of COVID, more people were surrendering more animals. Area shelters were full and not accepting more, so the Humane Society took them in, she said, and that led to more animals being euthanized.

But the story in Horry County, South Carolina, is very different. Naomi Jenkins, kennel supervisor for the Horry County Animal Care Center, said conditions and the shelter are “100% better” since Best Friends came in about four years ago. The shelter’s live release rate was about 20% before Best Friends. Now it’s at 88%, she said.

Best Friends has provided training, helped start a Trap-Neuter-Release program for cats, helped the shelter set up adoption days with PetSmart, offered mentorship and training on creating enrichment time for animals, behavior training, networking with other shelter employees, she said.

They sometimes exchange hard to adopt animals with similar animals at another shelter to try to find them homes, she said.

She’s talked to several shelter employees in other parts of the country who say they haven’t had good experiences with Best Friends, but they are in different districts of Best Friends. The district that serves Augusta and Horry County is run by the same director, Gina Burrows.