0: We are a no kill animal shelter. I don't like to use that language. No kill.
What we prefer to do is use the term save rate because it's more specific and
precise and it's more useful language.
So S save rate is defined as of all the animals that come in alive in a given
year, in that same year, how many leave alive? We have a live outcome.
You divide that number and you get a percentage, and that's your save rate.
If your S rate is 90% or better,
you would be classified as a no kill animal shelter.
So what a 90% or better save rate demonstrates to our community is that we are
saving every animal that can be saved. It's that simple.
Even 90% or save rate, yeah, you can call yourself a no kill animal shelter,
but more importantly,
it's indicating to the community that we're saving all the pets that can be
saved.
So the premier benchmark that most shelters are striving to accomplish is a
90% or better save rate, right?
And many organizations struggle to accomplish that because it's very,
very difficult. And we have a 95% S save rate, that's ours rate.
So what happened to the other 5%? They were euthanized,
but we're still classified as a no-kill animal shelter because there's a second
part to the definition. So to be classified, you have a 90% or betters rate.
The other piece of it is you can only euthanize an animal for two reasons.
The first reason is for health. The health of the animal is beyond repair.
Modern medicine cannot bring them back. It's a humane euthanasia.
The other one is for behavior. Sometimes rarely, but it happens.
An animal's behavior cannot be rehabilitated.
They are just too dangerous for anybody to handle or for me to place into a
home.
There's no amount of training or anything that you can do that will make that
animal safe to handle.
And you can't euthanize an animal based on behavior that very rarely happens at
our organization, like less than 10 oh year,
and that's out of thousands and thousands of animals year.
But you can euthanize on that and still be classified as an official.
We are obligated by contract to take every single sick and injured
displaced animal for the entire county.
They're all funneling into our organization.
And to save 90% or more of them is very difficult.
And so the fact that we're at a 90% is pretty cool.
And people should rest assured knowing that if an animal ends up in our
building, if it can be saved, it'll be saved.