You have probably seen the coverage. Save rates are up. More shelters going no-kill. The national numbers are trending positive.

And if you are working inside a shelter right now, you are probably reading those headlines and feeling like you are losing your mind.

Because your kennel is full. Your staff is burned out. Your intake doesn't stop. And the animals coming through your door are harder to place than ever.

You are not imagining it. The data just isn't telling the whole story.

Here's the part not in the headlines: national shelter statistics only count the animals that shelters actually accepted. Managed intake, appointment-only systems, limited admission policies. Those shelters turn animals away every day. Those animals never get logged. They don't show up in any save rate calculation.

When a shelter limits intake, it doesn't solve the crisis. It moves it off the books.

So when you see an 82% national save rate, what that actually represents is 82% of the animals shelters chose to count. The ones left at the door, abandoned in parking lots, surrendered to the already-overwhelmed shelter in the next county. Invisible in the data.

And even the numbers that do get collected aren't good. Annual staff turnover in animal shelters runs at 33%. The national average across all industries is 3.3%. Shelters are collectively caring for 245,000 more animals right now than they were in 2022. Five states (Texas, California, North Carolina, Florida, and Alabama) account for half of all shelter euthanasia in the country.

If you are running an open-intake shelter and feel like you are failing, you are not. You are working in the hardest conditions this field has to offer, and you are counting animals the field is still figuring out how to count.

The full breakdown, where these numbers come from, what they mean, and what is actually falling through the cracks, is on the blog.

​Read it Here​

Save it. Share it with your board, your funders, your city council rep. The next time someone tells you the crisis is improving, you'll have receipts.

Thanks for the work you do.

— Roxanne

Thank you for following, reading, and being part of the solution to the animal crisis. You are appreciated. Roxanne