Nathan Winograd is the architect of the no kill animal shelter movement in the USA. Well, that’s how I regard him. He’s famous for being an animal advocate specialising in saving the lives of shelter animals. He’s probably saved the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of animals over the years with his no kill movement.
He runs the Nathan Winograd No Kill Advocacy Center.
He has written and produced a “primer on humane animal care and services for legislators, policymakers, shelter managers, media, advocates and other stakeholders”. It is a reference manual for the aforementioned people and service providers.
He says that it is meant to be a “definitive guide to animal shelter issues and will be soon available for sale in packs of 10 to give to legislators and other policymakers”.
He describes his book as follows:
The No Kill Companion is a reference manual for legislators, policymakers, shelter managers, media, advocates, and other stakeholders. With short encyclopedia-like entries, it covers the definition of No Kill, its history, opposition, challenges, controversies, threats to No Kill success, the state of the movement, costs and benefits of No Kill animal control, model legislation, shelter assessment tools, a glossary, and a primer on various sheltering issues, including temperament testing, community cats, and more.
Nathan Winograd
I want to promote it which is why I have written this short post. In promoting the book, I promote animal welfare. America is the biggest companion animal “marketplace” in the world by far and there’s always a need to improve animal welfare.
Too many feral cats
You might know that it is believed that there are an approximately equal number of feral cats to domestic cats in America (but the experts are unsure how many there are), which signals cat ownership failure but it is not exceptional across the world. In fact, some countries are far worse. India is famous for their ‘community cats’ but these are really semi-feral cats which don’t receive veterinary treatment.
Euthanasia at shelters
According to ASPCA, about 6.3 million companion animals enter US animal shelters across the country every year. Of these, about 3.1 million are dogs and 3.2 million are cats. Also, according to that charity, about 920,000 shelter animals are euthanised annually of which 390,000 are dogs and 530,000 are cats. Those numbers have decreased substantially over the years thanks to the no kill movement.
Euphemism
It’s been said many times that with respect to euthanasia at animal shelters, the word “euthanasia” is a euphemism which often substitutes what is truly happening namely the killing of perfectly healthy and adoptable animals for a variety of reasons, the classic one being that the shelter is full and the administrators have to make space for incoming animals. PETA does not really buy into the no kill movement. Winograd is engaged in a longstanding and ongoing battle with PETA.
Too many unwanted companion animals?
A lot has been written about this. Some people say that there are not too many unwanted pets in America. They say that it’s simply a question of distribution. In some places there is a need for more shelter animals while in other places there are too many. I’m not sure about that argument. The obvious conclusion is that there are too many unwanted animals otherwise there wouldn’t be any shelters. And there wouldn’t be any unnecessary killing of companion animals brought into the world and owned by people who have provided less than optimal caregiving.
Winograd probably saves more animal lives than any other animal advocate.
RELATED: Nathan Winograd’s No Kill Advocacy Center Reviews US Statistics On American Shelters
I’ll look for it! 😎. Twitter is a jungle of tweets.