Call for change

Where others see death, Richard Avanzino sees hope. Where others see an intractable problem, Nathan Winograd sees a solution.

"The buck stops at the shelter director's desk," says Nathan Winograd, whose hardhitting book is making many shelter directors both furious and nervous. Together, the two men - one carrot, the other stick; one preaching evolution, the other revolution - are the visionaries of a grassroots movement to change the way the nation's animal shelters do business.

Their vision is a no-kill nation, where no pet is killed for lack of a home. They say it's not a dream, and it will be a reality.

"We think we will achieve success in less than 10 years," said Avanzino, president of Maddie's Fund. Based in Alameda, Calif., it was founded with the fortune of software moguls Dave and Cheryl Duffield and was named in memory of their dog.

As director of the San Francisco SPCA in the '90s, Avanzino turned around a struggling shelter by refusing to kill the city's adoptable pets. The SFSPCA put in place free spay/ neuter clinics, mobile adoptions, trap-neuter release programs for feral cats, behavior advice and foster care - programs now common in progressive shelters nationwide.

"All the things that we did in San Francisco were initially rejected and received with great hostility," said Avanzino. "Today, I can look backward and say without almost any exception that all the programs the organized humane community fought against they have now embraced and made the cornerstone of their own programs."

But the pace of change hasn't been fast enough for Winograd, who, as director of operations at the SFSPCA under Avanzino, heard plenty of the criticism. "No kill" was derided as "someone else kill," and San Francisco's experience was dismissed as a fluke, a manipulation of statistics or the product of the city's unique characteristics.

So Winograd crossed the country to Ithaca, N.Y., taking over the Tompkins County municipal shelter. He ended the killing of pets for population control and led the agency - an open-door shelter that held the animal control contract for the rural county - to sending out more than 90 percent of the shelter's animals alive.

"The buck stops at the shelter director's desk," he said.

He slams home that point in a provocative book that puts the blame for millions of shelter deaths not on animal lovers, but on the entrenched ideas of shelter directors who fail to seek the help of a pet-loving population and who value clean, empty cages more than living, breathing animals who need help to find homes.

Winograd's book "Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America" (Almaden, $17) has made many of the nation's shelter directors both furious and nervous, even as it has energized animal lovers who want to know why no-kill can't happen in their communities. Winograd,

now heading the No Kill Advocacy Center based in San Clemente, Calif., is telling

them that it can.

"Shelters call people 'irresponsible pet owners,' but (shelters) are the ones refusing to take responsibility for the fate of the animals in their care," said Winograd. "While it's people who surrender animals to shelters, it's shelters who kill (those animals)."

While Winograd's take-no-prisoners approach is galvanizing audiences on the stops of his packed book tour, Avanzino and Maddie's Fund are more quietly building bridges, reaching out to no-kill skeptics while working to build no-kill communities.

"We aren't having a litmus test on who our friends are," said Avanzino. "We want to partner with everybody who loves animals."

Good cop, bad cop? Maybe. But Avanzino and Winograd both say the power of the nokill movement doesn't come from either of them or from their organizations.

"The public's on board, and that's the salvation," said Avanzino. "That's what's going to be there as the true safety net for the animals."

"In communities that have achieved nokill, the public has made the difference," Winograd said.

"Society is now leaps and bounds ahead in terms of how much they value and cherish animals."