May be a naive question...

[idahospud49]

So often times on rescue sites you see "pulled from a high kill shelter". What is the best way of knowing if a place is a high kill shelter or not? I would love to be able to look at these shelters and do what I could to find homes for some of the dogs.

[JeanKBBMMMAAN]

It varies - some might think any killing is high kill but that makes it hard to determine urgency - and urgency means that a higher percentage of animals are put down, that they are put down more quickly, that they have may have ways to categorize - owner turn ins are killed really fast, that the shelter has high intake numbers (and again, low adoption/rescue rates), and sometimes people view gassing or heartstick shelters as more urgent than others because of manner of death. Location may make a difference too. Municipal shelters in the south may be high kill, municipal shelters in NE may not be. Like some shelters kill 80% of the animals turned in - that's high - and so as not to sound blamey at the shelters, there's lots of fingers that can be pointed when a healthy and behaviorally sound animal dies.

You can check on shelter stats, usually somewhere on their website, or from the county where the municipal shelter is housed. You can't go by name, or anything simple like that unfortunately - humane society, animal shelter, those names mean nothing in terms of kill rates.

You could also find and post them here for people to look at.

Shelters will be able, I am sure, to use any help you could give them! Thank you!

[idahospud49]

Thanks! I didn't know that you could find their statistics!