The Asilomar Accords: How Shelters Game the System and Why We Need a Better Metric
How Manipulating Metrics Undermine the No-Kill Movement—and What Needs to Change
On a warm summer day in Any Town, USA, a litter of newborn kittens is brought to the local Humane Society. Too young to eat on their own and requiring round-the-clock care, they are labeled “Unhealthy/Untreatable” (U/U) under the Asilomar Accords, a system used by shelters nationwide to categorize animals. Within hours, they are euthanized. Despite their deaths, these kittens don’t affect the shelter’s Live Release Rate (LRR)—the key metric by which shelters measure success. To the public, this organization can boast an impressive no-kill status. But the reality is far murkier.
This story exemplifies a troubling trend in animal sheltering. For nearly two decades, the Asilomar Accords have defined how shelters measure their outcomes. By categorizing animals as "Healthy," "Treatable," or U/U, the framework was intended to bring transparency and accountability to the field. Instead, it has become a tool for manipulation, enabling shelters to present inflated success rates while concealing practices that harm vulnerable animals.
How the System Fails Animals
The Asilomar system’s reliance on subjective classifications creates loopholes ripe for abuse:
Overuse of U/U Labels: Animals deemed U/U are excluded from LRR calculations. This creates a perverse incentive to label hard-to-save animals as U/U to protect a shelter’s no-kill status. Neonatal kittens, who need intensive care but are often adoptable, are frequent victims of this practice.
Manipulated Behavioral Assessments: Friendly but shy cats can be misclassified as feral, leading to unnecessary euthanasia or release into unsafe environments. Similarly, dogs displaying fear or stress in shelter settings can be misclassified as aggressive, resulting in the same U/U designation and outcomes.
Selective Intake Practices: Shelters may turn away injured or sick animals, choosing to accept only those that are easily adoptable. This artificially boosts LRR while leaving the most vulnerable animals in a community without help.
Space-Driven Euthanasia: Overcrowded shelters sometimes euthanize animals for lack of space, labeling them U/U for behavioral reasons to sidestep accountability.
These practices distort the true picture of a shelter’s performance, masking systemic failures and creating a false sense of progress. By undermining transparency and accountability, they erode public trust in shelters and the broader no-kill movement, ultimately hindering meaningful reform and the protection of vulnerable animals.
The Limits of Live Release Rates
Initially celebrated as a benchmark of progress, the LRR is increasingly recognized for failing to reflect meaningful, community-wide change. Instead, it often enables shelters to manipulate data, obscuring systemic animal welfare challenges and hindering genuine reform efforts.
LRR weaknesses include:
Excludes U/U Animals: By omitting U/U animals from calculations, LRR fails to account for the most at-risk populations, painting an inaccurate and overly optimistic picture of shelter performance while masking deeper systemic issues.
Ignores Community Context: The LRR focuses solely on shelter-specific outcomes, which can be manipulated, while failing to account for broader animal welfare challenges within the community, such as stray populations or access to spay/neuter programs.
Encourages Data Manipulation: The pressure to maintain high LRRs incentivizes questionable practices like selective intake, community animal release programs, and an over-reliance on U/U classifications—practices that ultimately distort shelter performance and obscure systemic challenges.
A Case in Point: The San Diego Humane Society
Critics allege that SDHS epitomizes these systemic issues. According to its 2021-2022 Asilomar Report, the organization routinely labels neonatal kittens as U/U, euthanizing them despite their adoptability. Behavioral assessments have also misclassified friendly cats as feral, leading to unnecessary deaths. While SDHS touts an impressive LRR, these practices raise serious ethical and operational questions about its true impact on San Diego County’s animal welfare landscape.
A Better Way: The Per Capita Rate
Animal welfare needs a metric that prioritizes transparency, equity, and community-wide progress. Enter the Per Capita Rate, which measures how many animals are euthanized per 1,000 residents in a community.
Epidemiologists have long used per capita rates to measure and compare the prevalence of diseases, accidents, and other societal issues. This approach ensures equitable comparisons between communities of different sizes, highlighting disparities and successes. Applying the per capita metric to shelter killing provides a clear, objective standard that transcends the limitations of current metrics.
Key benefits include:
Evaluates Community Impact: By focusing on total number of animals euthanized, the Per Capita metric assesses how well a community addresses its animal welfare challenges—not just what happens within shelter walls.
Prevents Statistical Manipulation: Shelters can no longer hide behind selective intake or U/U classifications. Success is measured by actually reducing the total number of animals euthanized relative to the community’s population.
Encourages Lifesaving Innovation: This metric incentivizes shelters to invest in proactive programs such as spay/neuter initiatives, trap-neuter-return (TNR) for feral cats, and fostering networks to actually reduce the killing.
By adopting the Per Capita Rate, animal shelters can align themselves with a proven metric used in other professional fields. The PCR ensures that every life counts—not just the ones that are easy to save.
A Call for Reform
The Asilomar Accords and LRR were originally introduced to standardize reporting and promote transparency in shelter operations. However, their limitations have become impossible to ignore. To move forward, the animal welfare industry must embrace metrics that prioritize transparency, equity, and community-wide progress.
The Per Capita Rating provides a clear path to achieving these goals. By adopting this metric, shelters and communities can restore public trust, ensure every animal counts, and drive meaningful, measurable progress toward no-kill goals. Additionally, by applying this metric universally, communities can establish a baseline and then measure and compare progress toward no-kill goals consistently at local, state, regional, and national levels.
As the no-kill movement evolves, we must elevate our standards by adopting metrics that prioritize transparency and drive reforms that protect vulnerable animals—not just enhance shelter statistics.
The Per Capita Rate Calculation - How it Works
Determine the Number of Animals Euthanized: Collect data on all animals euthanized in the shelter(s) and in the community over a specific period, typically one year.
Determine the Human Population: Obtain the total number of people living in the community or area served by the shelter(s).
Apply the Formula: Divide the number of animals euthanized by the population (in thousands). The formula is:
The first per capita calculation provides an initial baseline of how many animals are euthanized per 1,000 residents in a community. This baseline serves as a starting point for tracking progress or identifying failures over time. Subsequent measurements allow communities to assess and adjust the effectiveness of their animal welfare programs, such as spay/neuter initiatives, fostering networks, and adoption efforts.
Acknowledgment:
Merritt Clifton, the publisher of Animals 24-7, was a pioneer in recognizing the Per Capita Rate (PCR) as a transformative tool for evaluating shelter performance and community-wide progress. For years, his annual PCR reports provided detailed comparisons of euthanasia rates across cities, states, and regions, offering a transparent and equitable way to track, measure, and compare trends in animal welfare. While Animals 24-7 no longer publishes these reports, Clifton’s groundbreaking work laid the foundation for this more accountable and effective approach to animal welfare.
The purpose of this article is to build on that foundation by rallying animal welfare professionals to embrace the PCR as a standard shelter management metric. By adopting this tool, we can create a more transparent and equitable framework for evaluating progress toward no-kill goals, ensuring that every community is held accountable for protecting its most vulnerable animals.
Ed Boks is a former Executive Director of the New York City, Los Angeles, and Maricopa County Animal Care & Control Departments, and a former Board Director of the National Animal Control Association. His work has been published in the LA Times, New York Times, Newsweek, Real Clear Policy, Sentient Media, and now on Animal Politics with Ed Boks.
Per Capital Rate is a brilliant idea. Would reflect a better reality for the community, but it (like every other counting metric) does not include the number of animals turned away. That number is growing as shelters ‘manage’ their intake and game the system. We need a way to count those ‘ghost animals’ and also to count the number of animals who would be surrendered but are able to remain in their homes because of assistance the shelter gives them (food, veterinary care, training, resources)
Thank you, Ed, & thanks also for coming up with "PCR" as shorthand for the ratio of shelter killing to human population. I often wonder what might have happened if in 1995, when I began compiling this data, I'd had the brains to come up with "PCR," short enough for the attention spans of most of the public, instead of paragraph-long geeky explanations.
Concerning the problem of PCR not counting the number of animals turned away, that wasn't a problem of significance in 1995 & for about 20 years thereafter, because animal control departments and humane societies were mostly separate agencies with separate agendas. Animal control departments historically won their funding allocations from community governments based on intake, not exits, so had incentive to pick up as many animals running at large as possible. "Dogcatching" was a competitive field.
Maddie's Fund founding director Richard Avanzino can be faulted for instigating quite a lot of what's wrong with the present system, but one thing he did right was insisting that animal control and humane societies had to be separated from each other, as having inherently incompatible missions.
Over the past couple of decades, the pendulum has swung in completely the opposite direction, with animal control agencies trying hard to be popular by pursuing the "live release rate" metric, which is only appropriate for humane societies that can pick and choose their intake, and humane societies (such as in San Diego) increasingly often taking over animal control contracts, as was also common from 1895, when the ASPCA took over the New York City animal control contract, until 1985, when Avanzino returned the San Francisco animal control contract to the city.
Avanzino, who retired in 2015, never foresaw that humane societies would return to doing animal control work, & unfortunately never realized, either, the extent to which the Asilomar Accords formulas could be manipulated to disguise malfeasance, even though I argued like hell with him trying to point this out.
Back in 1997 I wrote an essay entitled "White Hats & Black Hats," which pointed out the necessity of there being people willing to wear the black hat of animal control, picking up and euthanizing dangerous dogs, potentially rabid animals, severely injured animals, et al, in order for the white hats at no-kill humane societies to do their work of life-saving without jeopardizing the public. Animal care & control still needs the black hats, just as does every western melodrama and cop show. Unfortunately, because nobody wants to be perceived as the bad guy, we don't have any authentic good guys, either, & the whole field now exists in shades of grey.
Incidentally, as a muckrake I've always worn a black hat. White hats do public relations.