The No-Kill Feedback Loop: Curate > Transport > Repeat

How Best Friends Turned Animal Welfare Into a Self-Sustaining Crisis Machine

By 2010, America appeared on the brink of a historic milestone: “no kill.” Shelter euthanasia had plummeted by nearly 80% since the early 1990s, thanks to aggressive spay/neuter campaigns, adoption efforts, and growing public awareness. In 2004, with the end seemingly in sight, industry leaders convened at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California—not to define the terms of a victory, but to strategize its legacy.

The result was the Asilomar Accords: a landmark agreement that standardized shelter data and reporting to codify transparency across the field. That movement reached its peak in 2012 with the launch of the national Shelter Animals Count database—an open-source initiative that delivered unprecedented visibility and helped save tens of thousands more lives.

From Grassroots Victory to Institutional Redirection

Yet with transparency came new questions: Could the very systems once designed to end euthanasia be repurposed to sustain a crisis narrative—one that fuels perpetual fundraising? Over time, spay/neuter—the engine that drove past success—was quietly deprioritized by many of the field’s largest players, including Best Friends, ASPCA, and PetSmart Charities. In its place emerged a different kind of strategy—one built not on reducing intake through prevention, but on managing intake through relocation.

This shift didn’t happen in a vacuum. As the broader field doubled down on collaboration and open-data principles, Best Friends quietly moved in another direction—consolidating control through strategic branding, selective partnerships, and, most critically, by redefining how lifesaving progress would be measured and perceived.

It wasn’t alone. Alongside other members of The Consortium*—a coalition that includes the ASPCA, PetSmart Charities, and other national influencers—Best Friends helped steer the field away from grassroots prevention and toward a top-down model centered on movement, metrics, and marketable success stories.

This report, based on interviews with shelter staff, volunteers, and public records, drills into Best Friends Animal Society’s Shelter Pet Data Alliance (SPDA) and its Transport Connection Map to ask: who writes the no‑kill story in 2025—and to what end?

A Lifesaving Stake—or a Strategic Stakeout?

In 2016, Best Friends Animal Society (BFAS) publicly “put a stake in the ground” to lead America to no kill by 2025—a bold declaration from an organization with minimal municipal sheltering experience. That pledge laid the groundwork for a data-driven strategy that would take full form seven years later with the launch of the Shelter Pet Data Alliance.

But this strategic pivot came after a sobering experiment in direct shelter management. In 2011, the City of Los Angeles essentially gifted BFAS a brand-new, city-owned shelter in Mission Hills for just $1 a year. Despite this extraordinary support and 11 years of operation, the project failed to produce the scalable results BFAS now claims it can deliver nationwide.

Rebranding Shelter Work as Data Work

Following that episode, BFAS chose to lean into its strengths in advocacy and branding. Rather than continue operating municipal shelters directly, the organization pivoted to shaping the broader narrative around animal welfare progress in the United States.

To control the narrative, one must control the data. As a founding collaborator on Shelter Animals Count (SAC), BFAS helped create a voluntary, sector-wide data project that, by 2022, included over 13,500 participants. SAC’s open-data approach brought transparency and accountability to the field, allowing shelters, policymakers, and the public to track national trends and measure progress toward no-kill goals.

However, in late 2023, BFAS quietly launched its own proprietary data platform, the Shelter Pet Data Alliance (SPDA), which sharply reduced the number of shelters included in its reports to 688. Unlike SAC’s broad, collaborative model, SPDA is positioned as a more sophisticated, automated, and interactive tool for shelters and rescues. According to BFAS, SPDA uses advanced predictive modeling, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to analyze its more limited dataset and identify where interventions can have the greatest lifesaving impact.

Controlling the Narrative

Critics contend that this transition was not merely a technological upgrade, it was a tactical shift aimed at owning the story of national progress. The selection criteria for SPDA’s “representative cohort” of shelters are not fully disclosed, and the use of proprietary algorithms means that key aspects of the data analysis are not open to public scrutiny. This has led some in the field to question whether BFAS’ growing control over the narrative—and the underlying data—serves the broader animal welfare movement or primarily advances the organization’s own strategic objectives.

The transition from collaborative, open-data efforts like SAC to the proprietary SPDA platform marks a significant shift in how progress toward no-kill is measured, reported, and ultimately understood by the public and policymakers.

But data control was just the beginning. Once the crisis was numerically curated, BFAS pivoted again—this time to logistics, building a national transport network to deliver not only animals, but also a steady stream of emotional urgency, donor engagement, and public acclaim.

From Data to Distribution: The Transport Connection Map

With SPDA cementing its influence over national shelter data, Best Friends shifted from metrics to movement management. In early 2024, it unveiled the Transport Connection Map—a high-profile platform billed as a solution to overcrowded shelters, promising to relocate “at-risk” pets to communities with higher adoption demand.

But critics argue this map isn't just a logistics tool—it's the engine of a self-sustaining crisis. Behind the inspirational language and celebratory social media posts lies a system that monetizes urgency, disincentivizes prevention, and trades in curated outcomes over measurable change.

According to internal whistleblower memos and corroborating accounts from shelter staff, many transports operate under “transport only” protocols, with animals arriving without intake records, medical assessments, or behavioral documentation—raising concerns about where animals land and what becomes of them. Public reports rarely disclose post-adoption retention or health outcomes, making it impossible to know whether lives are being saved—or simply disappeared.

Meanwhile, a 2023 analysis by an independent animal-welfare economist found that cross-country transports cost between $150–$300 per animal—funds that could otherwise underwrite hundreds of spay/neuter surgeries or local outreach. Yet these long-term solutions are often sidelined in favor of movement. As one internal document from a recent BFAS conference put it: “Prevention struggles for airtime when transport dominates the metrics.”

Critics say this is no accident. If animal welfare truly invested in prevention, intake would decline, the transport pipeline would dry up—and the curated crisis would lose its urgency. Without a constant stream of “at-risk” animals, there would be no dramatic narratives to fund and no data spikes to celebrate.

Follow the Money: Funding the Transport Engine

And fund it they do. Behind this high-volume relocation system lies a powerful financial engine. From the Rachael Ray “Save Them All” Grants—administered by BFAS itself—to PetSmart Charities’ transport incentives, millions of donor dollars now support the movement of animals over the stabilization of local shelter systems.

PetSmart’s own grant program specifies support for “collaborative efforts relocating at least 1,500 pets annually,” prioritizing transport scale over local problem-solving. These subsidies encourage organizations to move more animals, faster, often without fully investing in their long-term welfare or the communities they leave behind.

Even more concerning, most of the major transport companies driving these efforts are formal Best Friends partners, listed prominently in BFAS’ Shelter Partner network. This reveals a deep systemic entanglement: BFAS is not just enabling the system—it’s architecting and incentivizing it through its own funding ecosystem that begins and ends with its own strategic priorities.

Bypassing Accountability: The Documentation Gap

The Best Friends Transport Connection Map doesn’t just facilitate animal movement—it enables a dangerous accountability void. A confidential whistleblower recently flagged the Coalition of Animal Rescue Transporters (CART), a Best Friends partner that boasts on its own website that it “handles the transport specifics (without any cat intake) for local rescues and shelters.”

This “transport without intake” model creates a documentation black hole where “more animals including dogs” can enter the system without tracking, health verification, or outcome monitoring. By March 2025, CART reported moving 1,195 animals through this opaque network—transfers that, according to the whistleblower, occurred without any intake documentation from sending shelters.

The implications are chilling. Without intake records, there is no way to confirm:

• The animal’s medical condition

• Behavioral history or bite records

• Legal ownership status

• Required quarantine compliance

• Interstate transport regulation adherence

The resulting documentation gap provides plausible deniability for all parties while maintaining the flow of animals—and donor dollars. When scandals erupt—such as the 318 animals who vanished into a reptile feeding operation—the lack of intake records makes accountability nearly impossible to establish.

While “transport without intake” could simply mean that CART acts as a logistics provider—moving animals from Point A to Point B without assuming legal custody or performing shelter functions—the model still raises red flags. Without intake records (and outcome reports) from either the sending or receiving parties, animals can pass through the system with no medical, behavioral, or ownership documentation, creating a dangerous accountability gap.

The Whistleblower Files: Behind the Curtain of “Life-Saving” Transports

New whistleblower information has shed more light on the animal transport industry’s hidden practices—and the findings are damning.

Two of California’s most active transport organizations, START Rescue and Rescue Express, admit to using mass confinement methods and prioritizing speed over animal welfare. Rescue Express states plainly:

“An animal loaded in Tennessee and delivered to New England may be in a carrier for 24 hours… Stopping to walk 100+ animals in the middle of the night is problematic.”

Notably, Rescue Express is not operating on the fringes of the animal transport network—it is a formal partner of Best Friends Animal Society. Listed under its legal name, MGM Animal Foundation, Rescue Express is promoted by BFAS as a valued member of its national network. This partnership raises serious concerns about BFAS’ oversight and the standards it endorses.

A Demand-Driven Supply Chain

On its own website, Best Friends celebrates Rescue Express (under the MGM Animal Foundation) as helping to “provide the companion animals demanded by the public”—language that starkly confirms this is a market-driven supply chain, not a movement centered on local prevention or individualized animal welfare.

START Rescue, meanwhile, justifies their operations by declaring that shelters in Oregon and Washington “need” animals. The framing may sound logical on the surface: move surplus animals from overcrowded regions to places with open kennels and adopters. But this convenient narrative masks a deeper problem.

By relying on a transport model, organizations remove the incentive to address the root causes of overpopulation—such as lack of spay/neuter access, weak enforcement of breeding laws, and chronic underfunding of prevention programs. In this system, the supply must continue in order to meet the demand.

Global Imports and Local Consequences

Even more troubling, there's growing evidence of Mexican street dogs being imported into the U.S., further congesting the already overwhelmed Pacific Northwest adoption markets—while local California dogs languish or die in municipal shelters.

And those “demand” states? They are often forced to warehouse imported animals while their own harder-to-place pets—large dogs, seniors, or dogs with behavioral challenges—are euthanized or overlooked. The public believes they’re rescuing a local shelter pet, when in fact they’re adopting a product of a national logistics operation.

A Facebook group called California 501(c)(3) Rescue Transport explicitly discourages rescue pleas, insisting the group is “transport-only,” underscoring the detachment from actual shelter work and lifesaving. This mirrors the so-called Bunderground Railroad, a loosely organized network focused more on the logistics of movement than on outcomes or accountability.

And crucially, no centralized system exists to track where these animals end up or how many survive the journey.

This opacity is not a bug—it’s a feature.

Adoption or Disappearance: Questions on the Receiving Side

Even more troubling are the questions arising on the receiving end of the pipeline. A random audit by whistleblower sources flagged the Cat Adoption Team (CAT) in Sherwood, Oregon—listed as a recipient on the Best Friends map. CAT claimed 2,381 adoptions in 2024. Yet by April 2025, only 394 cats had been adopted and just 30 were available—raising questions about how such high prior-year numbers were achieved, and whether transport surges were truly resolved through adoption. The decline is steep enough to merit scrutiny, especially given the absence of a clear explanation and the opaque nature of the transport network.

Further complicating matters, CAT enforces highly restrictive owner surrender policies. These include appointment-only admissions, required fees, and behavioral assessments—barriers that limit access for many local pet owners. At the same time, it remains a listed recipient of high-volume out-of-state transports (21–30 animals per shipment), as flagged by Best Friends’ own network map. This juxtaposition raises a troubling question: Is the shelter serving vulnerable community members—or functioning primarily as a landing pad for institutional or commercial partners?

Adding to the unease, CAT’s Board of Directors includes Monika Davare, a senior researcher at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU)—a facility cited for repeated Animal Welfare Act violations and currently under national scrutiny to end the practice. A pediatric cancer lab at OHSU bears Davare’s name, and she is closely affiliated with in vivo research methods. Oregon law mandates that research dogs and cats be made available for adoption following laboratory use.

While there is no direct evidence linking CAT to the rehoming of OHSU’s research animals, the leadership overlap, combined with the state's unique legal environment, raises legitimate questions. If CAT is accepting animals from research programs while turning away local surrender requests, it would suggest that the adoption pipeline is increasingly serving institutional needs—not the community.

These connections raise a deeply unsettling question: Could animals funneled through opaque transport channels be diverted into research pipelines under the guise of adoption? While no direct proof supports this possibility, the structural opacity, intake restrictions, and institutional affiliations make it a scenario that cannot be responsibly ruled out—and one that remains disturbingly untraceable. A system that turns away struggling families while opening its doors to anonymous, untraceable imports demands far more scrutiny than it has received.

Conclusion: A System Built to Sustain Itself

The Shelter Pet Data Alliance (SPDA) and the Transport Connection Map are not merely tools for animal rescue—they are sophisticated instruments for narrative control and perpetual fundraising. By prioritizing visibility, emotional appeal, and curated success stories, BFAS has built a system that sustains itself on crisis, rather than solving it.

A system that deprioritizes prevention ensures the supply chain stays stocked—and the narrative of crisis uninterrupted. By underfunding spay/neuter programs and community-based solutions, BFAS helps maintain the very crisis it claims to solve—securing a steady stream of animals to count, move, and market. Until the industry demands transparency, accountability, and a reinvestment in prevention, the cycle will continue—fueling donor generosity, but failing to deliver on the promise of lasting change.

*Addendum: What is the Consortium?

The Consortium is a shorthand term that animal advocates use to identify a powerful network of influential organizations collaborating to shape the future of animal welfare. This network includes:

• Maddie’s Fund

• Koret Shelter Medicine Program (KSMP)

• Best Friends Animal Society (BFAS) / Shelter Pet Data Alliance (SPDA)

• American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)

• PetSmart Charities

• National Animal Control Association (NACA)

• Human Animal Support Services (HASS)

• Outcomes Consulting

• Team Shelter USA

Ed Boks is a former Executive Director of the New York City, City of 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.

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