Fresno Humane Animal Services doing a good job saving cats, dogs from being put down
It’s ironic that Fresno Humane Animal Services (FHAS) has been operating out of the parking lot of a condemned county morgue since 2015, as the scrappy, nimble organization has been heroically saving lives of the area’s homeless pets.
Fast forward to 2020, and FHAS established itself as a no-kill shelter pillar in the community, with a record-setting 93.6 percent save rate. Not an easy task for an organization that services roughly 6,000 square miles of largely rural area with formerly little lifesaving program in place for homeless pets.
When thinking about what changes needed to be made, FHAS was in tune with the idea that the traditional model of animal control and sheltering would not set the community up for long-term success. Knowing the goal is to keep pets and families together, FHAS made changes tailored to serving the area’s unique challenges.
According to the Human and Animal Vulnerability Study conducted by Best Friends Animal Society, only 29% of the nation’s total population lives in high vulnerability counties, yet 53.4% of the nation’s shelter animals that were killed were in these counties. Fresno County is one of those high vulnerability counties on the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI).
In high vulnerability counties, stray animal intake rates are higher, adoption rates are lower, animals returned to owner are lower, and owner requested euthanasia outcomes are higher. This is often due to outdated practices by animal shelters that often punish pet owners rather than work with them to keep a pet in the family home.
For example, it has been common procedure in Fresno for stray animals to be captured and impounded at the shelter in hopes of reclamation by owners. However, across the country, it’s still not common practice for people to search for their lost pet at the shelter. Even if they do, some are not able to afford the reclaim fees to get their pet back. This often leads to overcrowded shelters with staff being faced with the terrible consequence of killing pets for lack of space.
Instead of continuing the status quo, organizations like FHAS have shifted their field officers focus to reunite stray pets with their owners while still in the community rather than bringing dogs or cats to the shelter, avoiding potential transportation issues and impound fees altogether.
Another important shift is how community cats are treated. Instead of the antiquated, ineffective “catch and kill” method, FHAS has pivoted to humane programming that spays and neuters, vaccinates, and returns cats to their outdoor home. This approach has a strong basis in science and enjoys broad public support. (National surveys commissioned by Best Friends in 2014 and 2017 found that Americans prefer TNR to lethal roundups by nearly three to one, not only for its obvious benefit to community cats but also for its benefit to public health).
These are just two of the progressive changes FHAS is committed to as it re-imagines the role of animal services in the community. FHAS is also a pilot shelter of the Human Animal Support Services (HASS) initiative. HASS aims to create critical engagement among animal welfare organizations to build a system to better address the modern needs of communities when it comes to animal services.
Fresno Humane offers a variety of community services, including, but not limited to, spay and neuter assistance, trap-neuter-return for community cats, affordable wellness assistance, drive-up vaccine and microchip clinics, and free pet food distribution events. All of these services are aimed to help the community keep their pets, which in turn allows the shelter to be a resource for its intended purpose — helping truly stray, sick and injured animals.
As Fresno leaders search for a new animal services provider, they don’t have to look very far to see how things can be done correctly. FHAS provides a successful lifesaving model that any community would be proud of.