In a video posted on YouTube Maddie's Fund and the ASPCA expose a nasty truth about their real agenda, and it has nothing to do with saving animals' lives. It is really about making animal shelters "look good", no matter what.
Back in the early days of No Kill, when Maddie's Fund was founded, No Kill advocates hoped the fledgling organization would be a game-changer on the national stage. Sadly, that never came to be.
"Maddie's didn't take a firm leadership stand," said Beth Nelson, producer and co-host of Animal Wise Radio, one of the prominent voices in the early days of the national No Kill debate. "Now, they have grossly devolved from the mission they once claimed."
The video in question proves Nelson's point. The section at issue begins at the 28:20 mark. In it Libby Post, Executive Director of New York State Animal Protection Federation, lists her "Legislative Accomplishments" for the year 2019. In it, she lists "Stopped a bill to mandate shelter reporting."
The bill Post is discussing is the Companion Animal Protection Act (CAPA), a bill that has successfully brought many cities and counties to No Kill status. Transparent reporting of raw animal shelter intake and outcome records is one of the key provisions of CAPA.
In the video, Post claims that the reporting provision on CAPA would make shelters "look bad."
"It [CAPA] comes out of the 'shelters are bad' groups of people," Post says in the video. She goes on, " 'Shelters are the enemy, shelters only kill, shelters are horrible...' OK. And, that's where this piece of legislation came out of."
She goes on to say that sometimes animal shelters take in animals that are sick and that need to be put down and that reporting that "makes the shelters look bad. And, we want to do everything we can to make sure the shelters don't look bad."
We at No Kill Movement would like to offer a "Pro Tip" to Maddie's Fund, ASPCA and Post: Hiding shelter statistics makes shelters look bad. Working to make shelters less transparent makes you all look bad. Whether or not a shelter's statistics make them look bad depends on their statistics. A quick review of shelter report cards from RescueSuite Software's Live Release Rate Calculator shows that.
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If Maddie's Fund and the ASPCA want to make sure animal shelters don't "look bad" they should get busy fulfilling their stated missions. Maddie's Fund was founded, after all, using hundreds of millions of dollars donated by David Duffield for the purpose of helping shelters to end killing. It was not to help them cover it up.
Since the founding of Maddie's Fund, they have spent countless millions in communities and have so-far failed to deliver a No Kill community, while largely ignoring or chastising the grassroots advocates who are dragging their animal shelters to No Kill status. This video, however, marks a new low for the organization.
At least those of us in the No Kill Movement can stop debating about whether Maddie's failure to deliver No Kill has been due to, as Nelson put it, a failure to take a strong leadership stand. Now we can see the failure is clearly deeper than that. They are actively helping animal shelters to cover up the killing.
For those who want more information about CAPA in New York, you can check this website.
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