Danville’s municipal animal shelter is facing a growing backlash over its high euthanasia rates after a national animal welfare nonprofit launched a local grassroots and media blitz to call for change.
The Danville Area Humane Society last year euthanized cats and dogs at rates roughly eight times the state average.
Backers of the campaign say the problem isn’t new, and they complain that shelter leaders haven’t been responsive to offers of help. But shelter supporters question some of the solutions that have been offered and say that lowering euthanasia rates is a highly complex problem.
According to data from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the Danville Area Humane Society took in 3,499 animals in 2023. Of those, 980 dogs and 1,753 cats — more than 70% and 80%, respectively — were euthanized.
Statewide in 2023, across both public and private animal shelters, 9% of dogs and 11% of cats were euthanized.
“I knew our 2023 numbers were going to look bad,” said Paulette Dean, executive director of the Danville shelter. “People think it was a surprise to us. No, we lived those numbers daily — 24 hours, 365, living those numbers.”
The data caught the attention of Best Friends Animal Society, which contacted the Danville shelter in late 2023 to offer free programmatic resources with the goal of lowering the euthanasia rate, said Aurora Velasquez, regional director for Best Friends.
When the Danville shelter declined the offer, Best Friends launched a campaign of social media posts, television commercials and a presence at city council meetings. The campaign, Danville Deserves Better, advocates to save animal lives by asking the shelter to make changes.
The shelter is already working to lower its high euthanasia numbers, but there’s no easy fix, said Dean.
The Danville Area Humane Society is the city’s only shelter — there has never been a private shelter within the city limits to help shoulder the burden, Dean said — and doesn’t turn away any animals. It also takes animals from other jurisdictions, and it has experienced space and resource constraints since before Dean became executive director in 1992, she said.
Like other humane societies at a local level, it is not affiliated with the Humane Society of the U.S.
Higher-than-average euthanasia rates aren’t new at the shelter; it euthanized 81% of cats and 30% of dogs in 2022, and 71% of cats and 31% of dogs in 2021, according to state data.
But Dean said the Danville Deserves Better campaign has stirred division and hate in the community, and she said she’s been threatened, as have members of her staff and city officials.
“We know we’re not perfect,” she said. “But we’re not as evil as how we’re being portrayed.”
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a national animal welfare nonprofit, has also taken issue with Best Friends’ tactics.
Best Friends has a history of this kind of action in other communities, presenting statistics that are “inflammatory and designed to get people upset,” said Daphna Nachminovitch, PETA’s senior vice president of animal cruelty.
High euthanasia rates are not entirely the fault of an animal shelter, she said.
“Euthanasia is absolutely sad, but we need to put the onus back on why animals are euthanized at a shelter,” Nachminovitch said. “Because people are still buying from pet stores and breeders, because they are failing to spay or neuter their animals. … It’s up to the community to change its behavior, otherwise [shelters] are going to be a revolving door for unwanted animals.”
But campaign members said that the Danville shelter has shut down offers for funding and resources that would help, as well as attempts to have a conversation. They say there are many things the shelter could do to lower its euthanasia rates.
“They say that Danville Deserves Better is stirring things up,” said campaign member Tony Williams. “When really, I’ve only been here for two years, but I can see the anger and concern that has been brewing for 20 years.”
Different models, different challenges
Every municipality in Virginia is required by state law to operate an animal shelter, or to contract with another nearby facility, so residents have a place to take strays.
These municipal shelters are usually “open-intake” facilities, which means they don’t turn away any animal, regardless of its health or of the space and resources available. This shelter model typically reports higher euthanasia rates, and it’s not uncommon for healthy animals to be euthanized if no home can be found for them.
In contrast, limited-intake shelters can and do turn away animals, and thus have lower euthanasia rates, said Sharon Adams, with the Virginia Alliance for Animal Shelters, a group of open-intake and municipal shelters.
They generally reserve euthanasia for terminally ill animals, those with a poor quality of life or those that are considered dangerous to the public.
Sometimes, instead of these terms, the labels “kill” and “no-kill” shelters are used. A shelter is considered “no-kill” if it has a 90% or greater rate of live releases.
Many organizations in the sheltering world are trying to move away from these terms, said Julie Rickmond with the Roanoke Valley SPCA.
“The terms ‘no-kill’ or ‘kill’ shelters are very divisive and just not necessary,” she said. “Every shelter will need to euthanize pets, due to illness, injury or extreme behavior concerns. We are considered a ‘no-kill’ shelter, but we’ve had to euthanize pets before.”
If a limited-intake facility is full, it will not take any more animals until it has made some adoptions to free up space, said Melinda Rector, director of operations for the Regional Center for Animal Care and Protection, a municipal open-intake shelter in Roanoke.
“[Limited-intake shelters] are not going to euthanize for space, because that’s not their business model, that’s not their function,” Rector said. “Our function at RCACP is completely different.”
RCACP serves the city of Roanoke, Roanoke County, Vinton and Botetourt County.
“Our main function is to have space for animals that are lost or aggressive or awaiting court,” Rector said. “The two functions are completely different.”
In 2023, RCACP euthanized 15% of the almost 2,000 dogs and 19% of the nearly 1,500 cats it took in.
“Managed intake” is another animal shelter model, referring to a facility that schedules or regulates non-emergency intakes. This could include limiting intake hours or requiring appointments for drop-offs.
In the Roanoke Valley, as in many other larger communities, a variety of shelter models coexist and collaborate, giving residents options for where to take animals.
In fact, RCACP is located next door to the Roanoke Valley SPCA.
“There is no way that we can operate without our rescue partners in the valley,” Rector said. “We’re very fortunate.”
Space is a challenge at RCACP, but the organization can refer residents to the SCPA, the nonprofit Angels of Assisi or a variety of other limited-intake shelters for certain animals, like healthy feral cats, which are often euthanized at open-intake facilities.
But Danville residents have only one animal shelter to turn to; unlike RCACP, the Danville shelter can’t encourage residents to take feral cats to a nearby limited-intake shelter.
“That’s not [the Danville Area Humane Society’s] fault,” Rector said. “That’s the hand that they’ve been dealt.”
PETA is a proponent of open-intake shelters, Nachminovitch said.
“We believe that no animal should be turned away from an animal shelter, and that’s even more so the case with a taxpayer-funded animal shelter,” she said. “Of course, we recognize that there are small, privately funded groups that have their limits. We don’t want people to take more animals than they can properly care for.”
Best Friends has an overarching goal of helping all shelters in the country transition to “no-kill” by 2025. But Nachminovitch said that widespread limited-intake facilities would result in more animals “simply left out on the street to suffer and die.”
“Because of these policies pushed by Best Friends and other proponents of no-kill, the focus has become on statistics instead of welfare,” she said. “Best Friends is operating on the premise that the very worst thing that can happen to an animal is euthanasia. But the reality is, when you are in this field, that is simply not true.”
Danville City Manager Ken Larking believes that the city’s shelter is already feeling the effects of the movement toward limited-intake shelters.
“As more and more shelters in the area around Danville take the no-kill approach, Danville’s open-admission shelter is probably bearing some of that unintended consequence of others refusing,” he said.
The Danville shelter also accepts animals from other jurisdictions, something that used to be the norm among municipal shelters but has become less common over the years, Dean said. The Danville shelter might be the only option for some animals, she added.
“They appear on our doorstep, and they have been turned down by other shelters,” she said. “What would happen to that animal if we turned them away?”
Partially as a result of that policy, the shelter’s intake numbers are “staggering” for a community of its size, Larking said.
The shelter in Danville, a city with a population of about 42,000, took in 3,499 animals in 2023, according to the VDACS animal custody report. The municipal shelter in Fairfax County, which has a population of 1.15 million, took in 4,515 animals in 2023.
The shelter has 12 paid employees, though only three are full-time, as well as volunteers. Its annual budget is about $600,000, Dean said. Last fiscal year, the city contributed $250,000. This fiscal year, it will be $275,000.
“All of our other programs come from private donations,” she said, mentioning the shelter’s spay and neuter, safekeeping and foster programming, as well as cruelty investigations.
The roots of a change campaign
Best Friends first contacted the Danville shelter in the fall of 2023, said Velasquez, with the national organization. It made contact again in 2024, after the previous year’s data was posted by the state.
“We’re looking at data all the time,” she said. “We’re looking at high-level national trends … and we’re looking at shelter-level data so we know where to deploy our resources.”
First, the organization offered to help alleviate the shelter’s space crunch by moving some of its animals to a Best Friends facility in New York City, Velazquez said.
“We thought that might be a low-barrier way to start a relationship and partnership,” she said. “And then from there, we kept talking and ultimately extended a more comprehensive offer of support, which involved various programmatic resources, training, different things like that in addition to the transfer.”
The shelter declined the offer, a decision that Velazquez called “disappointing.”
Dean said she declined because she was not keen on many of the strategies that Best Friends was proposing.
“Just as closely as they had been following us, I had been following them and what they do throughout the country,” Dean said.
Dean said that she is not interested in making the shelter limited- or managed-intake, because so many animals would be turned away.
But Velazquez said that turning animals away is “not a pillar of no-kill.”
“There are a variety of best practices that we see implemented in shelters over and over again that are successfully no-kill, and turning animals away is not a part of that,” she said. “What we do see are things like a robust foster program, things that were included in our offer.”
While Velaquez said Best Friends would like to see the Danville shelter transition to a limited-intake or no-kill facility, the local campaign, Danville Deserves Better, says there are things the shelter can do to lower the euthanasia rate while maintaining its open-intake status.
The website for Danville Deserves Better says that it has not found any valid correlation between a shelter’s intake numbers and the save rate it can achieve.
“Save rates come down to shelter programming and the shelter’s and community’s commitment to lifesaving,” it says.
The local campaign, which launched after the shelter declined the offer of help from Best Friends, has gained traction in recent months, holding meetings of residents who are attending and speaking at city council meetings.
Campaign members have been “horrified” by the euthanasia numbers for years but were unsure of what to do about it, said member Sue Ellen Lawton.
“Before Best Friends came, we didn’t know what to do,” she said. “There was no recourse.”
The average save rate for animal shelters in Virginia is 83% said Cherie Tamson, a campaign member. In Danville, it’s 17%.
“We want to get that 17% up closer to the 90%” threshold for a no-kill shelter, Tamson said. Or at least up to the state average, Lawton added.
Danville Deserves Better has made a number of recommendations, including improved adoption marketing, broad foster programming and increased transport to transfer shelters and rescue groups.
Most shelters use software that automatically uploads their animals to adoption websites like Petfinder, said campaign member Tanya Martin. The Danville shelter doesn’t, she said.
“They don’t post on any of those adoption sites, they don’t post on their own website,” she said. Occasionally they’ll make a post on Facebook but they don’t market their adoptable animals almost at all.”
Dean said that better advertising of adoptable pets is a goal of the shelter. It used to have a presence on Petfinder but got few adoptions through it and stopped using it. She said she plans to reactivate the account.
The campaign would also like to see a trap-neuter-vaccinate-return, or TNVR, program implemented to reduce the size of the city’s feral cat population — and the number of cats that are brought to the shelter and euthanized.
However, open-admission municipal shelters are not allowed to run this kind of program in Virginia, according to a 2013 opinion by then-Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
Private, limited-intake shelters can offer TNVR; that’s why RCACP, a municipal shelter, refers residents who bring in healthy feral cats to the neighboring SPCA.
“We can’t do anything for them except wait until the stray hold is over and then euthanize them, which is so unfair to the cat because it’s perfectly fine out there on its own,” Rector said. “We tell people with trapped cats to get with the SPCA, or Angels of Assisi or Mountain View Humane, and get them spayed and neutered and release them back on the property so that they’re not making more kittens.”
Without a private animal shelter in town, the Danville shelter can’t do the same.
But it does offer free spay and neutering surgeries, as long as residents bring the animals in and take them back — it’s just the “return” part of TNVR that municipal shelters aren’t allowed to do.
Dean said that the shelter spends between $50,000 and $60,000 each year spaying and neutering animals.
Lawton said she didn’t know the shelter offered that service. That kind of comment frustrates Dean, who said information about the shelter’s spay and neuter program is on the shelter’s website.
“Whenever I hear that people don’t know about it, I think, ‘How can they not?’” she said. “I don’t understand how people don’t know. But I’m glad they’re finding out about it now.”
The shelter is also looking for software to computerize its intake forms, which currently only exist on paper, Dean said.
The Danville shelter is not entirely unique in its space, staff and resource limitations, Velazquez said. There are shelters in other communities with similar or fewer resources that do not have euthanasia rates this high, she said.
According to the Danville Deserves Better Facebook page, there are 1,866 open-intake shelters across the country that had an aggregate save rate of 80% in 2023, “proving that open-admission shelters can and do have much higher save rates than Danville.”
This data comes from the Shelter Pet Data Alliance, the post says.
“It’s important to recognize that the save rate at the Danville Area Humane Society is so inconsistent with their peers,” Velazquez said. “I don’t see how that’s an arguable fact.”
‘Escalation of rhetoric’
Since the formation of Danville Deserves Better, Dean said that she and her staff members have been receiving threats online.
“Do I believe that any of the people involved in the campaign are behind it? Do I believe they would do anything? Absolutely not,” she said. “But hatred stirred up among perhaps those who live on the fringes of society, that’s where the danger is.”
Recently, Dean said she and members of her staff have felt unsafe because of comments made on Facebook and Danville Deserves Better signs placed outside their houses.
“When you see comments like ‘Paulette Dean needs to be euthanized’ and ‘Paulette Dean deserves to go to hell, and she needs to go now,’ you take that seriously,” Dean said.
She said she has told several trusted friends what to do if she is killed. Dean said she doesn’t think this is a dramatic reaction — animal welfare is a subject that hits close to home for many, and she has seen it lead to violence before.
Larking said that high emotions are understandable, but he’s worried that “the escalation of rhetoric” might result in harm.
“It’s never helpful to have what could be a legitimate debate about best practices, and what’s good for the community, devolve into a situation where people are name calling or threatening others,” he said. “To me, if you’re funding a campaign, you have a responsibility. … If those who are your allies are behaving in ways that are not helpful, those behaviors should be condemned publicly.”
Danville Deserves Better campaign members say that they have never been involved with any threatening or bullying behavior. Tamson added that her fellow campaign members are some of the least confrontational people she knows.
“[The shelter] tends to consider any negative or critical comment a threat,” Williams said, and other campaign members added that even questions have been perceived as threats.
Velazquez said that Best Friends does not tolerate any threatening language.
“If individuals who support our message are engaging in that kind of behavior, that’s not something we would support and we would ask them to advocate in a more positive, productive way,” she said. “But we do understand why people are upset.”
Dean said she heard from shelters in other communities after Best Friends first contacted her; shelters in California, Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, Maryland, Tennessee and Kentucky urged her not to take the offer from Best Friends.
“They said Best Friends goes into a community, stirs up the anger and hatred, and they have a lot of money to do this, and then they kind of take a back seat and let the local anger just grow,” Dean said.
The total revenue for Best Friends in 2023 was about $173 million, according to its publicly available tax forms.
Adams said that Best Friends uses “the admirable passion of folks who care about animals to attack individuals and entities that don’t share their view as to how a shelter should operate.”
Local opinion has a big impact on a shelter, Rector said.
“Facebook can be a wonderful, wonderful thing, but it can also be a devastating thing,” she said. “You have to talk nicely to each other, because the end result of helping the animals is something everybody wants, but you can’t get there with cruelty.”
Since the campaign began, the shelter has increased its security measures and had a police presence at its annual meeting in July, Dean said.
Danville Deserves Better campaign members were frustrated by the meeting, which required an RSVP to attend, saying that it was an example of ongoing problems with communication and transparency.
Lawton said she was turned away at the door, even though she was on the RSVP list, and Tamson said she and her husband were asked to leave as soon as the meeting started, even though there were plenty of available seats.
“We just want the beginning of a conversation, and it’s just completely shut down,” Lawton said.
A coming expansion
Lowering euthanasia rates at open-intake shelters is not an easy task, said Nachminovitch, of PETA.
“It’s like asking a police department what it’s doing to reduce crime, when it’s up to its eyeballs in it,” she said.
More staff would help, Dean said, and this is something the city and the shelter are having conversations about.
In July, the city and shelter jointly announced an expansion to the shelter’s isolation area for incoming puppies and kittens, intended to reduce the spread of illnesses among animals.
Soon there will be a bid for construction for the expansion, Larking said, adding that the city welcomes future opportunities to provide assistance to the shelter.
“Paulette and I have talked about looking at best practices at other shelters, visiting them, talking to their shelter managers about things that they put in place to help reduce euthanasia rates,” he said. “I think everyone is open to hearing ideas.”
Danville Deserves Better members say they plan to continue to speak at city council meetings and advocate for improvements at the shelter.
Dean said she’s not sure how the animosity between the campaign and the shelter will be resolved.
But she doesn’t believe that the community’s trust in the shelter is entirely broken. The shelter is still receiving between 10 and 30 animals per day, as well as community support like donations.
“People still trust us to do what’s right for the animals,” Dean said. “In my heart of hearts, and this will be very unpleasant for people to hear, I know that we do the right thing. And that keeps me going.”
Larking said that both the city and the shelter are aware that there is room for improvement.
“Every organization is a work in progress,” he said. “Typically change happens incrementally and there are likely things that could be done at an open-admissions shelter that could improve the euthanasia rate.”