Interview with Peter Marsh
Excerpted from the Best Friends Magazine July 2002: New Hampshire attorney Peter Marsh is one of the directors of Solutions to Overpopulation of Pets (STOP), which spearheaded New Hampshire's campaign for a publicly funded spay/neuter program. The initiative he helped push through the state legislature is a model of what can be achieved in order to provide a statewide, low-cost program.
The key to any successful No More Homeless Pets program, he argues, is a low-cost spay/neuter campaign that is precisely targeted toward specific segments of the local population.
Best Friends: You've called adoptions "the crack cocaine of animal sheltering." Do you really mean that?
Peter Marsh: What I mean is that rescuing homeless animals and placing them in great homes is such a sweet thing to do it gives you an incredible rush. You can't help wanting to do it again and again.
After a while, you tend to forget about everything else. You forget that we can't adopt our way out of pet overpopulation, no matter how hard we work at it or how much we spend. The past 50 years have shown us that.
BF: Some of the places that are best known for no longer having to kill homeless animals have great adoption programs.
PM: That's true. But it hasn't been their adoption programs that have gotten them where they are. Most of their success has been driven by their extraordinary prevention and intervention programs.
Take San Francisco. Together with the Department of Animal Care and Control, the San Francisco SPCA found homes for about 5,300 homeless dogs and cats last year through aggressive, creative, and well-funded adoption programs. That's about seven adopted animals per thousand people, very close to the national average.
The way the San Francisco SPCA got where they are is by funding 7,000 or 8,000 targeted neuters every year - year after year. This has reduced the intake of homeless animals at the SPCA and DACC to less than 10 dogs and cats per thousand people.
In the rest of California, they still have 24 animals coming in. They find homes for six of the 24 and kill 18, not because their adoption programs are so terrible, but because their prevention and intervention programs are not nearly as good as they could be.
In the No More Homeless Pets in Utah campaign, they're already finding homes for 11 or 12 cats and dogs per thousand people. That's huge. They may even get up to 15, which would be unprecedented. But without well-targeted and well-funded preventive programs in place, 25 dogs and cats would still be entering shelters there every year per thousand people. So 10 of them will die there, even with such a successful adoption program.
That's why Julie and Gregory Castle are focusing so much of their efforts now on highly targeted spay/neuter programs.
Those are, as Lincoln once said of the Civil War, "the awful mathematics."
BF: So you started on a spay/neuter program in New Hampshire. But hadn't you already been doing lots of spay/neuter?
PM: Sure. Our best neutering assistance program, New Hampshire Spaying & Altering Service, goes back to the late '70s and has helped with more than 10,000 neuters so far. And we've always had a number of smaller local programs, too.
BF: But if you're doing a lot of spay/neuter and adoption, aren't you by definition going to be making progress regardless?
PM: That's what we thought, too. Although our shelters stopped being flooded with puppies by the mid '80s, the kittens still kept pouring in, especially during kitten season. We couldn't understand why, so we stepped back in the early '90s and put together a complete set of statewide shelter statistics.
The numbers showed that our neutering programs had been neutered themselves. They'd hit a plateau. Year in and year out, between 10,000 and 12,000 dogs and cats had died in our shelters every year for the past 10 years. That has happened in other parts of the country, too. Some people call it "hitting the wall." In California, the shelter death rate peaked in the mid '70s and dropped steadily until the early '90s. It's leveled off since then.
Now we know why. Throughout the '70s and '80s, discount neutering programs got great results in middle- and upper-income households. In 1970, less than one of every 10 household dogs and cats was sterilized. Twenty years later, six of every 10 dogs and eight of every 10 household cats had been fixed.
But in low-income households, the neutering rates remained much lower because the lack of outside funding made it impossible to bring neutering within their reach. That's what was holding up progress in New Hampshire. And that's what is still holding things up in most of the country.
Once we understood this and managed to get funding for an affordable low-income program, the shelter death rate in New Hampshire dropped 30 percent the next year, and it's dropped even further every single year since then.
Every rescue group around the country has stories of people applying for their low-cost vouchers, only to see them turn up in a Mercedes to claim them.
BF: You're basically saying that the higher-income people were taking advantage of the low-cost programs and the lower-income people weren't.
PM: Exactly. Every rescue group that has run an untargeted or open access discount program will tell you horror stories of people who apply for low-cost vouchers over the phone and drive up in a Mercedes to pick them up! Vets who underwrite much of the cost of discount programs get understandably annoyed at this.
The bigger problem, though, is that untargeted programs operate at such a high volume, you can't offer high enough subsidies to reach the people who need it the most. A $20 voucher isn't going to help them. It's still way too expensive.
BF: So how does your program work?
PM: New Hampshire's low-income spay/neuter program is available to all resident cat or dog caregivers who are eligible for Medicaid or food stamps or any of five other public assistance programs. The only cost to them is a $10 copayment. The program pays the rest of the veterinarian's fee for the surgery and related expenses, including any necessary pre-surgical immunizations. This makes it affordable for everyone.
All services are provided by licensed veterinarians in their own hospitals and clinics. Vets who participate in the program agree to accept a 20 percent reduction of their customary neutering fee. Support from the veterinary community has been across the board. About three quarters of all the state's veterinarians have joined the program, making it accessible throughout the state. It's an ideal arrangement - people go to their own vets in their hometowns. The State Veterinarian sets maximum neutering fees each year, based on the regular fees of all the veterinarians who participate in the program.
The program's funding comes from a $2 surcharge on dog licenses. About 130,000 dogs are licensed in the state each year, generating revenue of about $260,000. These funds are held in a special account.
