How is your community doing when it comes to lifesaving?
National Overview
Click on a state to select a specific community.
Top Priority:
High Priority:
No-kill:
Help our shelters achieve no-kill in 2025
In 2016, 1 million cats and dogs were being killed in America’s shelters because shelters didn’t have the community support or the resources they needed to save them.
That same year, Best Friends committed to change that in 2025, and while incredible progress has been made, we need your help now more than ever to get across the finish line.
No-kill is a collaboration between shelters and their community. The first step is for individuals to understand the progress being made in their own community and to know how they can help. And that is the purpose of the pet lifesaving dashboard.
Whether you have 20 minutes or 20 hours a week, you can save lives. Dive into the dashboard to find out how.
Cats and dogs
entered shelters
Cats and dogs
were saved ⓘOf the 4.76 million cats and dogs entering shelters in 2023, 3.97 million were saved.
Total number of shelters
in the U.S. ⓘFor a definition of “shelter,” please see https://bestfriends.org/map-methodology
About no-kill
No-kill means saving every dog or cat in a shelter who can be saved. But it’s helpful to have a way to measure lifesaving progress as we move forward together, which is where the 90% benchmark comes in.
A 90% save rate for animals entering a shelter is a meaningful and common-sense benchmark for measuring lifesaving progress.
Typically, the number of pets who are suffering from irreparable medical or behavioral issues that compromise their quality of life and prevent them from being rehomed is not more than 10% of all dogs and cats entering shelters. Therefore, we designate shelters meeting the 90% save-rate benchmark as no-kill.
The ultimate goal, however, is to ensure that every shelter has the resources they need to save every dog and cat who can be saved – whether that exact number is 90% or something else. But first, we want to help every shelter in every community reach the 90% no-kill benchmark in 2025.
Join your local grassroots action team
Find a local 2025 Action Team near you and learn how you can help create big change for the pets and people in your community today.