Animal Welfare Professionals

Just saw the new interactive map for no-kill. https://chewonthis.maddiesfund.org/2019/01/find-out-if-your-community-is-no-kill-with-best-friends-interactive-map/

Great tool. Maddies Fund said "So far, 2,000 (5%) U.S. communities are considered no-kill, out of 34,000." Can anyone expound on the criteria for the 34,000 total communities included on this map? Is this the number of cities/towns/counties with animal shelters or number of shelters altogether?

@Aim C. at Best Friends, @Tina O. at Best Friends , can you answer this?

Thanks for the tag @Kim at Maddie's. Getting clarification right now!

Good question @Jessica Schleder! I'd like to first refer you to our Map Methodology page that defines criteria for both our No-kill Communities Map and National Save Rate Map. Click here for the Map Methodology page.

It's important to note that the methodology page was published in July. We are currently making changes in response to feedback we received and will be publishing an updated methodology page in the very near future. That said, there is a link to a feedback form on the no-kill cities map or you can click here for the feedback form. We welcome suggestions for improvement!

As far as your specific question, the dots on the map represent communities, not shelters. The 34,000 represents the current total number of communities. A no-kill community is generally a city, town, township, village or borough whose brick and mortar animal shelters are working collectively to save at least 90 percent of their animals. This number will be changing with the new publication as we will be removing communities that do not have animal sheltering service to our knowledge.

I hope this helps and Happy New Year! 

Thanks, @Tina O. at Best Friends! I took a look at the methodology page prior to posting in regards to understanding where the 34,000 came from. I'm trying to get a sense of how many shelters/rescues/humane societies exist in the US and the only resource I have been able to find is this one from animal sheltering. Do you know of any other resources that talk about the market of the overall shelter landscape?

You answered my question - in these 34,000 communities, not all have shelters. I'm looking forward to the updated publication. Please tag me when it comes out!

I did some checking and there currently isn't any resource that targets the numbers of shelters and rescues. If that changes and I come across something, I'll let you know @Jessica Schleder! 

This may help: https://shelteranimalscount.org/

There is also this project on github https://github.com/beccarobins/pet-appeal which you can use to find shelter counts.

There is also a dataset out there on the interwebs that has shelter info pulled from petfinder but not sure that this would be ALL shelters in the US. I have a copy of this but can't upload a  zip file here. If you want to PM me an email address I can send it to you.