pet connection

On Sept. 25, Pet Connection contributing editor Christie Keith interviewed Nathan Winograd, who was in the middle of a nationwide book tour for “Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No-Kill Revolution in America.” The book, and Winograd’s message, have ignited fierce debate within the shelter movement and energized an army of animal lovers to bring an end to the use of killing for animal population control in this country.

Portions of this interview appeared in Christie’s column for SFGate.com, as well as in the Pet Connection, our syndicated pet feature, which appears weekly in more than 70 papers. This is the complete transcript of the interview, which began with a question about the kind of response he’s been getting to “Redemption” while on tour:

NW: I’ve heard sort of two things in response to the book. It seems to cut universally across the board – that is, if you talk to people who don’t have an allegiance other than to the animals. They want the animals to live. The book makes a whole lot of sense to them.

With people who lived through it, they think I was too kind. From people who are not in the movement, I read one review from just a publishing journal and the person was I would guess not an animal lover because they said that it was too harsh rhetorically, the language was too aggressive.

I don’t recall the exact wording in the book, but I think I might have said that in San Francisco, it was like the world was upside down. Here is a shelter that’s really sort of paving the way and rather than people – When you were there and you feel like here’s the way to do it, folks, and we’re having great success, the response I mean it was ugly and it was unfair. What I saw was institutions putting their leadership interests ahead of the interests of the dogs and cats. It’s one thing not to embrace it initially because you’re skeptical, but it’s another thing to vilify it.

CK: Whatever your ultimate allegiance, one of the things that I find so compelling about this issue is that it is one of the few places in my life where I regularly find myself interacting with people whose political views are the direct opposite of mine. It’s cut across so many political boundaries. People who love animals can come from the left, the right, no political affiliation at all.

NW: Do you know what the safest community right now is? It’s tiny so you probably wouldn’t know it, but it’s a place called Ivins City, Utah. It is south of what they call Utah’s Mason-Dixon Line, if that tells you anything. It’s 100 percent Republican. It is the reddest part of the reddest state, and if you are not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, you have no public life. They are saving 97 percent of all dogs and cats because they see these as God’s creatures and they feel like they have a stewardship.

Then on the other side you go to a place like Ithaca, which is a very blue part of a blue state, where it’s more about love in the hippie sense.

CK: Berkeley of the East, yes.

NW: Absolutely. And San Francisco. You know where San Francisco is basically. I was always very – I hope this doesn’t offend you, but I was always a very proud when I was living there and our mayoral run off was between a black man and a gay man arguing as to who was further on the left.

CK: Sure. I always love telling everyone that Gavin Newsom was actually the moderate candidate in our run off. [Laughter]

NW: Then you go to southern Georgia, and you go to Charlottesville, Virginia, which are very red, and they’re doing great things. It’s very exciting for me, but the sad thing is that without exception in all those places, it’s people outside of the movement who are forcing the changes and making the impact; not the people who “are the experts.”

After the book went to press we took the model to Reno, Nevada. The county is called Washoe County. Here’s a county that’s taking in 15,000 dogs and cats a year – and just to give you some perspective, it’s got a population that’s half the population of San Francisco and they’re taking in twice as many animals. They’re also the fastest growing county and the country’s fastest growing state.

The argument was that you couldn’t achieve that kind of success because one, they’re taking in too many animals per capita, but two, there’s such a population explosion that the influx of new people, new animals just spells trouble for the shelter.

In fact, since January 1st of this year the adoption rate has increased 106 percent and the kill rate has dropped by more than half. They are now saving 91 percent of dogs and 80 percent of cats in a matter of months.

No matter how many communities – this is animal control – no matter how many communities fall into the no kill camp, it’s not enough and in terms of the other side thing, it’s still to this day they’re saying it’s impossible.

We’ve got success in San Francisco to a degree. We’ve got success in Tompkins County. We’ve got success in Charlottesville, Virginia. We’ve got success in Reno, Nevada. Philadelphia is aggressively moving in the right direction. They expect to save 80 percent by next summer. This is a city, the fifth largest city in the country, that was killing 22 out of the 25,000 just two years ago. Next year they expect to save 80 percent. That’s not 80 percent of the self-serving category of adoptable. It’s of all animals.

It’s really exciting to me, but no matter how often and regardless of the demographics of the community where we show it can be done, we still get groups like PETA and HSUS and the ASPCA providing political cover to shelters that just refuse to change.

CK: Now, two things that I wanted to hit on. One of the things I noticed when you speak is that you are identifying not individual shelters, but communities, cities, counties, towns.

I’m sure you know that many times the criticism of no kill is not about community-based no kill, but saying that a single shelter, that one individual group, by not having an open door policy or by not killing for shelter space or whatever their objection of the moment is, is just pushing the problem somewhere else. You are not talking about one shelter or one program. You’re talking about an entire community?

NW: Before I do, I want to address that in a different way. If you are a dog and cat lover and you don’t want to kill dogs and cats, and you can only limit yourself to a certain number of animals that you can care for in what your ethics and conscience says is a non-lethal and therefore humane manner, I mean if you look at the other side of that argument, the other side of the same coin, basically the argument against no kill shelters is that they’re derelict because they refuse to kill animals.

Keep in mind, and I talk about this in the book, it’s like when Carl Friedman was bashing Rich Avanzino in San Francisco for becoming a limited admission shelter initially because as a private organization, the mandate to care for the animals belongs to animal control.

If these private groups can only save 500 or 1,000, that’s 500 or 1,000 that don’t go through the open door shelter and aren’t competing for space.

So I always found it troubling that open door municipal shelters would attack private groups who are helping with part of the problem.

But that argument aside, yeah, to me – and I didn’t really go into this in the book because it’s something that sort of gets seized on and it becomes a distraction – no kill shelters have existed for about a century.

So the San Francisco SPCA under Rich Avanzino was nowhere near the nation’s first no kill shelter, but its programs and services and the adoption pact and the trap-neuter-release feral cat program and all the others that it implemented on a citywide basis allowed San Francisco to save all healthy dogs and cats at animal control.

So the whole focus of the book is how it often starts with individual shelters, but it’s how they transform their communities, which is why I argue in the book that the question of whether it’s a public shelter or a private shelter or an SPCA or a municipal department is less relevant than whether the programs and services that made San Francisco so successful and that we’re replicated in Tompkins County are put in play citywide. Not just in all shelters, but especially at the animal control shelters, which is what’s happening in places like Charlottesville, Virginia, Ivins City, Utah and I talk a little bit about Fulton County, Georgia and some of the other communities that are seeing a renaissance in life saving.

The end result is since the dogs and cats and other species of animals are going into an animal control shelter, the important thing is what happens there, whether they live or they die there.

The exciting thing is that one shelter that’s comprehensively putting these programs in place can transform the entire community. So, because the Tompkins County SPCA was the animal control authority, we ensured that the entire county was no kill.

The same is true in Charlottesville, Virginia and the relationship between Washoe County Animal Services and the Nevada Human Society in the Reno area ensures that regardless of which shelter the animals go in, the Nevada Humane Society, which is private, or Washoe County Animal Services, overall less than ten percent of animals are now losing their lives – which is incidentally a higher save rate than the city of San Francisco.

CK: The subtitle of your book includes the phrase “the myth of pet overpopulation. Isn’t there pet over population? I’ve seen you say in a number of places that there are more homes than animals and shelters and that is contrary to what most people carry around in their head. I was hoping that you would say a little more about it.

NW: Yeah. And actually what has been the most surprising to me is how that gets people’s hackles up. I’ll tell you, before I go into it let me just preface it by saying – and I wrote about this in one of the blogs back in August – that when I argue that pet over population is a myth, I’m not saying that we can all go home.

And I’m not saying that there aren’t certain people who are irresponsible with their animals and I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of animals entering shelters. Again, I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be better if there were fewer of them being impounded. But it does mean that the problem is not insurmountable and it does mean that we can do something short of killing for all savable animals today.

If all shelters not only have the desire and embrace the no kill philosophy, but comprehensively put into play all those programs and services that in the appendix I sort of collectively call the no kill equation, then we would achieve success.

For me that success translates into about four and a half million of the five million dogs and cats currently entering shelters this year. I mean they would still be walking around this earth today if every community achieved the same success of a Charlottesville or a Tompkins County or even a San Francisco. To me that’s good news and it’s news we should celebrate because it means the keys to ending the killing are in our hands and not this insurmountable obstacle that requires us to wait until some mythical time in the future.

So I’m always shocked by the sort of knee-jerk response as if – this is where, Christie, where it gets in that I somehow must be in league with some nefarious interest because I’m denying the fact that pet overpopulation exists.

When I looked at the numbers, when I looked at the data in terms of what the AVMA puts out and what the American Animal Hospital Association has been putting out and what even the Pet Food Manufacturers Association, some of the data going out and some of the census data that came out in the last census , the reality is is that every year in the United States there are twice as many homes opening up for dogs than there are dogs entering shelters, and there are more homes opening up for cats every year in the United States than cats entering shelters. That’s because people want to bring an animal for the first time in their home.

It’s because they want to bring a second or third animal into their home that already has animals. It’s because their pet has died or because their pet has run away. So that means that if we could increase market share so that those people get their animals from shelters, we would eliminate population control killing right now.

Now on top of that, not all animals entering shelters need adoption. Some of them are going to be redeemed by their owners. Some of them are going to come in as strays and then actually be reclaimed by their owners. Some of the dogs and cats will be transferred to breed rescue groups, either in the same community or in some cases a different community or a different state.

In the case of cats, some of them will be feral and they don’t need adoption. They need sterilization and release, and a small percentage of them – and I would argue that number is less than seven percent – are going to be helplessly ill or injured. They’re going to need the dictionary definition of euthanasia. So they don’t need homes.

So the numbers are good for us in terms of sheltering, and the sad thing is that people are only getting their animals from shelters about 15 percent of the time. All we have to do is increase that number by a few percentage points and we’d be a no kill nation today. That’s the data.

But putting the data aside for a second, if you look at what San Francisco did between 1993 and 1994, the number of deaths didn’t decline by one percent or two percent. In the case of healthy animals it declined 100 percent. In the case of sick and injured animals it declined by about 50 percent.

In Tompkins County we reduced the death rate 75 percent in two years. In Charlottesville, Virginia they reduced it by over 50 percent in one year and Reno, Nevada has January through the end of August has reduced the death rate by over 50 percent.

So it’s not a question of not enough homes. It’s a question of shelters doing a very poor job of getting their animals into their homes. There are various reasons for that, and I can go into it now, but it’s all documented in the book that these communities that have essentially eliminated population control killing have proven that there are enough homes in the community. Not just for a year or two, but to sustain it five, six years, seven years and in the case of San Francisco, we’re now in its 13th year.

This wasn’t completely and fully developed, and it’s something I’m pursuing for a separate article, but when I looked at those communities that had high rates of shelter killing, they tended to have almost across the board a large number of commercial sources of animals.

Those communities that were really successful at life saving had fewer commercial sources of animals. So, for example, it’s a lot harder to find a pet store that sells live dogs and cats in San Francisco than it is to find one in Philadelphia.

To me, since commercial sources of animals, pet stores particularly, you know, industries that are fed by puppy and kitten sales, are motivated by profit, they wouldn’t be in the business if there wasn’t a market for their products. That shows that in fact, even in places with high rates of shelter killing, there is a huge demand for dogs and cats.

My opinion is the reason these sources exist is because the shelter one, kills a majority of its occupants which keeps out the animal lovers and when a shelter kills a majority of its occupants, that’s almost always associated with poor customer service, poor cleaning and housing protocol. Meaning the animals are all getting sick.

The shelter’s usually in a remote part of town away from where people work, live and play and the only time you ever hear of them is when there’s a controversy. They’re passive. They’re not proactive about marketing their message and getting people to adopt rather than buy.

If I can give you an example – when I was in Tompkins County, you could buy a kitten at a pet store at our local mall. It was called Pyramid Mall. If you were ever on the East Coast, Pyramid Corporation owns every mall east of the Mississippi.

So at the local Pyramid Mall there was a place called Pampered Pets and they sold kittens for 50 bucks unspayed. What we did was set up shop in the very same mall, and for $30 you could adopt – I mean you’d still have to go through the application process, but you could adopt a fully spayed or neutered kitten that also allowed you to get a free health exam at any local veterinarian.

You got a free bag of pet food. You got a free guide to your new kitten. You got a free grooming at the local pet salon. You got 15 percent off all your first purchases of pet supplies at the local PetsMart. I mean it went on and on and on. On top of that you got the satisfaction of knowing you saved a life.

So from a mission standpoint, people felt good about adopting from our shelter. But from a pure value standpoint, it cost you less money and you got more for the same dollars, because we effectively competed and won.

If I could summarize the difference between traditional sheltering and no kill it’s that traditional sheltering is passive and no kill is very proactive.

So rather than just opening the doors at nine in the morning and closing them at five in the afternoon and tallying the number of animals that came in and went out and coming to this wrong headed conclusion that there are more animals than homes because more are coming in than going out alive, no kill is the philosophy and the programs are very proactive.

So we’re not sitting around saying how many people are going to come in to adopt. We’re actually going to make a proactive effort to increase our market share.

CK: One of the things you just mentioned that they got when they adopted a kitten from you was veterinary – some kind of services from veterinarians. I’ve seen vets oppose some of these programs because they feel that it eats into their livelihood.

NW: Historically the veterinarian community’s response – and I’m not denigrating all vets, but the AVMA, their flagship umbrella organization has been shameful in terms of their response.

Even today, unfortunately, the response by some of the veterinary community in terms of – you know, here we are where veterinarians have actually – they’re specializing. They themselves are realizing that this bond between people and their pets is a lot stronger than perhaps even the industry was aware of and we’re taking better care of our pets, we’re seeing specialists.

There’s opthalmologists, there’s cardiologists, there’s neurologists for pets. I mean there are some animal veterinary hospitals that rival those of human medicine in terms of the technology and the capability.

Yet even in California one or two years ago, the California Veterinary Medical Association opposed a move by the legislature to give people the same rights for loss of their pets, or more rights I should say, for loss of their pets that people have in the malpractice arena.

So, if a vet commits malpractice right now, you’re limited to market value of the animal. While this animal might be your best friend, it might be a family member for some people, particularly the elderly; this might be the only creature you have in the world to love. If you adopted the dog or cat from a shelter, you’re limited to 30 bucks.

But animals have become much more than that, and the veterinary community has encouraged it when it meant more revenue, but resisted when it threatened, real or imagined, their bottom line. Particularly as it relates to spay/neuter, the history has been shameful, particularly if you recall where they participated in those meetings in Chicago and Denver in the mid 1990s where the groups – the distinction that I make there is the groups didn’t just pass on low income spay/neuter subsidies by SPCA’s and municipalities. They actually opposed them.

Here you have the AVMA and the HSUS and American Humane and throw in the American Kennel Club and the Pet Food Industry thing, not only do we think this is a bad idea, not only do we not support it, we actively oppose it and think it should not be done.

What I have found is typically in a rural community those sort of basic issues like immunization and spay/neuter make up a larger percentage of the veterinary business than in more urban areas where those things are sort of considered loss leaders and under-played in terms of their importance.

The mistake I made was I invited all the veterinarians to sort of a round table and I got shouted down when I talked about some of the programs that I wanted to do there, but I learned. I decided I was going to meet with them one at a time and sort of won all of them over one at a time because from an ethical, moral standpoint, how can you lose.

It’s an argument that if they really want to fight about it on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, how could they stand up and basically say a shelter should continue to kill animals so that we could make an extra two or three percentage points on our bottom line. It’s a no win situation.

You know, I’ll tell you the biggest mistakes that I think people make is setting themselves up as adversaries with the veterinary community. Or on the flip side, going to them and saying you’re a vet so you should help us without thinking that these people have debts to pay and things of that nature. So when I worked with the veterinary community, I always tried to set it up as how can I help you while you help me.

Some of the things that we also gave away with our adoptions for example, and particularly with dogs, was we had somebody come out to your house and pick up the dog poop from your yard for a month and we had free behavior advice for life. All these things, but we didn’t pay a dime for that.

What that was were all these pet related businesses in the community – I forget the name of the outfit, but it was called like Doggy Doo Doo Pick-Up or something. I mean that’s what they did.

So, when I approached them I didn’t say you need to do this for free. I said to them, we create more new pet owners in this community than all other sources combined, and we can give you access to those people, but we want something for the animals of our shelter in return.

So the company that did dog poop pick-up threw in a free month and then they tried to sign the person up for a contract afterwards. The vets gave us a free office visit and then they said we’ll hook them in for a lifetime of care. The groomer gave you a free doggy bath once and then hoped you’d come back for one a month for the rest of the dog’s life. There’s not a single veterinarian in Tompkins County that’s not part of that program.

CK: Wow.

NW: And in fact it’s a program we had in San Francisco. Now, its been what – seven years since I left the San Francisco SPCA, but I would be surprised if a single veterinarian has fallen out of that program because what does it cost you. I mean technically it’s a $40 office visit, but in essence it costs you very, very little but 15 minutes of your time. While the rate of return might not be 100 percent, I think my guess is it’s significant enough that you’re getting into these pet owners.

The beauty of this movement is that everybody from the profit driven businesses, like pet salons, to the vets – you’ve got to make money to survive as a vet, but I have no doubt that the majority of them care about animals, to our shelter which was entirely mission driven. Everybody benefited.

I always felt that the more successful pet related businesses were in the community, the more pets would become integrated into that community and the more people that would adopt and the less that we would see relinquishment.

I don’t know if that (poop removal) business is still around, but I know in talking to the guy that started the company of the difficulty he had of getting his message out there without a very expensive and out of his reach ability to pay for advertising.

Here I am producing thousands of new pet owners a year hitting his target market and I can put his flyer in every one of those adopters hands at no cost to him. You get a dog and you don’t have to pick up dog poop for a month, you’re going to get spoiled. For a few extra bucks a month, you never have to pick up dog poop. I mean that is an exciting thing for -

CK: It’s win-win even beyond just the shelter and the profession in question that actually could potentially expand the number of adoptive homes.

NW: And actually I would argue that it does expand it and it’s because it’s beyond pooper scoopers. If there were doggy daycare facilities in the community. If there were more pet groomers, of course, the competition keeps costs, fees in check and drives down prices.

If there were off leash dog parks where you can go exercise your dog where you don’t actually have to exercise yourself. You could sit at the bench and talk to other dog owners and let the dogs tire themselves out.

The more those opportunities existed in the community, the more I saw my job as easier, because particularly if you’re at a park and you’re not a dog owner and you’ve always wanted a dog, but you work all day and you live in a small apartment, you’re thinking, would it be fair to the dog?

Well, if you had an off leash dog park right down the street and every day after work you could just kind of walk your dog and you’re tired, but you can just sort of sit there and drink your Starbucks while the dogs are running around, you’re thinking this isn’t so bad for the dog.

That’s why when we were in San Francisco, one of the departments – which I understand they no longer have – was what we called the Department of Law and Advocacy. Not only did we deal with laws, but our goal was to integrate pets as much as possible into every day life so that having an animal wasn’t a burden.

So, if there was a restaurant with an open patio where not only dogs were welcome, but they put out a dog biscuit and a bowl of water. If every park was off leash at least during certain hours, if not all the time. You know, all those things. If the doggy daycare facility was on your way to work. If groomers were right next door to where you get your hair done.

One of the things that we even had at Tompkins County was we had a place that did pet massage and human massage.

CK: Wow.

NW: I mean how romantic is that to get a massage while your Great Dane is sitting at a table next to you getting a massage. So the more we did that -I mean that sounds funny and somewhat silly, but the more we did that and integrated pets so that they sort of fit right in into your normal routine, the easier we felt our job would be getting these animals, particularly big dogs, into homes.

I don’t have cause and effect data, but what I do have is the more we were successful on that front, the higher our adoptions went in terms of numbers, in terms of thousands.

At our peak we were importing dogs and cats from San Mateo, from Contra Costa, from San Marin, from – I forget the other one just south of us – Alameda. So, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, and San Mateo and even Santa Clara County because we were sort of shooting through our own inventory, particularly of really young animals, with all our promotions.

CK: I remember very well PHS in San Mateo arguing that SF SPCA was so-called cherry picking the adoptable animals, I couldn’t believe the arguments that people would raise to them taking dogs out of these high rate kill shelters and bring them somewhere where they would know they weren’t going to die and then they would argue with you.

NW: Yeah. See that’s the thing and I know I said this before, but it was a really ugly time. That’s why I used the metaphor – and I hope you felt it was carried off – with the great influenza epidemic.

Okay, everybody’s killing. And here’s this one community that is seeing tremendous declines in the death rate. Yet, instead of acting the way people should act if they’re passionate about saving lives, they saw the solution as the problem in a way that would make no sense outside of the movement.

But because it’s been, to your average dog and cat lovers, but because it’s been repeated over and over and over that no kill equals hoarding, no kill is cherry picking, no kill is smoke and mirrors – even now, when it’s not just San Francisco anymore, it’s Tompkins, it’s Charlottesville, it’s Ivins, it’s Reno. By next year Philadelphia will fully fall into the camp. It’s places like Fulton County. Richmond, Virginia is having tremendous success. All these communities that have either crossed the goal line or are aggressively moving in that direction, and yet to this very day you still hear the arguments.

Now, you don’t hear them the way you used to before, because it was easier to isolate San Francisco than it is to isolate a rural community, an urban community, communities in the north, communities in the south, communities in the blue, communities in the red, established communities, growing communities, but the arguments are still made.

To this day I get e-mails from people who I have no doubt love animals, but who are still stuck in the ‘no kill is darker than what we currently have’ mentality, which is a philosophy that we should adopt some and kill the rest. I think it’s going to take some time.

That was the impetus for the book because what I found was even rescue people were stuck. They were stuck with, the problem’s insurmountable. They were stuck with, no kill’s not good.

So I sort of wanted to leapfrog over their heads and reach just people in the community. The kind of people who, when I put out a call that we just got a dog hit by a car and I need $3,000 for surgery, I would get $6000. When I had a blind dog in the shelter – let me tell you a story.

My darkest day in the shelter was also my best day. It was a day where our humane officer seized 59 dogs from one home and without exception these dogs – there was a nine-year old blind dog with rotten teeth who lived inside one of those pet carriers its entire life. A dog who was blind. A dog who had neurologic problems so his head tilted and he could only walk in circles. On and on and on. I mean without exception, every one of these dogs were in horrible condition.

What was I going to do with just shy of 60 dogs that are, by most people’s definitions, unadoptable? On top of that we’re an animal control shelter so we’ve got the steady impounding of just the regular strays and the owner relinquished animals.

I again put out the call through the media to the community and to our volunteers and we literally – if you remember the old television series, MASH, with Alan Alda, we sort of set it up like a MASH unit. I had a human dentist, a guy call me up and say, “Look, I just saw the story on television. These dogs have rotten teeth. I’ve never looked inside a dog’s mouth. I can’t imagine the physiology of the dog’s teeth are different. I’d be happy to help.” So a human dentist came out and started treating some of these dogs.

We had a couple of veterinarians who literally closed their practices for the day and came down to the shelter. We had volunteers. One person would bathe the dog, one person would dry the dog, we had a groomer come down and start clipping mats and stuff.

At one point I looked around and everybody was doing what they were doing, people were coming to adopt the dogs, and I realized I wasn’t necessary anymore.

I remember towards the end of the day I for the first time picked up a – and if you knew me, I start drinking coffee from the moment I wake up and it doesn’t stop. It must have been around three in the afternoon and I was able to finally get a cup of coffee.

I just remember putting my feet up on my desk thinking, this community out here is taking care of the problem. Within a week every single one of those dogs got adopted.

I remembered about eight months later – I mean, this dog didn’t last all that long, but a family adopted this 14-year old dog that his eye had become so infected it literally was sucked back into his head. I remember this family wanting initially a puppy. They came and they saw what was going on and they saw this scared little dog hiding in the back of the kennel.

By the time they got there, the dog had bandages on his head because of the surgery and they just took this dog in. They sent me this card of this little dog sitting on the couch next to the family with his head on the person’s lap, and telling me how he only lived eight months and he ended up dying in their arms, and that they wished they could have given him more than eight months worth of love and attention, but that he was incredibly cherished for those eight months.

Those are the people that are vilified by traditional shelters. I’m not saying that those irresponsible people aren’t out there, but it’s the community that helps us save lives, and by shutting them out, we’re condemning these dogs and cats to an unnecessary death.

CK: You know, that is the part of your message that as I started this interview saying that’s been so transformational for me.

What we’ve just come through with the pet food recall, nothing could possibly have shown me more clearly that people love their animals. I mean they don’t just like them and like having them around, they genuinely love them.

The whole reason that people buy our books and read our columns and come to our web site and participate in our online events and communities is that they love animals.

Why are we vilifying them and talking down to them and making them into the enemy and secretly thinking, as I have thought many times, no, I’m not going to explain to you how to teach your dog to walk on a leash for the 952nd time. I’m going to come over to your house and take your goddamned dog away from you ’cause you’re too stupid to live.

Nathan, I mean it’s really wrong and you are responsible for making me suddenly just go, God, what am I doing?

NW: Well, one, I really love that kind of feedback because I think this is how people sort of transform this movement from what it has become to what it was meant to be.

One of the things that always struck me was we were in rural America, so it was NASCAR country. Being a city boy in California, I never saw the fascination with people who drove around in circles. But it was almost like every other dog or cat that came into our shelter was named Dale.

I remember this cat. He was what you would call lacking in objective beauty. Just found underneath a bush in the middle of the city. A city by rural standards. Not LA or San Francisco. This cat was on the adoption floor, and a couple days later, this woman is pounding on the glass and we weren’t open yet. And I’m going to sound like a snooty, liberal intellectual so forgive me, but this is what people would call a true rural person if you had an image in your mind.

She was crying, “Where’s my cat? I miss my cat. Is he here?” I said, “Well, come here before you go into the adoption area in the back of the shelter to look for the cat, what does the cat look like?” She just started screaming, “Dale?”

And this sound comes from the other room, “Meow.” She’s like, “Dale?” And the cat answers her, “Meow.” She’s just – I’m trying to ask her questions. She goes running into the room for this cat, who is, again, lacking true objective beauty.

She comes out and this cat is nuzzling into her neck and she says, “How much does it cost?” I said, “Oh, don’t worry about it.” She literally handed me a dollar and like some nickels and stuff. She’s like, “That’s all I have.” And out the door she was.

We make all these assumptions about how good or how bad or how responsible, and here is a country that’s spending billions of dollars on their pets, and some people giving to their animals and going without themselves ’cause they don’t have it, and we vilify them.

We blame them for what I have come to believe and see is a problem with the very institutions where they might have been successful increasing the status of animals in society, they fail to realize that society is now leaps and bounds ahead of where they are in terms of how much they value and cherish animals. We’re still vilifying them when we need to start looking inward at the very institutions that I believe are violating their core mission.

The other goal of my book, of course, was to resurrect Henry Bergh from obscurity. He was truly a great man and sadly forgotten. In fact, one of my hopes is to – from some of the sale of the books – nobody takes care of his gravesite.

So if you ever visit Henry Berg’s gravesite, it’s over growing with weeds and it’s almost been forgotten. I’m not sentimental and I’m not spiritual and I’m not religious, but it just seems wrong that here is this man who really carried the movement on his shoulders till the night he died and he’s sort of been forgotten. His picture sits on my desk. It’s the only one.

CK: Anyway I’ve taken up enough of your time.

NW: I really appreciate it. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me feel ’cause I mean I sort of felt like what I was really fearful of is that people who came in with pre-conceived ideas or were skeptical, if they couldn’t find flaws in the logic they would attack me personally. I don’t know if you saw the blog that I just did about AB16-34 -

CK: Yes, I did.

NW: I literally have been getting e-mails that I want dogs and cats to die so that I can profit off of them by selling consulting services. It’s just gotten so ugly and I tried to ignore it, but I sort of felt like John Kerry. Was he even really in Vietnam because he was being accused and you got -

CK: Oh, yeah. You’re being swift-boated.

NW: You want to know something? Those people will never be allies in the fight because – and I don’t know how else to put it, but with some people, it’s almost like they have no language for success. Like as long as there’s no real pet overpopulation and if we can actually solve this issue, then who am I and what do I stand for and how unique am I?

It’s their status in opposition as the truly loving pet owner versus everybody else who is irresponsible. The person who really cares about dogs and cats and does rescue, whereas nobody else does, you take that identity away and they’re left with not feeling valued.

You know, look, when I was a D.A. I saw some really ugly things. I mean everything from child sexual assault cases to rape. I even did a capital murder case. Even in animal control you see some really ugly things. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of what Phyllis Wright of HSUS wrote in that article, “Why We Must Euthanize.” I mean if you want your hair to curl, you can find that article by just Googling it, where she says literally she never lost a single day’s sleep over the 70,000 dogs and cats she killed, but she still worries every day about the animals she found homes for.

How did that happen? How are we worried about lifesaving given that all life has risks, but we feel nothing about snuffing out 70,000 beings just because we then know where they are and we don’t have to worry about them? It’s frightening.

I mean my God, what have we become?