No Kill Williamson County, TN

Every Life Matters.

No Kill Williamson County TN is an all volunteer group of concerned citizens dedicated to providing a lifesaving guarantee to every animal that is not a threat to society and has a treatable condition. We believe in partnering with our community leaders to assure safe and dignified care for all animals within our community shelters.

The mandatory programs and services that must be rigorously implemented include:

TNR Program
Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) programs for free-living cats allow shelters to reduce death rates.

High-Volume, Low-Cost Spay/Neuter
No- and low-cost, high-volume spay/neuter reduces the number of animals entering the shelter system, allowing more resources to be allocated toward saving lives.

Rescue Groups
An adoption or transfer to a rescue group frees up scarce cage and kennel space, reduces expenses for feeding, cleaning, and killing, and improves a community’s rate of lifesaving. Because millions of dogs and cats are killed in shelters annually, rare is the circumstance in which a rescue group should be denied an animal.

Foster Care
Volunteer foster care is a low-cost, and often no-cost way of increasing a shelter’s
capacity, caring for sick and injured or behaviorally challenged animals, and thus saving more lives.

Comprehensive Adoption Programs
Adoptions are vital to an agency’s lifesaving mission. The quantity and quality of shelter adoptions is in shelter management’s hands, making lifesaving a direct function of shelter policies and practice. If shelters better promoted their animals and had adoption programs responsive to community needs, including public access hours for working people, offsite adoptions, adoption incentives, and effective marketing, they could increase the number of homes available and replace killing with adoptions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, shelters can adopt their way out of killing.

Pet Retention
While some surrenders of animals to shelters are unavoidable, others can be prevented—but only if shelters work with people to help them solve their problems. Saving animals requires shelters to develop innovative strategies for keeping people and their companion animals together. And the more a community sees its shelters as a place to turn for advice and assistance, the easier this job will be.

Medical & Behavior Programs
To meet its commitment to a lifesaving guarantee for all savable animals, shelters need to keep animals happy and healthy and keep animals moving efficiently through the system. To do this, shelters must put in place comprehensive vaccination, handling, cleaning, socialization, and care policies before animals get sick and rehabilitative efforts for those who come in sick, injured, unweaned, or traumatized.

Public Relations/Community Development
Increasing adoptions, maximizing donations, recruiting volunteers and partnering with community agencies comes down to increasing the shelter’s public exposure. And that means consistent marketing and public relations. Public relations and marketing are the foundation of a shelter’s activities and success.

Volunteers
Volunteers are a dedicated “army of compassion” and the backbone of a successful No Kill effort. There is never enough staff, never enough dollars to hire more staff, and always more needs than paid human resources. That is where volunteers make the difference between success and failure and, for the animals, life and death.

Proactive Redemptions
One of the most overlooked areas for reducing killing in animal control shelters are lost animal reclaims. Shifting from a passive to a more proactive approach has allowed shelters to return a large percentage of lost animals to their families.

Compassionate Leadership
The final element of the No Kill Equation is the most important of all, without this element all other elements are thwarted— hard working, compassionate leadership within the shelter system.

No Kill is simply not achievable without rigorous implementation of these programs. They provide the only model that ever created No Kill communities. It is up to us in the humane movement to demand them of our local shelters, and no longer to settle for the excuses that shelters often put up in order to avoid implementing them.

Comprehensive Implementation
To succeed fully, however, shelters should not implement the programs piecemeal or in a limited manner. If they are sincere in their desire to stop the killing, animal shelters will implement and expand programs to the point that they replace killing entirely. Combining rigorous, comprehensive implementation of the No Kill Equation with best practices and accountability
of staff in cleaning, handling, and care of animals, must be the standard.

By joining the No Kill Williamson County TN community page, each individual must agree to abide by the following rules. Those who violate these rules on more than one occasion may be permanently blocked from posting to this community page. Please respect these guidelines. This is a place for healthy discourse, conversation, and proactive efforts to reform our nation’s animal shelters.

We reserve the right to remove posts and comments containing any of the following:

• Derogatory language
• Profanity
• Spam
• Threats or mentions of violence
• False facts or misinformation
• Personal insults, slander, or bullying
• Promotion of illegal behavior or activities
• Off-topic content

Thank you in advance for your support and participation.

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