NYC AC&C's No Kill Lip Service

In an otherwise very good overview of the NYC AC&C's operations, AC&C's Volunteer Coordinator Elisabeth Manwiller strays from the facts when she goes into her discussion of No Kill during a volunteer orientation session.



According to her, every city needs not only No Kill rescue groups which are by her definition limited admission, they also need "full service" shelters - which are defined as shelters that kill.

First of all, there are not only open admission No Kill shelters in America, there is an open admission No Kill shelter in New York State - Tompkins County, in Ithaca.

If New York City has a stated goal of becoming No Kill - and that stated goal was repeated several times elsewhere in the presentation - perhaps they should stop calling it impossible and defend their killing as necessary, especially when other communities are doing it. You can't hit a stated goal while simultaneously calling it impossible, and you make it clear that you're merely offering lip service to the No Kill philosophy.

We the people - the people who fund you, by the way - demand better.

Perhaps you could start by streamlining the barriers to volunteering.

Download audio as .mp3 here.

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