FyreFiend, I think you have it almost backwards. In my experience, publicly-funded (but privately-run) shelters are under a fair amount of pressure from local officials.
Every halfwit who gets rejected for an adoption, who gets charged a boarding fee when they pick up their stray animal, or who comes by the shelter two weeks after their dog has gone missing and finds out it’s been euthanized – every one of these halfwits goes straight to the County Commissioners or the Mayor with their complaint. Running a publicly funded shelter involves a huge amount of public-relations skills.
(To be fair, every person with a legitimate complaint also goes to the local officials. I tend to think we run a good operation, though, and so I get a little defensive when people complain 
).
In contrast, privately-run shelters tend to answer only to the foundations or private members that fund them. These folks are a lot less responsive to complaints by voters, for some reason.
Of course, there’s also government-run shelters: unlike private nonprofits that contract with a government, these shelters are run by government employees, and too often the person in charge is basically a political appointee. These places can be downright grim.
In any case, see my post above about how we’re not franchises. Except in rare places like New York city, there’s no SPCA that has any authority to shut us down or indeed do anything with us. We’re answerable to local government, to private members, and to foundations, mostly, not to national organizations.
Dantheman, that’s an interesting procedure! Just by way of comparison, I wanna give our procedure. There are some significant differences:
- Person comes to the shelter. We ask them to sign in (so we can track shelter traffic, and so we can have a record of who was at the shelter in the event of an animal theft or something), and then we direct them to the cat room or the dog room.
- They go to the appropriate room, where an adoption counselor meets them. (When not dealing with visitors, adoption counselors are responsible for keeping cages clean, feeding animals, and the like).
- The counselor asks them a few very general questions about what sort of animal they’re looking for – young, old, breed, active, lazy, etc. – and about their lifestyle – outdoorsy, in an apartment, traveling often, etc. The counselor points out particular animals that the visitor might be interested in.
- The counselor helps the visitor take cats and puppies out of their cages to be played with, or dogs out of their cages to be walked.
- When the visitor decides on an animal to adopt, the counselor takes them to our adoption application room, where they conduct a more formal interview/adoption application process. This is where we look for red flags (“I’m just looking for a guard dog, not a pet,” or, “Yeah, my last five dogs all jumped out of my pickup truck and got run over,” for example). We also look for concerns (“I have a six-month-old child at home; is it okay to get a puppy now?” or “My parents just gave me a really nice sofa, and they’ll kill me if I let the cat scratch it up – how can I prevent this?”) We’ve got about 40 different fact-sheets on all sorts of animal behavior subjects, which we make available to the applicant, and we try to answer all their concerns completely. If they say something that concerns us, we’ll try to work with them on it.
- Almost everyone is accepted, sometimes after we’ve spent awhile persuading them that they really are going to need to let the dog come inside on a daily basis or whatever. At this point, the applicant pays their $70 adoption fee and decides whether to get the animal microchipped at an additional cost of $20. They sign the adoption contract, agreeing to such things as providing proper care for the animal, not letting dogs run loose, not performing experiments on their new pet or selling the animal to laboratories, and so on.
- We have an in-house veterinarian who sterilizes all male cats and all male puppies before they enter the adoption room; we sterilize other animals as appropriate. If the animal is already sterilized, the adopter can take their new pet home immediately; otherwise, they have to come back the next day, after we can send the animal off for surgery. This is really important to us: we almost never let an animal leave our custody fertile. It would be irresponsible to the 6,500 other animals we have to euthanize every year to let one go out that might send more animals through our back doors.
- In very rare cases, an animal will be adopted out that weighs less than two pounds or that has a medical condition preventing sterilization at that time. In these cases, the adopter puts down an additional $100 deposit. We tell the adopter that if they don’t present us with proof that they’ve sterilized their animal by a deadline we give them, we’ll use that $100 to pay court costs involved in reclaiming the animal from them. We’re super hard core about this. We get mean about this if we need to. As a result, we have a 100% sterilization rate for our adopted cats and dogs. (Our rate is less impressive for the hamsters, ferrets, parakeets, and tarantulas we adopt out).
- Finally, one week after the adoption, a staff member or volunteer calls the new pet owner to make sure everything’s going well. If they’re having problems, we put them on the phone with our animal behavior expert, who will try to help them resolve the difficulties.
Our goal is to put good animals in good homes. Yes, we’re cautious, and we won’t adopt to just anybody; and yes, we’ve had people chew our heads off because we denied them an adoption. But for the most part, we really want to make the process work. We’re all too aware of the fate of the animals that don’t get a home, and if there’s any way we can put the animal in a good home, we really want to do so.
That said, the one thing we’re crazy zealots about is spaying and neutering. Putting an animal in the best home in the world isn’t worth it if that animal’s puppies or kittens are going to be coming in our back door twice a year for the next seven years. In this case, a grisly calculus comes to play, and we’d prefer to euthanize an animal than adopt it out fertile.
Daniel
- but there’s a thin line between rescue and hoarding, and people cross it all the time.