Austin’s animal shelters struggle to uphold no-kill reputation in the face of overcrowding

For more than a decade, Austin was the largest city to designate itself a no-kill sanctuary for animals. That came to an end in 2021 when Los Angeles joined the club, but the animal services system in Austin still prides itself at its save rate of over 95%. To achieve that level of performance, the partnership at the system's core – between the city-owned and -run Austin Animal Center and its nonprofit partner Austin Pets Alive! – needs to operate seamlessly and without friction, as it sustains the work of hundreds of volunteers and makes connections with scores of community partners. That's not happening right now. As Austin rebounds from the pandemic, policy changes and staffing challenges at both AAC and APA!, along with the worsening of the city's housing crisis for humans who'd take care of animals, have left the sanctuaries with emergency levels of overcrowding and infighting. At AAC, dogs are at 145% of capacity and cats are at 171% as of July 28.

Council, employees, stakeholders, and volunteers are all uniformly disappointed with the state of animal rescue in Austin. So how did the system get here? Where is communication breaking down? And can they dig themselves out of this hole and reclaim the no-kill gold standard? In the last three years, Amy Rae Dadamo has picked up around 10 dogs off the streets. "On the Southeast and Southwest sides of Austin, I cannot even explain how common it is to see loose dogs strolling along the sidewalk. Sometimes that dog belongs to a neighbor of mine, but most of the time it doesn't." Dadamo says since 2020, she's been turned away at AAC several times. When she and a friend found a pair of abandoned puppies in a field in Somerville, 90 minutes east of Austin, AAC refused to take them because they were found outside Travis County. "They never gave me any kind of direction, other than to call the county in which they were originally found. But they're not in that county anymore, and I was two hours away." One of the dogs died from the contagious parvovirus soon after; to save the other, Dadamo contacted Austin Lost & Found Pets, which directed her to APA!'s parvovirus ward. "But I just got so annoyed, because why, if this is a commonly known resource in the city, did no one at [AAC] direct me there?"