Managed Intake and Community Sheltering is Driving our Animal Crisis

We just returned from two weeks of touring shelters and rescues in four states. This tour was different from the dozens we’ve done (nearing 175 shelter visits now) because at almost every stop we heard about the damaging effect of ‘managed intake’ and ‘community sheltering’ – two concepts that many large animal welfare organizations have promoted.

During the first few years of tours (2018-2020), most shelters were still open-intake, accepting any/all animals, but we were starting to come across some that had switched to managed intake. At the time it seemed like a good idea.

Managed Intake was presented as a policy of asking people who wanted to surrender animals to make appointments to do so.

Another part of managing intake was not accepting animals being surrendered because of severe behavioral issues. Instead, they encouraged owners to take their pet to the vet to be euthanized (instead of forcing the shelter to do it – which only makes it harder on the animal and the shelter staff).

Some shelters would also ask that would-be owner surrendered animals be ‘fostered’ in their home until the shelter had room. The shelter still took Good Samaritan turn-ins and ACO drop offs and on a case-by-case basis immediate owner surrenders if necessary because of the circumstances (eviction, abuse, etc.).

Explained this way, managed intake did (and still does) make sense.

But managed intake has morphed to the extreme of many municipal shelters that simply will not take owner-surrendered animals. While most managed intake shelters will accept animals brought in by Animal Control Officers, they may choose not to take owner-surrendered animals or animals turned in by Good Samaritans. Most offer resources to help the person rehome the dog themselves or give food, supplies, or training advice to people wishing to surrender.

The majority of the shelters we visited in 2024 practiced this kind of managed intake.

In about 2021, we started hearing shelters talk about Community Sheltering. The idea was first proposed as part of the HASS model of sheltering. This plan has many good ideas, but the one piece that some shelters and the big animal welfare organizations have glommed onto is returning the found animal to where it was found and/or asking the Good Samaritan to hold onto the animal and look for the owner.

My first thought at hearing this idea was – this is what we did when I was growing up. Back when there were only dog pounds that had dog catchers who killed dogs and not shelters that had trained professionals who saved dogs.

The reasoning behind the plan—that shelters are stressful places for dogs and that most ‘lost’ dogs are not far from home—makes sense in suburban Connecticut. It also assumes that stray dogs belong to someone and have just gotten lost.

The combination of these two ideas—managed intake and community sheltering—has resulted in a huge increase in the number of unwanted animals on our streets and being brought into shelters.

Why?

80% of animals coming into shelters are not spayed or neutered. This fact is important, hang onto it.

If the shelter is practicing Managed Intake by refusing to take owner-surrendered animals, and the owner feels they have no other options and/or cannot wait a few weeks (or months), they will very likely dump that animal. One of the shelters we visited told us they have over 300 people on the waiting list to surrender animals. I know in a perfect world people wouldn’t dump animals, but talk to anybody working in rescue or sheltering, and they will give you hundreds of stories of animals abandoned in dumpsters or store fronts or tossed over the shelter fence.

Where I live in Virginia, it is illegal to abandon an animal. Since every safe place you might choose to abandon your animal likely has a camera, people have taken to leaving their animals in the National Forest. I have a friend who found a three-month old puppy while hiking in a remote area just a few months ago.

No one is keeping track of how many animals have been turned away by a municipal shelter. Esther Mechler, who founded United Spay Alliance, coined the term ‘ghost animals’ because they are not seen by most people or counted by shelters or animal welfare organizations.

If a Good Samaritan finds an animal and follows the shelter’s directive to put it back where they were found, and it was actually dumped not lost, you’ve just added another Ghost Animal to the count.

Remember that fact I gave you above – the 80%? How quickly do you imagine the Ghost Animal population will grow?

An unspayed dog and her offspring can produce 67,000 puppies in just six years.

An unspayed cat and her offspring can produce 350,000 kittens in just seven years.

Is anyone surprised that managed intake and community sheltering has resulted in an unprecedented number of unwanted animals?

Georgia Department of Agriculture just released a report that said in 2020, shelters euthanized 12,271 animals and in 2024 shelters euthanized 33,109. I don’t know the number of shelters in GA who practice managed intake and community sheltering, but the timing tells me all I need to know.

On this tour, we visited a shelter in north Georgia that had only recently returned to open intake after nearly two years of managed intake. The ACO I spoke with there said, “I remember telling people to just put the cats back where they found them, and at the same time thinking—this is crazy and wrong. But that was what we were told would work.” They are full to bursting now and rely on transports to save lives. They do euthanize for space.

Every shelter we visited on this past tour had puppies. In early 2020, on our tours, we rarely saw puppies in the shelters. There weren’t that many coming in and rescues quickly whisked away the ones that did. It’s impossible to find rescues to pull enough to save them all. At Memphis Animal Services this week there are three mama dogs with puppies under 8 weeks old that are all on the euthanasia list.

I have one more thought on this managed intake/community sheltering fiasco. Why on earth would we tell people to shelter a ‘lost’ dog at their home instead of sheltering it with professionals trained to care for animals?

This seems like a lawsuit at best and a tragedy at worst just waiting to happen. What if the ‘lost’ animal was actually dumped because it had become aggressive with children or other animals? What if that animal was unvaccinated or infested with parasites? Now this kind person who agrees to ‘shelter’ the dog at their house is taking a huge gamble, likely unbeknownst to them (but not to any ACO I’ve talked to).

We saw the impact of these crazy practices at every shelter we visited. Some have switched back to open intake and are struggling to retake the ground lost. Others are still plugging along, managing their intake and scrambling to find more space for the massive demand. Rescues are overwhelmed as they try to fill the gap left by the shelters’ policies.

It is only a matter of time before communities in the midst of this ‘new way of sheltering’ say they’ve had enough. But by then, how many more animals will be in need of shelter? Let’s hope for the cats sake it’s not seven more years.

I have so much more to say on this, but my post is getting too long. In the coming weeks I’ll share the stories from this tour and you can see exactly what I’m talking about.

Meanwhile, please, please, please question the narrative being pushed by some of the large animal welfare organizations. There is NO WAY we will be a no-kill nation in 2025 no matter what the shelter numbers say because no one is counting the ghost animals and a reckoning is coming.

Until each one has a home,

Cara

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Who Will Let the Dogs Out: Stories and Solutions for Shelters and Rescues was published in January of 2025. It is filled with stories and ideas to help everyone be part of the solution. You can buy a hardback or paperback copy for yourself and/or buy a copy for a shelter or rescue through our website. It is also available on Amazon in paperback and ebook. We are looking for opportunities to share a presentation of the ideas in the book and facilitate conversations about how we can work together to find solutions for our shelters. If you have a dog-hearted group that would like to connect, contact Cara@wwldo.org.

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