Best Friends No-Kill Interview
Francis Battista Interviewed by Claudette Vaughan
Best Friends Animal Society is no ordinary shelter for homeless and neglected cats and dogs. It is strictly No-Kill. It is a place where animals are completely safe, where they are given time and respect to recover from their ordeal and it’s a shelter where they have the trust, love and support of their intermediately guardians whilst finding a new home for them. Francis Battista is one of those rare breeds of people who is making a difference in the world. He is one of the founders of Best Friends Animal Society and sits on the Board of Directors. His past work with Best Friends includes Director of Animal Care, Director of Rescue Outreach and Director of Los Angeles Programs. Francis is also a regular contributor to Best Friends Magazine.
Over the course of Best Friends extended response to Katrina, Francis managed the emergency rescue and shelter operations located in Tylertown, MS for a period of four months beginning in September 2005. Francis was born in New York City and attended New York University and the State University of New York at Albany where he studied engineering. Prior to his involvement with Best Friends, he worked in a family business in suburban New York. He has been active in social and animal causes since 1968.
 Abolitionist: What is your over-arching philosophy on No-Kill Francis?
Francis Battista: I think No-Kill comes out of no particular philosophy. It comes out of using common sense. No-Kill really emerges when people have direct contact with an animal. It’s kind of a bottom up grassroots movement because it stems from people who are involved in rescue and can connect with the animal on a very personal basis and understands that this animal has intrinsic value. This animal has desires and makes choices and he/she has a life that cannot be minimised – that’s the basis of it.
I would say that philosophy has been formulated around No-Kill but the idea that you need a philosophy to rationalise kindness is speciesist in itself because philosophy is such a human oriented framework.
How has the pro-kill animal advocacy people hindered your work?
If you look back at the history of where the movement has come from and what passed for ‘business as usual, was rabies control. Animal control was essentially rabies control and it was a public health activity essentially being a street cleaning operation that took potentially dangerous animals off the street and held them for a minimal amount of time and they would be killed unless their owners came and found them. That’s basically the history of animal control up until the 70’s and 80’s. The problem is that so much of the animal control establishment has its history, investment and legacy in that mindset. The way the establishment has changed is that it’s been nibbled at and pushed very slowly from below by activists and advocates. It hasn’t really been a top-down philosophical re: organisation of what animal control really is or should be. When you look at shelters, even nice shelters, they are conceptually very similar to the old rabies control shelters. Because of advocacy and rescuers edging this thing from below, cities and institutions give in to incremental change to meet public demand but it hasn’t ever been a situation where policy makers have really looked at this and said, “Let’s make this community No-Kill.” They tend to focus on the shelters, but the shelters are the wrong place to look for solutions. Once the problem arrives at the shelter level it’s too late. Traditionally then, the argument has been about shelter operations and policy...“well we’re a No-Kill shelter or we’re a open admission shelter”. That goes nowhere. The discussion needs to move upstream in the issue to look at the whole community and look at the contributing factors and deal with them at their source through community outreach, education, delivering local vet and spay/neuter services where they are needed, etc.
Animal Care and Control as it’s called in many US cities these days is treated like a stepchild department. Nominal changes are grudgingly made to appease the rescue and activist community.
Most city managers and mayors regard animal control and the animal community as something they have to tolerate and they want it to go away. They don’t want to be hounded by activists and so they cast around for a solution and what they tend to do is bring in “the man with the plan”...someone with a good reputation who they hope is going to make things better and they say “Okay you come up with a solution”. The viability of No-Kill for that community tends to stand or fall on this one person’s ability to perform. If he or she doesn’t perform, they bring in the next person and let them run with a new plan and so it goes, but the full scope of the problem is seldom, if ever looked at and responsibility is pushed down the ladder rather than being owned at the top levels of local government.
The kind of thing that we have been advocating, and it’s becoming more popular in the conversation, is not looking at shelters, but looking at whole communities. Going back to first principles. If we were talking about schools or talking about a water delivery system or an airport we’d bring in a consultancy team and we’d look at this from the top down and look at all the parameters that are contributing to the issue. If we were trying to design a new municipal water delivery system, we wouldn’t ask the plumbers to come up with a solution. We’d ask civil engineers to develop a plan that would shape public policy based on the best information available then that policy would be owned by the city official public policy, not treated as a side issue to appease a few clean water nuts. Do you get the analogy? Animal care policy needs to be taken as seriously as any other department of government.
Having heard you speak in Hong Kong at the Asia for Animal Conference I assumed that trap-neuter-return was the technique of choice in animal advocacy in the West. In Asia poverty plays a significant role in daily life yet much of an activist’s T-N-R in Asia has a determination to save animals lives unmatched in the West. Frankly, the rich over-indulged, find-a-quick-solution capitalistic attitude is at fault when the West has all the money yet serious intent to save lives isn’t there.
I agree with you. They need to come up with solutions out of necessity that are both sensible and humane but also the history of the community animal and street dogs and situations that pointed at other acceptable solutions. In the West it’s rather more neat and tidy. If they don’t have a home then a process in place to get rid of them.
The problem is further compacted when animal welfarists treat animal rescue work and No-Kill as nothing more than a mere do-gooding service. These cats and dogs are our companion animals, they are the closest to humans, we don’t eat them and they are one’s there can never be no excuses for.
You’re absolutely right. Best Friends Animal Society comes at this from our personal experience and once you become conscious of the problem it’s impossible to turn a blind eye to it.
Best Friends has 20,000 people visiting annually. What are your winning ways?
I think the thing that characterises Best Friends is the ability to tap into where people really live with their animals. We say it’s a very personal thing, affectionate, funny, goofy and fun and a combination of sublime and ridiculous. Animals are wonderfully entertaining. They do things without any self-consciousness that we might find in ourselves. It’s the ability to relate to them very personally and their keen intelligence, their clear ability to get enjoyment from life – all of that is what binds us into a special relationship. Rather than coming at for it as a sense of obligation and morality, we want to be able to speak to “Aunty Ethel who loves her dog. She may not be a vegetarian but she loves her dog”. That’s where we can start from. We can relate to Aunty Ethel on the basis of her simple compassion for animals and build it on from there and to eventually to extend that commitment to more and more animals and animal issues. The model is our concern with where people live. So animals here at the Sanctuary where it’s spectacularly beautiful is almost like National Park territory. On any given day there are 1500-2000 animals here – dogs, cats, horses, wildlife, farm animals, bunnies and birds – and people are invited to come in and volunteer and spend time or just take a tour. The combination of the natural beauty of the environment and the dedication of people in caring for animals that need their help or simply they need some time, attention and some affection, if they need serious rehabilitation and medical care then we take it up to another notch. When people start to think about what they can do to personally help we provide workshops, seminars, classes and things like that as well.
Is it possible to legislate No-Kill?
There are different schools of thought on legislation. I think you can legislate a lot of the supporting components involved with spay/neuter. Spay/neuter works when you have affordable, available, accessible and low-cost spay/neuter so genuinely poor people can afford it. So things that work are publicly funded spay/neuter services and getting communities serious about the problem and what can be achieved instead of simply handing it over to the citizen auxiliary of rescuers and volunteers who work desperately hard to do things but can never really address things the way municipalities can with community outreach and education like they would address public health. I don’t know if legislating is the answer as much as these common sensical things that will inevitably lead to it.
Why are companion animals in rented premises, animals on public transport or sick animals going to for veterinary care using public transport, why hasn’t legislation here been achievable yet? Why is achieving anything for companion animals so difficult after all this time?
As an interesting vignette, we had some folks from Germany passing through here in the South West part of the United States near some of the famous National Parks. They came across a mother cat with kittens out in the middle of the desert and they were told the nearest place to take them for help was Best Friends. They arrived here very dehydrated. One kitten died and the other two survived. The Germans didn’t speak much English so we took them on a tour and thanked them. You could see them getting more and more confused then they finally said, “Why do you have all these animals?” We told them they don’t go to shelters because they’ll be killed there and they looked at each other in horror and said, “You mean you kill animals in this country?” Then the conversation proceeded and they told us it’s illegal in Germany to kill healthy animals. Things had progressed and changed somewhat in Germany around 1990 before they absorbed East Germany. I was over there two years ago and in Berlin in their largest shelter, in order for them to put a truly vicious dog to sleep they had to have the sign off from the head of the shelter, the head vet, the care-taker of the animals and the dog warden from the District that brought the animal in. Four people had to sign off. In the United States it’s any appointed shelter worker on any given Tuesday with a needle.
The difference in the significance given to killing one dog says a lot. In the United States there’s an attitude that prevails – the ‘Don’t-tell-me-what-to-do’ mentality. It’s part of the culture and I don’t think you can ever change that. Where that goes to, in terms of when it comes to the animals is: Don’t tell me what to do with my animals. Don’t tell me I have to do this and that and the other thing. There is no legislation about companion animals at a national level. It would have to be community jurisdiction by jurisdiction. The trend is towards No-Kill. That’s what people expect. That’s what people are demanding. There’s a lot of people arguing that it isn’t possible, it’ll never happen, it’s a waste of time blah, blah blah. I believe that argument is genuinely over. It’s simply now a matter of time and execution.
It’s the greatest thing in the world to save a life yet the animal rights movement, or what’s commonly called the animal rights movement, has not always been supportive of these tremendous efforts of No-Kill. Isn’t that odd to you?
This has been an interesting evolution because there is no question that the animal rights movement and the No-Kill movement has been somewhat at odds or on parallel tracks or divergent tracks. The rationale on that has usually been, “Well look, you really should be focusing on factory farm animals their lives are worse than anything you can find in a shelter. For a factory farm animal it’s just torture, killing and hell.” There’s no arguing with that. It’s true. It’s awful but that’s not really the point. From our point of view we think that work and advocacy is great. We support and we are committed to that as well but this is what we are doing and we feel that working with dogs and cats is the perfect place to start with people. It’s more likely that we are going to achieve No-Kill first than to get everybody to become vegetarian. So that’s been part of the argument. With some animal rights logic I guess the risk of practices like T-N-R are not acceptable meaning that some animal rights people believe that returning a cat to managed colony is an unacceptable risk and the cat would be better off dead rather than face the potential for suffering. When you think like that, then shelter killing becomes acceptable and is seen as the lesser of many possible evils. Obviously we disagree with that.
Kindness doesn’t need to be explained or justified. If you are spending your time and energy on 2 animals or 2000 animals then God bless you. It’s an important thing and it has myriad effects. It’s important for the animals but it’s also a good thing to do.
One of the original adages of the animal rights movement is one person can make a difference. It’s always possible to go down to your local shelter, pick out an animal and save his or her’s life. To mock no-kill efforts surely would defeat the purpose of the meaning of “animal rights” in the first place?
Well it makes no sense. It masks a level of cruelty, indifference and it’s antithetical to the whole movement. Some people regard your and mine ideas as soppy and sentimental. I would argue against that categorically. These are core principles and values. It’s about your commitment to kindness and compassion. It doesn’t just begin and end somewhere. You have to practice it. More people need to begin and internalise principles of kindness and thoughtfulness. To me this isn’t a dotted line, it’s a continuum. If we can’t bring our community to value the lives of animals who want nothing more than to be with you, how are you going to get beyond that?
And it doesn’t only affect out treatment of animals, it affects our treatment of people. It’s not like we are talking against people. You can’t help animals without helping people. We need to move the centre of gravity of just that behaviour. Not that much but to a point where it becomes unacceptable to take your animals down and dump them in a shelter. If you are genuinely unable to care for an animal, then the obligation is on you to do the right thing to find that animal a home or to rehome him safely. That isn’t that big a deal. I think it’s really worth the effort and that’s what the No-Kill thing is all about. It’s about valuing these universal ideas of kindness and compassion. What’s to argue with?
Micro chipping has made a big dent rehoming dogs back to their guardians. What is the situation like in the States?
Yes we have micro chipping. Depending on where you are it’s common practice or almost utterly unheard of. In Los Angelos and New York every animal that comes out of a city shelter is microchipped and spayed or neutered as well.
We were doing work in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and directly handled 4000 animals. We helped transport another 2000 animals. You can almost count on my hands and my feet how many out of those 4000 were actually micro chipped. In that County it’s almost unheard of and had it been a practice all of those animals could have been safely returned to their families or identified and moved along. As it was it was a huge mess with people trying to locate their animals, people trying to identify them. “Is that my Black Lab or is it somebody else’s Black Lab?” 6 months later is that Black Lab going to recognise the person? Micro chipping there would have solved so many problems. It’s here, it’s being promoted more and more but it’s still not universal.
It’s essential to ask you about Best Friends heroic efforts in Lebanon with the recent war there. How many animals did you pull out?
About 350 dogs and cats. This has become a well-known issue. It was on the National news. Many people stepped forward to adopt one of these animals where a shelter had been destroyed in the fighting. These people had these animals parked all over the countryside. People came forward to say they would like to adopt but how do you get them out and how is it possible to facilitate the transport, quarantine, the health assessment, the behaviour assessment all that sort of thing, we did it so these animals could move into adoptive homes and so the animal welfare workers in Beirut could focus on rebuilding the shelter.
How is Best Friends Sanctuary funded?
Primarily we are funded by donations from individuals although we have had some grants and the occasional charitable foundation and corporates but mostly it’s individuals who loyally send their few dollars every couple of months and who love their animals.
What are your rehoming rates at Best Friends Sanctuary like Francis?
I would say currently we have between 500-600 dogs with us and for every 100 we bring in, we place 75 of them. This isn’t a kind of a rapid turnover high adoption operation. We are much more geared towards relating to animals that need time, attention and a little bit of rehabilitation whether it’s behavioural, health or training. We partner with local organizations. For a small local group that’s committed to No-Kill having a difficult dog or cat challenges their commitment so they say, “So what are we going to do with him. We can’t find a home for him.” “He needs extraordinary medication every day and he’s difficult to adopt and it’s just clogging up our program so should we give up?”
What Best Friends Sanctuary will do is exchanges. We’ll exchange out a couple of easy to adopt dogs from the Sanctuary for a difficult dog that needs special treatment or special care. We help local No-Kills stick to their mission. We relieve them of some of the more difficult animals they have and we send out the one’s that have been rehabilitated and are ready for Prime Time.
Will we ever see a annual international No-Kill Conference happening and will it be possible in the future to develop strategies to help developing countries organise themselves better?
I think that’s probably inevitable. At the moment it’s at the regional stage. There was a Conference recently in Egypt in December trying to strengthen and professionalise and help small grassroots organisations in countries that don’t even have an animal welfare ethic to pin their hopes on, to get started, to work and to tap into resources in a lot of new countries and how to do their work better. That’s where we are at the moment.
Francis can be contacted at: francis@bestfriends.org
Website: bestfriends.org
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