The year was 1999 and I had already been advocating for No Kill sheltering for many years. There was much I did not understand at the time and things I believed that turned out to not be true, and reflecting back on those days helps put the entire No Kill Movement into a clearer perspective for me. A pivotal moment in my life happened when I was helping to coordinate a conference at the University of Minnesota on the topic of "pet overpopulation," which, it turns out, isn't r

Pet overpopulation and mandatory spay/neuter: two topics that seem to come up nearly every time killing of healthy and treatable pets in animal shelters is mentioned. But, neither topic is really what they seem. Hi. I’m Mike Fry from No Kill Learning and if you are one of those people who believes that animal shelters are killing healthy and treatable pets because they have no choice – because of so-called “pet overpopulation” and that, therefore, mandatory spay neuter will p

There was a time in my life when I uttered the phrase "pet overpopulation" several times a day. My family and I, after all, had spent many years of our lives fighting to end the "pet overpopulation" crisis. The thinking was, at the time, that animal shelters in the USA killed between 8 million and 10 million animals annually. That was evidence enough to prove there were too many animals and not enough homes for them. We never stopped to ask ourselves if pet overpopulation exi