People working to assess animal shelters have relied heavily on a simple statistic to measure shelter performance: The Live Release Rate or LRR, which is the percentage of animals that leave the shelter alive, relative to the total outcomes. In an ideal world, computing this number would be simple and straight-forward. Unfortunately, in the strange world of animal sheltering, it is anything but, because there is no standardized way of entering animal records, or consolidating

When I started No Kill Learning, and began conducting shelter and community assessments using my newly created online assessment tools, I did it entirely to help shelters and communities increase the live outcomes from their animal shelters. Little did I know that I was on to something potentially much bigger. It turns out the assessment data could be on the verge of scientifically proving the efficacy of the No Kill Equation, a set of 11 components, first articulated by Nath

A blog post at No Kill Nation recently explored some real and serious issues with the way many animal shelters calculate their Live Release Rates (LRR) and rightly pointed out that the formula considered by many to be the defacto standard allows animal shelters to eliminate thousands of deaths from their calculations, by not counting all animals "euthanized at owner request" or even animals that died, or that were lost or stolen at the shelter. Why a shelter would want to eli