The No Kill Movement’s Capture
And how we restart progress in an age of narcissism and tribalism
I received this email through The No Kill Advocacy Center:
I’m thankful for your long-standing advocacy for animals. I first saw you at a conference in Tucson in the mid-90s and have followed your work since. Over the years, I’ve watched many who once claimed to support no-kill turn their backs on animals. I don’t need to tell you that. You’ve written about how they now fight lifesaving reforms, defend killing, and protect those who abuse animals... Do you know why this happened [and…] is there anything we can do about it?1
The email was in response to a post by The No Kill Advocacy Center, which noted that,
The number of concerned residents contacting The No Kill Advocacy Center about the need to reform their local pound has slowly but steadily increased in recent years and has surged higher this year as more communities retrench after years of rising placement rates. Despite tremendous gains over the last 30 years in bringing transparency, accountability, and improvements to the pound industry — including a 95% decline in killing thanks to the No Kill Equation model of sheltering — the last few years have seen those gains increasingly eroded.
Death rates are climbing despite declining intakes as a result of groups that used to champion the No Kill Equation being co-opted and joining forces with the opposition to promote a darker agenda.
As a result, pound directors no longer feel pressure to reform and are being given carte blanche — indeed encouraged — to do less for animals, such as turning animals away and making pandemic-era policies permanent.
Others have also reached out to note that this describes their community, including one who said it was “the 1990s all over again” in terms of killing, neglect, and abuse and another who writes of the growing number of “individuals or organizations who profess to want to help animals - but ultimately betray them.” And given the parallel increase in the publication of articles regurgitating thoroughly discredited excuses to defend regressive pounds, I want to share my response more widely, even though — given the partisan age we live in — it is likely to please few.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.” — Eric Hoffer.
A few years ago, Gurwinder Bhogal wrote a very disturbing article about the perils of personal ambition. In it, he told the story of a young man who uploaded YouTube videos to become an “influencer” that showcased his love for the violin and promoted veganism. These videos failed to gain much attention. By the following year, the young man abandoned veganism and began creating videos where he filmed himself eating large amounts of food.
These videos quickly gained popularity, attracting a growing audience whose demands soon escalated. Viewers began challenging him to eat increasingly larger portions of food. He became more extreme in response, often consuming entire fast-food menus in one sitting. As his subscriber count surged, so did the intensity of these challenges.
Although he amassed millions of subscribers and thus fulfilled his desire for fame, his transformation from mild-mannered, health-conscious vegan violinist to extreme obesity with all the associated medical problems was a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.
This phenomenon — where people abandon their values or beliefs to make a name for themselves, advance in their chosen field, or gain more viewers, readers, “likes,” and revenue — is called “capture.” In this case, it was “audience capture”; in other cases, such as with the No Kill movement, as I discuss below, it is “elite capture.” This is why most pundits are extreme — and it is one of the primary reasons I left Facebook and Twitter.
In 2021, for example, I wrote a Facebook post that the National Institutes of Health division then headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, authorized the spending of a grant “to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive.” The experiments were deemed unnecessary by the Food & Drug Administration, the agency ostensibly for which the experiments were done.
The post netted me hundreds of new followers, hundreds of shares, and hundreds of comments, many of them from people who were driven by a partisan hatred of Dr. Fauci and made it clear they subscribed to anti-vaccination and COVID conspiracy theories. Instead of allowing the audience to capture the page, I responded to those commenters and new followers that my post was about promoting non-violence to dogs; it was not about vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccines, which I noted were one of the most significant public health interventions in human history. I also noted that although Dr. Fauci was Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden when I wrote the post, the NIH grant was made while he was working in the Trump Administration.
All those new followers vanished, as did many of my existing followers who, like Dana Milbank writing in the Washington Post, were just as hyper-partisan: outraged at any criticism of Dr. Fauci. Fauci was no longer fallible and subject to all the pedestrian flaws of human nature. To Milbank and many of my (former) followers, he had become a totem. Lost in the politics of rage and extremes were the dogs — the poor, abused, tortured dogs.
Social media and social movements reward tribalism and tribalism is maintained by catastrophizing. If you want to stand out, being a reasonable person with reasonable concerns will only get you so far. To become the most widely read publication on Substack, for example, you have to argue that Americans who do not agree with you or your political party are sinister. And it begs the question: If people are so willing to sacrifice their values for personal ambition — indeed, if they are willing to destroy their own health as exemplified by the former vegan — what chance do animals have? Not surprisingly, the No Kill movement has not been spared.
Before Austin Pets Alive (APA), Best Friends Animal Society, Maddie’s Fund, and their leadership and former leadership, including Kristen Hassen, became shills for the Kill Pound lobby, they were No Kill advocates — or at least claimed to be. To a greater or lesser degree, they now promote and defend abusive pound directors, encourage “shelters” to leave kittens and other needy animals on the streets, violate the constitutional rights of volunteers and rescuers, close their doors to adopters, defend the killing of healthy and treatable dogs and cats, and fight lifesaving legislation. What happened?
They were captured.
As organizational theorists who study threats to social movements describe it,
Co-optation occurs when movement leaders come to associate with authorities or movement targets more than with the social movement constituents. For example, a leader could be asked to work for the organization that is the target of a movement with offers of being able to change things from the inside. Instead they themselves become integrated into the organization and take on its values, rather than the social movement’s values.
For example, when Hassen joined the advisory board of the National Animal Control Association, the flagship organization representing pound directors across the nation, and invited the directors of various kill “shelters” to serve on APA’s own advisory boards, the personal relationships that were formed with these individuals usurped APA’s mission, and the allegiances of the organization — and Hassen’s — flipped. And they flipped to the extreme.
Hassen’s embrace of regressive pounds is near absolute. When Philadelphia’s pound director participated in a conspiracy that involved intentionally breaking a dog’s jaw, allowing him to suffer with no medical care, killing him despite knowing his family was coming to pick him up, and destroying his remains to hide the evidence, Hassen came to her defense, writing “It’s such a difficult time for shelters and shelter workers.” When the director was forced to resign under a cloud of ethical and criminal misconduct after public outcry over the dog’s abuse and killing, Hassen likened her forced departure to one of the darkest days in the movement: “the likes of which we haven’t really seen.”
In response, Hassen created a committee of other pound directors — including those with their own history of neglecting and killing dogs — and tasked them with developing an action plan to counter efforts by residents to hold their abusive pound directors accountable.
She featured directors with a history of abuse at her organization’s conference and promoted books and articles that disparaged rescuers and shelter volunteers, encouraged backyard breeders, excused those who chain dogs 24/7, and even defended dogfighters. While animals lose, it has been lucrative for both Hassen and organizations like Best Friends.
Also see The Lure of the Dark Side, The Co-optation of Austin Pets Alive, and Winter is Coming.
Collectively, three of the wealthiest U.S. organizations, including Best Friends, have $776 million in annual revenue and $1.2 billion in assets. And despite a legacy of betrayal, Hassen has been awarded a $2.45 million contract to “consult” with a pound that she has praised and defended despite that pound killing more animals than any reporting “shelter” in the U.S. and being sued for neglect, abuse, and other gross mismanagement.
Unfortunately, the public is largely undiscerning regarding which animal groups to support. They falsely equate large and well-known with caring and effective. Because most Americans have heard of the ASPCA or the Humane Society of the United States, they wrongly believe those groups are on the front lines leading and effecting positive change for animals, likely stemming from relentless direct mail efforts and highly lucrative commercials spanning decades. To restart stalled No Kill progress, that must change.
We must educate the public that organizations like the ASPCA, the Humane Society of the U.S., Austin Pets Alive, and Best Friends Animal Society betray animals. And we must stop underplaying the harm they cause because they use some of the donated money for its intended purpose. These organizations are irremediably corrupt and cannot be reformed. Getting that message out would reduce their ability to stop shelter reform and change the incentive structure for people like Hassen, who are driven by personal ambition, a desire for power, and greed. The sooner we stop rewarding the Macbeths among us — those who sacrifice values for self-promotion, goals for fame, facts for ideology, and creation for disruption — the sooner we will start course-correcting our movement’s derailment. But it is only a start.
I live in Oakland, California. Everything you have heard about Oakland is true — the unchecked crime, the unfilled potholes, the dysfunctional government, the failing schools filled with lead pipes, the unresponsive police, the ubiquity of homeless encampments, the trash and debris, the failure to support merchants and economic development. And yet, voters do not punish elected officials. They vote them back in by wide margins. They vote to raise their own taxes to give people who squander millions even more. All a candidate has to do is declare themselves or their cause “progressive,” and they will win. It is the same on the opposite end of the political spectrum in other communities likewise plagued by politically caused blight. All a candidate has to do is call themselves “conservative,” and they will win.
Show me a state with a supermajority (where one party has control of government without the need to compromise with the other party) — regardless of whether they are on the Left or the Right — and I will show you a state with elected officials indifferent to sound policies and good governance. As most Americans no longer live in contested districts, ideology now rules the day, making it challenging to hold any agency — let alone one that deals with “lowly” animals — accountable. And given that the only threat comes from within the elected official’s own party — being primaried by someone on the Left if a Democrat or on the Right if a Republican — going along with the ideological program protects them. Since elections matter less and almost not at all in thoroughly single-party districts, there is no need for elected officials to solve problems and no ability for constituents to force them to do so.
If we want to see change, we must also change the incentive structure here, moving away from “Right” or “Left” policy to effective policy that leads to measurable and proven results. To do that, we have to abandon our partisanship and pursue a middle course because, as it stands, when Democrats or Republicans sweep, the animals lose.
We need to vote for moderate people who will fix problems and ensure responsive government — including reforming dysfunctional, abusive, kill-oriented “shelters.” And if they fail, we have to vote them out. Everyone should be a swing voter.
The lives of animals depend on it.2
The email was edited for grammar and repetition.
In short, to jump-start the No Kill movement, we must stop fetishizing people as celebrities, rewarding tribalism, supporting groups that harm animals regardless of what else they do, and putting partisanship above all else. Issues and elections must matter again.