Impact Report 2023

A message from Julie

As you turn these pages, you’ll see some of the incredible things you’ve made possible over the past year: the lives you’ve touched, the shelters you’ve lifted up, and the inspiration you’ve shared with fellow animal lovers. You’ll also get a preview of exciting things on the horizon. But first, I want to celebrate this moment with you — and thank you for being here for the animals.

Right now, you’re a part of the greatest transformation that has ever happened in animal welfare. This push to no-kill nationwide by 2025 — and then to a time when there are no more homeless pets — is the most significant effort on behalf of animals that you can be a part of in your lifetime.

Where are we right now, exactly? Out of 3,943 shelters in the U.S., 57% of them are no-kill. Three states are also no-kill (Delaware, New Hampshire, and Vermont), with four more on the cusp. In Utah, our home base, fewer than 15 shelters still need to reach their lifesaving goals to place every shelter in the state at or above a 90% save rate. To put that in perspective for you, I remember decades ago when San Francisco was widely recognized as the only no-kill community in the nation.

So what do we do now? We lean in the way the founders of Best Friends have always done. If we believe in no-kill nationwide by 2025, we will achieve it together. We keep following our road map by saving lives, helping shelters, and rallying supporters. We focus on the places across the country where lifesaving needs are the greatest. But we don’t turn away from any shelter or any community because it will take every single one of them to reach no-kill nationwide. It will take every one of you, too.

Your impact, by the numbers

Since 2016, when Chief Executive Officer Julie Castle announced our goal to bring the nation to no-kill by 2025, we have been tracking the lifesaving progress that your gifts make possible. This is what you have helped achieve for our nation’s homeless pets:

Saving lives

This is what it’s all about, right? Second chances for our most faithful companions. Together, we’re giving dogs and cats at our sanctuary and lifesaving centers all the love and care they need to find homes of their own.

Recent successes

• Opened the Best Friends Pet Resource Center in Northwest Arkansas — the first-of-its-kind, modernized, community-driven animal shelter in the country. With the new center and lifesaving progress that trended above the national average in 2022, Arkansas is now poised to be a leader in achieving no-kill in the South Central and Southeast regions.

• Joined clinical trials through the University of California, Davis to speed up access to successful treatment of feline infectious peritonitis, a fatal disease in cats. Dixon, the first cat from Best Friends to complete the trials, is healthy and in a loving home today.

• Worked with the Parker Project to spay or neuter 1,546 dogs and cats on the Navajo Nation (where access to these services is very limited); welcomed 724 dogs and cats from the Navajo Nation to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary so they could get care and find homes; and facilitated 2,218 transports for pets from the reservation to 33 shelter and rescue organizations in calendar year 2022.

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“There is a staggering number of dogs and cats who call the Navajo Nation their home. We are delighted to be able to participate in the joint efforts of Best Friends and the people of the Navajo Nation to improve the health, well-being, and survival of animals.”

— Marty and Brenda Winnick

What’s next

• Amplifying the success of the Best Friends Lifesaving Center in New York City to help more animals through adoption, pet transport, and public engagement. The center, located in the heart of SoHo, is already a resource and an adoption hub that finds homes for thousands of dogs and cats each year. It’s also an action hub for our work along the East Coast, which is helping save lives from Florida to Maine. A key focus of the program is facilitating transports from overcrowded shelters in the South to those with more capacity (and a higher demand for adoptable pets) in the North.
  

• Helping more pets find loving homes. The latest Best Friends national adoption weekend (June 30-July 2, 2023) helped 9,470 dogs and cats get adopted from Best Friends and our shelter and rescue partners. The next national adoption weekend is planned for later this year. There are also upcoming Best Friends Super Adoption events in Los Angeles and Houston.
  

• Testing and proving new techniques for helping more dogs with behavior challenges here at the Sanctuary and across the country. The work is happening at the new Shipley Dog Lodges in Dogtown, which opened in 2023.
  

Helping shelters

Together, we’re supporting more than 4,400 shelters and rescue groups across the country. We give these partners the tools, resources, and guidance they need to save more lives and achieve no-kill in their communities.

Recent successes

• Embedded a staff member at Pine Bluff Animal Control in Arkansas for six months. During that time, we helped implement strict vaccine and booster protocols to prevent the spread of diseases like canine distemper, set up a new foster program, and held a month-long adoption promotion that increased the save rate for cats and dogs to 88% for November and December 2022 (up from 57% between January and September 2022).
  

• Continued partnering with Southern Utah University to offer learning opportunities in contemporary animal services and recently introduced three new animal services courses. Prior to this partnership, no college or university in the U.S. offered academic or continuing education opportunities in this field. From July 2022 to July 2023, 184 people graduated from Best Friends’ learning advancement programs.
  

• Supported the city of Victorville, California, as they assumed shelter operations that were previously contracted to another agency. Through the partnership, Victorville has already successfully implemented lifesaving strategies, such as suspending the admission of healthy outdoor cats and working with the community to keep pets out of the shelter.
  

What’s next

• Expanding the shelter collaborative program through “super mentors.” Super mentors will work with multiple fellows at once to accelerate progress to no-kill.
  

• Partnering with Southeast Area Animal Control Authority (SEAACA) to build a newborn kitten foster program to save some of the most at-risk pets in shelters. SEAACA is in Los Angeles County, California, one of our priority areas for achieving no-kill nationwide. The new program has already had a great response from the community.
  

• Helping key shelters that are struggling with the effects of the national veterinary shortage through the shelter outreach program. Our veterinary experts offer shelter assessments, workshops, consultations, and mentorships aimed at increasing lifesaving capacity through strategies like high-quality, high-volume spay and neuter.
  

Rallying supporters

Achieving no-kill nationwide is a community effort. That’s why we’re bringing entire communities together to save lives and inspiring more people to adopt, foster, volunteer, and advocate for homeless pets.

Recent successes

• Spearheaded and/or supported efforts that: toppled Florida’s breed-specific legislation, including a decades-old breed ban in Miami-Dade County; legally protect community cat caregivers in Texas when they return outdoor cats as part of trap-neuter-vaccinate-return programs; and stop insurance companies in Illinois from making coverage decisions based solely on the breed of a homeowner’s or renter’s pet.
  

• Engaged 3,285 people in Best Friends’ first National Action Week for Animals (NAWA). Advocates took more than 4,250 actions to help community cats, such as signing petitions and writing emails to elected officials. The 100,000th member of the 2025 Action Team (Best Friends’ grassroots advocacy group) also joined us during NAWA.
  

• Launched the Shelter Pet Data Alliance (SPDA), which helps Best Friends collect data more quickly and will result in our dataset being more current. With SPDA, organizations share data directly with Best Friends and receive feedback that helps them make better lifesaving decisions. Streamlining data collection allows us to constantly refine our strategies and respond to situations across the country at any given moment.
  

Brew and Julien

What’s next

• Rolling out a campaign to bring much-needed awareness to the situation in America’s shelters and the actions people can take to help achieve no-kill nationwide by 2025. The no-kill message will be on a highly visible national stage as well as local platforms to inspire entire communities to save homeless pets.
  

• Organizing social action campaigns to spark transformation in shelters that are not just resistant to no-kill but to implementing best practices that have been proven to save more animals’ lives. In Weslaco, Texas — where 5,000 pets are killed each year — advocates are pushing for no-kill programming that would radically improve lifesaving. Public support has already increased programming and adoptions to save lives.
  

• Developing a strategy to increase engagement and advocacy in priority areas where Spanish is commonly spoken. This will involve thinking in Spanish rather than simply translating our English-language messages and approach. By focusing on inclusion and access for every community, we can boost momentum to reach no-kill nationwide.
  

A world record

In May, on National Rescue Dog Day, Best Friends and Baby Doge Coin teamed up in Bentonville, Arkansas, with fellow food partners Blue Buffalo, Purina, I and Love and You!, Walmart, and the Trisha Yearwood Pet Collection to break the world record for the most pet food donated in 24 hours. An astounding 81,021 pounds of kibble was collected and distributed to community members and shelter partners.

Campaign contributor spotlights

Herb Huene

Animal lover Herb Huene has always had a dog by his side. The CPA and lawyer added “rescue co-founder” to his resume in 2007. The rescue group helped soldiers find foster homes for their dogs prior to their deployments to Iraq, helping to reduce the number of dogs surrendered to the local shelter. At one point, Herb had 21 dogs in his care, including an Australian shepherd named Harley. After an 18-month deployment, her person (a colonel on the commanding general’s staff) returned to pick up Harley. When he saw how happy she was, he asked Herb to adopt her. Harley spent her golden years with Herb, passing in the summer of 2022 at age 16.

Herb donates to Best Friends using his donor-advised fund (DAF) because of its ease and immediate tax deduction. He emphasizes that money within an existing DAF is already legally committed to charity, and there are no more donor tax deductions from those contributions. He also knows that the animals need his help now to find loving homes. To inspire other donors, in 2022 Herb made a generous matching gift to encourage other supporters to make first-time or increased gifts from their DAFs.

Whisker

On one end of a cat, there’s unbearable cuteness: the button nose and elegant whiskers, bewitching eyes, and Cheshire grin. Then there’s the other end: the messier one whose products cat people begrudgingly accept as the price one pays for true love. But it’s this end that inspired Best Friends and Whisker to form a partnership to save more cats’ lives. Whisker has donated its flagship product — Litter-Robot® 4, a self-cleaning litter box — to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary’s Cat World and six lifesaving centers across the United States.

Whisker has also committed $100,000 to Best Friends, a portion of it earmarked for cat and kitten adoption fees during kitten season. During the month of June, when Whisker covered all cat and kitten adoptions from Best Friends locations, 937 cats were adopted. Whisker hopes its Litter-Robot “will actively change the way volunteers interact with the shelter cats by modernizing the litter box experience, relieving the burden of manual cleanup, and allowing the volunteers to spend more time serving animals and the community.” And allowing them to spend more time at that cuter end of the cat.

Helen McCluskey

My love affair with Best Friends began as admiration for the founders, their mission, and their journey. Having lost my best buddy, Zak, in 2022, I felt the need for the healing magic of the Sanctuary and recently attended Discovery Weekend. While it was a bittersweet visit, it reinforced my commitment to give a voice to those who have none — wonderful animals who need a home.

As I’ve done many times during a long corporate career, I decided the most effective way for me to participate in this effort was (and is) to provide funding and support to enable the expert problem-solvers to do their work to get the desired results.

Best Friends has the talent, expertise, and commitment to lead the nation to no-kill. They’ve set bold goals and developed sound strategies to deliver them. I left Discovery Weekend impressed with the lifesaving progress and potential, and I’m confident we’ll achieve the goal of no-kill nationwide by 2025.

I love volunteering at the Sanctuary and will rescue another buddy (or two), but my greatest satisfaction comes from seeing the passion of everyone at Best Friends and the lives we’re saving together through the incredible work that they do every day.

Tami Brown

Tami Brown enjoys hiking and biking in Utah’s Wasatch Range with her beloved dog, Troy, whom she adopted from Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. “He’d been through a lot,” says Tami. “He really stole my heart.” He also inspired Tami to join The Legacy Challenge. She named Best Friends as beneficiary of one of her investment accounts, and a kindhearted anonymous donor gave an immediate gift of $2,025.

With gratitude

In 2016, we made a commitment to lead the nation to no-kill for dogs and cats by 2025. Every year since then, we’ve navigated challenges and celebrated innumerable successes together. You’ve been there all along — lifting up once-struggling shelters and the compassionate people who work in them, raising your hands (and your voices) for the animals, and giving thousands of homeless pets the bright futures they deserve.

With 2025 just around the corner, it’s critical that we keep pushing forward. Your continued dedication and support for the animals is what makes no-kill possible for every shelter and every community in the nation. All of us at Best Friends — most especially the animals — are wholeheartedly grateful for you.

Together, we will Save Them All.