Читать книгу Infectious Disease Management in Animal Shelters - Группа авторов - Страница 19

Advances in shelter medicine over the last decade have paralleled and supported the rapid evolution of animal‐shelter management and community policy concerning abused, homeless and free‐roaming dogs and cats. These changes, in turn, have resulted in substantially improved outcomes for shelter animals in many regions. A national database, Shelter Animals Count, (www.shelteranimalscount.org) has been developed to document these trends within the United States. Improvements to cat outcomes have been particularly striking. In 2018, the Million Cat Challenge (www.millioncatchallenge.org) announced that over 1,300 member shelters increased life‐saving success compared to each shelter's baseline by over 1.1 million cats in the four years from 2014 to 2018.

With improved outcomes, a positive cycle has been created that further supports successful programs to control disease. Though the belief that euthanasia should be reserved for dangerous or suffering animals is a widely shared value, historically, the number of live outcomes has failed to keep pace with the rate at which healthy animals were admitted to many shelters. This created a painful dilemma: either euthanize healthy animals to create space or permit crowding and allow the resultant disease to take its toll. Non‐lethal methods to balance shelter intakes with live outcomes are therefore a potent tool to maintain shelter animal health and welfare.

The practice of “Return to Field” (RTF) (also sometimes called Shelter/Neuter/Return), widely implemented in US shelters over the last decade, provides an example of this phenomenon. (Spehar and Wolf 2019). These programs involve sterilizing, vaccinating and returning cats to the location of origin, and are differentiated from traditional Trap/Neuter/Return (TNR) programs in that they target cats admitted to the shelter as part of normal animal control services, versus specifically captured with the intent to have the cat sterilized. Analysis of one of the first large‐scale RTF programs demonstrated not only a reduction in euthanasia of over 75%, but also a 99% decrease in the number of cats euthanized for URI. With an additional outlet for healthy cats other than adoption, shelter managers are far less likely to face a choice between crowding or euthanasia – and the impact on feline health can be dramatic.