Two tiny kittens sitting side-by-side on a soft blanket in a metal kennel

Here’s what’s happening in animal shelters across the U.S.

A dog or cat is killed in America’s shelters every 90 seconds, simply because they don't have a safe place to call home.

Understanding what’s happening in our animal shelters — including how many shelters there are in the country, how many animals they take in, and how many they save — helps us figure out the best way we can work together to save more lives.

This data about shelters allows us to see where pets are most in need and where we should focus our efforts to save lives. With this information — and with the help of caring people like you — we can save the lives of homeless dogs and cats.

To explain that data, we’ve broken down the findings into key takeaways.

Dogs and cats are needlessly killed in shelters every day

But together, we can save the lives of healthy and treatable pets in shelters who are often killed simply due to a lack of space.

We call this goal "no-kill," and collecting data across the nation is a big part of achieving it. To reach no-kill, a shelter needs to save at least 90% of the animals it takes in. We call this percentage a save rate.

Typically, no more than 10% of animals a shelter takes in can’t be saved because they have irreparable medical or behavioral issues that compromise their quality of life. That’s how we arrived at the 90% benchmark.

Each day in 2023 across the United States, 13,000 animals entered shelters, and 83% of them were saved.

To reach our goal of achieving no-kill nationwide, we would have needed to save 415,000 more dogs and cats last year. Roughly 7 million households are planning to add a pet to their family this year.

If just 6% more people chose to adopt versus purchase their pets, we would end the killing of dogs and cats in our nation's shelters.

Communities want to be no-kill

In communities all around the country, most residents want to stop the needless killing of animals in shelters.

According to our data, communities want homeless pets to leave shelters alive:

80% of people feel it is very important or essential to have no-kill shelters in their area.
74% of people are more likely to support a shelter working toward becoming no-kill.
51% of people would donate to a local shelter or rescue group to ensure shelters become no-kill.

And we know it’s possible. In fact, in 2023, three states (Delaware, New Hampshire, and Vermont) maintained their no-kill status, and one new state (Rhode Island) became no-kill. An additional four states (North Dakota, Montana, Connecticut, and Maine) were within 200 animals of being no-kill.

62% of the shelters across the U.S. were already no-kill in 2023, and that list continues to grow. But there’s still much more work to do to get the entire country to no-kill in 2025. Save rates vary depending on where you live, so it’s important to check to see how your community is doing.

Is Your Local Shelter No-Kill?

How do animals end up in our communities’ shelters in the first place?

In 2023, 4.8 million homeless dogs and cats end up in shelters in communities all over the United States.

Some lost and stray animals are brought into shelters by people trying to help or by animal services officers. Some are given up by their families for financial reasons or a lack of pet-inclusive housing. And some come in from other shelters in hopes that they will have a better chance of being adopted at a different location.

The number of homeless pets coming into a shelter is called intake, and knowing a shelter’s intake pattern is important to understand how to help it with lifesaving. The data has shown us that for many shelters, adoptions have stalled while intake has increased. In 2019, 2.6 million pets were adopted from shelters; in 2023, 2.3 million pets were adopted from shelters. That’s a 13.2% decrease.

There's not enough space for the homeless pets who need it most, especially among some of the most vulnerable animals entering shelters: kittens who require round-the-clock care, big dogs who are less likely to be adopted because of pet-restrictive housing and insurance policies, and cats who prefer to live outdoors (we call them community cats) who often don’t leave shelters alive because they’re not used to being around people.

Once pets end up in shelters, our goal is to ensure they make it out safely

While it would be ideal if pets didn't end up in shelters in the first place, once they're there, our main goal is to find them safe places to call home.

In 2016, when Best Friends made the bold goal to lead the country to no-kill in 2025, 71% of homeless dogs and cats were making it out of America’s shelters alive. Since then, that number has increased to 83%. Increasing the national save rate from 71% to 83% since 2016 means that an extra 3.7 million cats and dogs have been saved in just eight years.

In 2023, 1.2 million cats and 1.1 million dogs were adopted from shelters. The number of cats being adopted from shelters is down 5.9% since 2019, and the number of dogs being adopted from shelters is down 16.8% since 2019.

We can help even more pets find homes in 2024 and beyond when we let people know the lifesaving impact they can have when they adopt a pet from a shelter — instead of buying a dog or cat from a breeder, online retailer, or pet store.

We can also make sure more pets leave shelters safely through fostering and giving them lifts to places where they’re more likely to be adopted. When pets are fostered in a home — even for a night or two — that frees up space in the shelter. And when they’re taken to other shelters or areas of the country where they’re more likely to be adopted, that saves even more lives.

As for community cats (the cats we mentioned earlier who prefer to live outdoors), many are unlikely to be adopted, which puts them at risk of being killed in a shelter. Housing these cats also diverts resources from caring for other pets and finding them homes. Community cats can live happy, long lives when they’re returned to their outdoor homes. That's why we need our communities to allow trap-neuter-vaccinate-return (TNVR) programs that prevent cats from reproducing.

Together, we can help animal shelters around the country save more lives

Best Friends is working together with shelters and rescue groups to save the lives of dogs and cats who end up in their care. We call them our network partners, and they’re in communities all across the country.

Best Friends is committed to supporting lifesaving in shelters, and we see the challenges firsthand. We work with over 4,900 network partners, providing direct support through training, grants, hands-on help, and other programmatic support as needed. Our network partners have a save rate of 84% compared to shelters that are not network partners, which have a save rate of 79%.

Well-supported staff are crucial for effective animal sheltering in a community. Working in a shelter is not easy. It can take a toll, so we've also worked with shelter employees across the United States to understand how their work affects their mental health.

Animal shelter staff experience burnout and compassion fatigue at levels comparable to — or even exceeding — first responders like firefighters, police officers, and nurses. Burnout reduces the likelihood of shelter staff staying in their roles, according to original research conducted by Best Friends.

Our communities can support shelter staff when we volunteer and foster to help alleviate their burden. Donations also make it possible to provide the staffing resources needed to keep both people and pets safe in our animal shelters.

NetworkPartners/FindaNetworkPartner

Find a network partner near you today

Each of our network partners needs caring people like you to adopt, foster, donate, volunteer, and advocate to help save the lives of pets where you live.

Smiling person holding a small dog while sitting in a yard next to a house

How is your community doing?

Animal shelters, local stakeholders, lifesaving groups, and individual community members are working together to save at-risk pets right where they live.

Is Your Community No-Kill?

Connect with us on social media to stay in the loop about the lifesaving progress we’re making together. 

The most accurate dataset of animal sheltering in the U.S.

To determine where shelters need the most help, we’re using data to inform our decisions and looking for new ways to use what we find. Each year, we collect this data and share the dataset publicly in something we call the national dataset.

To collect the data in the 2023 national dataset, Best Friends conducted extensive research to explore and determine which shelter and community characteristics impact a shelter’s intake and live outcomes. All data and analysis prepared for the 2023 national dataset were done by Best Friends Animal Society.

Data was collected via an online data-sharing platform, Shelter Pet Data Alliance, as well as directly from shelter websites, forms completed by shelters, files provided by state governing bodies, and through Freedom of Information Act requests.

This information is used to track the effectiveness of our direct lifesaving efforts, such as foster and community cat programs, and it helps us plan future strategies.

While we were able to capture a robust and representative sample of shelters for 2023, some of the nearly 4,000 shelters in the U.S. had not yet provided data. For those, we used advanced statistical methods that took 30 factors into consideration to estimate 2023 data, including 2022 or older data from nearly 2,000 shelters.

The data for individual communities and shelters around the country can be found on the pet lifesaving dashboard and is updated monthly.

About Best Friends

Best Friends Animal Society is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across the country, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

As recently as 2016, 2 million cats and dogs were killed in shelters in this country simply because shelters didn't have the community support or the resources to save their lives. That number is now down to 415,000 per year, but there’s still work to do to ensure a bright future for every dog and cat in America. 

Best Friends operates the nation's largest no-kill sanctuary for companion animals and is committed to saving the lives of homeless pets by working with shelters and passionate people like you. We’re sharing our resources and what we know to help shelters around the country achieve no-kill in their communities.

Together, we will bring the whole country to no-kill in 2025.