About Best Friends Animal Society
A better world through kindness to animals
Best Friends Animal Society is guided by a simple philosophy: kindness to animals builds a better world for all of us. In the late 1980s, when Best Friends was in its early days, roughly 17 million dogs and cats were being killed in shelters every year. Despite the commitment of shelter workers to the animal in their care, the conventional belief was that little could be done to lower that terrible number.
Best Friends' No More Homeless Pets campaign
created a new vision: A grassroots effort to place
dogs and cats who were considered "unadoptable"
into good homes, and to reduce the number of
unwanted pets through effective spay and neuter
programs. Since then, the number of dogs and
cats being destroyed in shelters has fallen to
approximately 5 million a year. There has been
much progress,but there is still much more to do.
The next phase of this work -- bringing the number
down to essentially zero -- will take more work and
some bold new initiatives. Shelters are crowded with
pit bulls, dogs abandoned after being bought from pet stores, stray cats rounded up on the streets and not looking their very best when they're brought in, and other pets abandoned or neglected.
As the flagship of a grassroots network of people and organizations that care about animals, Best Friends continues to lead the way towards this future. And that's why our purpose remains: A better world through kindness to animals.
