ABOUT THE ANIMAL UNION

Our History

Bill Hamilton founded The Animal Union in 2010 and has been running it since, relying on the heavy lifting of an amazing, dedicated team of volunteers.

The impetus for the refocusing of its mission has been the widespread abandonment of the rescue and adoption of friendly stray cats by most major public and private animal shelters.

This movement, partially supported by Maddie’s Fund and Best Friends Animal Society, started to balloon around 2019 and was euphemistically labeled the Community Cats Movement. The movement was based on irrelevant studies that supposedly applied the TNR of feral cats to all socialized, adoptable cats without evidence of ownership. As a professional editor of technical, scientific and legal literature, Bill carefully examined about two dozen of the studies most commonly cited by community cat proponents and found no scientific basis for the categorization of friendly cats as community cats.

The Lucky Few

Thus, the only free-roaming cats offered for adoption at most shelters, including San Francisco Animal Care & Control (ACC) and the SF SPCA (which gets most of their cats from ACC), are

• friendly stray cats whose owners don't want their cats back
• cats surrendered or unclaimed by their owners (a large percentage of whom are
  euthanized)
• cats transferred from other shelters to relieve overcrowding, and
• friendly kittens between four and eight weeks of age.

All socialized, adoptable cats not fulfilling at least one of these criteria and brought in "from the field" by volunteers, including Good Samaritans, residents and cat colony caregivers, are turned away, not even impounded by shelters.

Back into the Wild

In San Francisco, volunteers are asked to house and care for stray cat(s) or to release and retrap them until they can get a spay/neuter appointment with the SPCA, which can take over a month. When the SPCA’s spay/neuter clinic finally sterilizes the cats, it also implants a microchip (registered to the volunteer who brought them in), slices off the tip of each cat’s left ear to show they were altered and should remain outside as “community cats,” and administers a flea treatment and the usual vaccinations. The SPCA then advises the volunteer to let the cats recover overnight and release them back to where they were trapped, whether or not a daily caregiver is around. The SF SPCA is exceedingly generous in providing free spay/neuter and other services for unowned San Francisco cats, and a greatly reduced charge for out-of-county cats, but the conditions for those services compromise that generosity.

As for ACC, by state law, shelters are required to offer cats at risk for euthanasia to partnering nonprofit rescue groups. ACC abandoned this practice for their most successful cat rescue groups when the groups exposed the shelter's inhumane policies.

What the Big Shelters Aren’t Telling You

On many days, because of these restrictions, so-called "open door" shelters, like ACC, have very few cats available for adoption. The unspoken advantages of this to the shelters include less work for staff and thus less need for as many staff as before the new policy went into effect; fewer volunteers needed; less cat food, supplies and medications needed; fewer euthanasias (since rejected cats die unseen outside), which artificially raises a shelter's Live Release Rate; fewer adoptions to process; and easier achievement of a balanced budget and salary raises.

Collective Cat Care

The Animal Union and other nonprofits cannot, of course, fill the gap left by the region's large shelters. Our valuable, hard-working volunteers are doing as much as possible. We are partnering with other rescue groups and individual residents to fulfill many of the large shelters' feline welfare responsibilities. With your help we can strengthen and grow those partnerships – and save more cats.