Based on a press release from earlier today from Ally Cat Allies, the new Florida Animal Shelter Tranparency Law was signed into law today.
The new law, which was proposed back in February, is designed to require shelters in the state to compile monthly and annual reports of all dogs and cats that enter the shelter, how they got there, and the number of animals outcomed to shelter or rescue groups, returned to owenrs, adopted, euthanized or died at the shelter. The revised version of the bill has a lot more categories including "born at shelter" and "released in the field/TNR"
One of the essential elements in increasing responsible life-saving is the open access of information and transparency to the public. The public WANTS animals to live, and if they are able to be made aware of high kill rates at their area shelters, will demand more. And if they demand more, eventually change will happen.
But the first step is always being able to identify when there is a problem.
And within the law, the following was labeled as the intent of the law:
"The Legislature finds that additional efforts must be made to find hoems for homeless and unwanted animals in an effor tto reduce or eliminate the euthanasia of adoptable dogs and cats. To that end, teh Legislature finds that defining the problem and assessing programs both require statistical measurement."
The bill goes into effect July 1 of this year.
I'm a huge fan of this bill and requiring records to be kept and reported. Having toiled for years just trying to get access to this information under Freedom of Information Act requests, I'm amazed at the amount of information that is simply "not available". This will certainly help in that regard - by mandating reporting that shelters should be doing anyway.