The AmPA! Lifesaving Recipe: The No Kill Recipe Part 2

When you think about No Kill as a recipe, anyone can bake the cake and achieve lifesaving success. We distilled everything we know about No Kill cities into 12 Lifesaving Ingredients-- the No Kill cities are the cake and each cake is made up of 12 ingredients. We call this method of program implementation, the AmPA! Lifesaving Recipe.

Think about an amazing cake that has just come out of the oven. This cake doesn’t bake by putting unmeasured or random ingredients into a bowl, popping it in the oven at a random temperature and hoping for the best. Instead, the cake is made by someone who measures ingredients, mixes them together in the right sequence, and bakes the cake for the right amount of time, at the right temperature. The cake is made under the control of a baker who uses a recipe. The recipe helps the baker ensure that something important isn't overlooked or something unhelpful isn't added.

It’s important to point out that the 12 ingredients in a cake can be made by different manufacturers, General Mills Flour or Pioneer Flour will have the same measurement. The same is true for No Kill, the brand of ingredients can differ, but the measurements remain the same.

Take the Shelter-Neuter-Release ingredient, for example. It doesn't matter if you use the Community Cat Model, Feral Freedom Model, as long as 100% of viable cats over 2 months of age, leave the shelter alive. Substitutions might need to be made, like substituting maple syrup for sugar. You can’t leave the sweetener out altogether, so something stands in its place. As is for cities who cannot SNR cats, you will have to find a substitute ingredient to send 100% of these cats out through another avenue, like adoption programs. To use another example, for a parvo puppy program, you can choose to use the APA! model, or the Philadelphia model, or a private practice model. It doesn’t matter which model you choose, what matters instead is that the puppies are medically treated and the goal is to treat 100% and save at least 85% of all puppies with parvo. What is important in the AmPA! Lifesaving Recipe is that all of the ingredients are accounted for and measured and nothing is left out.

The American Pets Alive! Lifesaving Recipe answers the all-important, community-stumping question, where do we start and what programs do we need to include? Instead of guessing or checking boxes, the AmPA! recipe provides tangible ingredients with measurable goals. If each ingredient is quantified and accounted for, your No Kill cake should bake and you should be able to achieve a greater than 90% live release rate for homeless pets in your community.

Here is a full list of the 12 ingredients with examples of programs and measurable goals for each.