Animal Adoption Center of Blount County

Shelter Data

The Animal Census Reporting Act (Alabama Code §§ 3-10) requires animal shelters to compile a monthly report of shelter data. The data below is from the Blount County shelter’s monthly reports.

Intake

Intake is a tally of pets taken in by the shelter. Blount County takes in animals via the following three routes:

• Owner Surrenders are pets taken in at the request of the owner. The shelter is under no obligation to accept surrenders.
• Strays are pets impounded by animal control officers or brought in by residents. The shelter is required to intake strays.
• Seized pets are removed from the owner by an officer in accordance with the custody procedure delineated in Cruelty to Dog or Cat § 13A-11-240 et seq. Seized pets cannot leave the shelter except by court order. The shelter has, thus far, categorized seized pets as strays, so it has not been possible to track the number of seized pets.

*2025 data includes Jan. through June. The AAC stopped reporting intake of other species.

Extremely High Intake: Animal Adoption Center of Blount County intake for 2022 to 2024 has ranged from 33 to 43 animals per 1,000 residents. This is an extremely high per capita intake compared to shelters nationwide, according to Best Friends 2021 data, even accounting for the expected higher intake in rural and poorer areas. Best Friends recorded an average intake of 25.5 animals per 1,000 residents for counties matching Blount’s highly rural, moderately socially vulnerable status.

Upward Trend: The already-high intake increased 30% from 2022 to 2024. Will 2025 intake end that trend?

What Can the Animal Adoption Center of Blount County Do to Reduce Intakes? Even comunities with higher intake rates have succeeded in securing live outcomes for well above 90% of pets. But the higher the intake, the greater the challenge. Tthe AAC has the opportunity to reduce intake through:

• High Volume, Low-Cost Spay & Neuter: Blount County residents have many options for low-cost sterilization, and the AAC reports that nearly all pets adopted from the shelter are now sterilized prior to release to their new family.
• Cat TNR Programs: Trap, neuter, return (TNR) is the only effective and humane method of stabilizing populations of feral and friendly community cats. The AAC has not implemented a TNR program.
• Pet Retention Programs: Surrender counseling leads people to keep their pets more than half of the time. Food banks, trainer referrals, grants for vet care, short term foster plans, and pet help desks are also instrumental. The AAC does no meaningful surrender counseling, the number of accepted owner surrenders is high and rising, and pets are accepted from other counties all while increasing numbers of animals die at the AAC.
• Proactive Redemptions: A large number of animals that end up in shelters are actually family pets. Some may be rehomed, others destroyed without their family’s knowledge. Blount County has the opportunity to encourage microchipping (such as by holding an at-cost or sponsored microchip event and including microchipping with adoption) to raise the reportedly low percentage of county pets that have a microchip and to facilitate the reunion of pets with their owners — especially while still in the field (without a trip to the shelter). Currently, animals are scanned for microchips only once they arrive at the shelter.

Intake by Owner Surrender

*2025 data includes Jan. through June.

The shelter accepted 53% more surrendered pets in 2024 than 2022. If the shelter continues to accept surrenders at 2025’s current pace, 2025 surrender intake will far exceed previous years.

Intake of Strays

*2025 data includes Jan. through June.

Stray intake increased 21% between 2022 and 2024. Will 2025 continue a decline from 2023’s peak?

Outcomes

• Outcomes represent pets who have left the shelter.
• Live Outcomes include:
  • Adopted pets go home with individuals and families who come to the shelter from Blount County and sometimes other areas.
  • Rescued pets are taken in by nonprofit rescue organizations and sometimes transported to other areas of the US and even internationally.
  • Reclaimed pets are reunited with their owner.
  • Cat TNR (trap, neuter, return) is another possible live outcome; however 2025 shelter data indicates no utilization of TNR.
• Non-Live Outcomes include:
  • Killed includes euthanasia of irremediably suffering animals and killing for reasons unrelated to the animal’s health. (The shelter does not accept pets for owner-requested euthanasia.)
  • Died is the number of animals who died in the shelter from other causes.
• Live Release is the percentage of pets who left the shelter alive. This rate is calculated by dividing live outcomes by total outcomes.

*2025 data includes Jan. through June.

The percentage of live outcomes decreased 15% from 2022 to 2024. Thus far in 2025, adoptions and reclaims are at a four-year low, and rescue is at a four-year high.

Month-by-Month Outcomes for 2025

September: Dog adoptions reached a new high for the year-to-date at 43 (though it should be noted that the AAC recorded an average of 53 canine adoptions per month in 2022–2024 and an average of 68 in September of the past three years). All other months had recorded between 21 and 32 canine adoptions except for July at 41. Feline live-release, at 33%, was the lowest since Sept. 2023 (when 58 cats were taken in, of which 43 were killed). Out of the 96 animals taken in as strays, only 2 canines (and no felines) were reunited with their owners.

June: The 56 non-live cat outcomes included 9 adult cats and 47 kittens up to 5 months old, according to the data; all were listed as unnatural deaths. The 19 non-live dog outcomes included 4 deaths at the shelter (2 adults and 2 puppies) and 15 who were killed (8 adults and 7 puppies).

About the Data

You are welcome to review the raw data as provided by Karen Startley, shelter director:

• 2025 (file will be updated when Dec data is available, or please ask)
• 2024
• 2023
• 2022

Prior the shelter’s 2025 transition to electronic calculation, there were inconsistencies with the raw data. For example:

• In 2024, there was a difference of 200 pets in the intake and outcome numbers. While a small difference is expected since there are pets in the shelter from one year to the next (the difference in the two previous years was 13 and 22), 200 is well over the number of pets in the shelter at any one time, indicating a large number of missing outcomes and/or extra intakes.
• Live release rates were miscalculated on the shelter’s handwritten data sheets. The live release calculation is the number of live outcomes divided by the number of total outcomes; the shelter had instead calculated as live outcomes divided by total intake.
• Annual data did not match totals of monthly data. Monthly data was typically more accurate. For example, the 2023 annual data page showed an intake-outcome discrepency of over 400 pets, but the total of the monthly numbers came much closer to balancing.
• There were some transcription errors on the shelter’s sheets, such as the exact duplication of total intake, total adoption, dog adoption, and cat adoption numbers in March and April 2023.
• Calculation methods varied: return adoption and animal control numbers are sometimes in addition to surrender and stray numbers, and other times are already figured into surrender and stray numbers.

These issues became evident when the data is entered into a spreadsheet and calculated by formula. The result is that the shelter’s data prior to the 2025 transition mentioned above was challenging to input and analyze, and some issues continue (seized pets continue to be listed as strays rather than as seizures, for example). The 2002 through 2024 numbers in the tables above are derived from a spreadsheet in which I entered the shelter’s data to make it possible to analyze. Please ask if you would like the file.

(Data for other species, which has previously included hamsters, guinea pigs, and rabbits, is no longer listed on shelter records, as indicated by the question mark.)

Your thoughts, feedback, and ideas are always welcomed.