If you do animal welfare work in Alabama, you have heard about Huntsville. It is the state’s proof point. Intake was over ten thousand a year, the city put real money into spay/neuter, and intake fell by almost half. I have used that number myself, in writing, more than once.
Last week I got the primary records. Aubrie Kavanaugh, who wrote the book on Huntsville’s shelter reform, sent me forty-two pages of the shelter’s own annual reporting, 2008 through May of this year. Not a summary and not a press release. The Maddie’s Fund forms, the Asilomar report, the National Federation of Humane Societies data matrices, the monthly kennel stats. I pulled every year out of them.
The part everybody quotes is true. The part that comes after it is the part I have not seen anyone publish, and it complicates the story we have been telling.
The series
Total dog and cat intake, City of Huntsville Animal Services:
2008: 9,721
2009: 10,248
2010: 8,277
2011: 8,374
2012: 7,189
2013: 7,248
2014: 5,899
2015: 5,185
2016: 5,110
2017: 5,496
2018: 5,136
2019: 5,500
2020: 4,333
2021: 5,233
2022: 5,661
2023: 6,036
2024: 5,726
2025: 5,542
Through May of this year the shelter has taken in 2,026 animals, against 2,273 for the same five months of 2025. That is about eleven percent down year over year.
One disclosure on confidence, because it matters. Everything from 2013 forward I read out of the documents’ own text layer and checked against a year I had already verified by eye. The 2009 through 2012 figures came off scanned pages with no text layer, and I would not stake a decimal point on them. The shape of that early decline is not in question. The exact digits are.
What the series actually says
The famous claim covers 2009 to 2014. Intake fell from 10,248 to 5,899, a drop of about forty-two percent in five years. That is real and it is a big deal.
Then it stops. From 2015 through 2019 the number sits between 5,110 and 5,500 and goes nowhere. Five straight years, no pandemic, no explanation available except that the decline ran out.
Then 2020 falls off a cliff to 4,333, and everything after that gets complicated. It climbs three years running, to 5,233, then 5,661, then 6,036. The 2023 figure is higher than any year since 2014. Then it comes back down, 5,726 in 2024, 5,542 in 2025, and this year running eleven percent under that.
So it is not a slope. It is a steep fall, a long flat, and then four years I do not think anyone should read as program performance at all. Here is why.
The four years nobody should score
March 2020 did two things to these numbers and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is obvious. Shelters closed to walk-in surrender, field operations pulled back, and people stayed home. Intake dropped everywhere. Huntsville losing 21 percent in 2020 is not a program working.
The second gets almost no attention and matters more. The surgeries stopped. The ASPCA advised shelters on March 19, 2020 to suspend elective procedures, and low-cost clinics across the country shut down. National spay/neuter volume fell 22 percent that March and bottomed at down 80 percent in April. Researchers later put the shortfall at roughly 2.7 million surgeries in high-volume clinics through the end of 2021, with 91 percent of surveyed shelters carrying a backlog. It did not bounce back. By 2022, 93 of 189 clinics tracked were performing fewer surgeries than in 2019, twelve had closed for good, and six had stopped doing surgery at all.
A litter not prevented in 2020 is intake in 2021, and its offspring are intake in 2022 and 2023. That is the lag you would expect, and it is the shape in front of me.
Look at the raw juvenile numbers rather than the total. Animals up to five months old: 1,330 in 2019, 1,061 in 2020, then 1,498, then 1,585, then 1,781 in 2023. That 2023 figure is the highest of any year in the file, about 20 percent above the pre-pandemic peak. Then it eases to 1,661 in 2024 as clinic capacity comes back, and 2025 was the biggest surgery year in the program history, 3,693 sterilizations.
I am not going to tell you that proves the mechanism. The juvenile share bounced between 24 and 29 percent before COVID too, and one city cannot isolate a national shock. What I will say is that the 2020 dip is not a win, the 2021 to 2023 climb is not a failure, and anybody using either one to argue about whether prevention works is scoring a game that got rained out.
The thing I have to say before I go further
I would love to hand you Huntsville as clean proof that funding sterilization drives intake down. I cannot, because the national numbers did close to the same thing over the same years.
Shelter Animals Count reported national intake up about ten percent from 2021 through 2023, a plateau in 2024, and a 2.1 percent drop in 2025, roughly 121,000 fewer animals. Huntsville climbed when the country climbed and fell when the country fell. That is a confound sitting in the middle of my proof point, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. It is also the same shock. Every clinic in the country lost the same two years of surgeries, so the national curve is not an independent check on the local one.
Huntsville also did more than one thing at once. Aubrie’s book makes the case that the turnaround was driven by shelter reform and advocacy, and she pushes back on spay/neuter-as-the-answer framing. She has the receipts on the outcome side. The live release rate was 73.6 percent in 2014, 88.09 percent in 2023, and 93.25 percent this April. That is a real achievement and it belongs to the people who did shelter reform in that city, not to any surgery program.
What I take from it anyway
Three things.
First, a single city’s annual intake total is a poor instrument for judging whether prevention is working. It moves with the economy, with housing, with a pandemic, with whether the front door was open that year. Anyone funding a prevention program on a three-year horizon and measuring it by total intake is going to get a noisy answer and probably the wrong one. The only clean stretch in this whole file is 2015 through 2019, and what it shows is a decline that stopped.
Second, there is a better number sitting in these same reports and almost nobody publishes it. Huntsville splits every intake by age, and that split is the only thing in this file that told me anything the total could not. It is how I could see the surgery deficit arriving on schedule. It is also why I know the last decade of prevention work did not shrink the litter pipeline, because the juvenile share never went down. Blount County’s first quarter this year was 54 percent under six months. The age cutoffs differ and the periods differ, so that is not a clean comparison, but the gap is not subtle either. Puppies and kittens arriving today are last season’s unaltered females.
Third, dose has to keep pace with population. Huntsville Animal Services covers the city plus the unincorporated parts of Madison County. The county runs field enforcement, does not operate a shelter of its own, and says every animal it impounds is transported to the Huntsville shelter. That is a service population of roughly 370,000 today, in a county that has grown hard over these seventeen years. Flat intake against a growing population is real progress in per-resident terms, and it is still not the same as the problem shrinking.
I will say plainly what I could not find. Neither the city nor the county publishes when that county arrangement started. If the service area expanded partway through this series, part of the climb after 2021 is a bigger map rather than more animals. So I am not putting a per-resident rate on the early years, and nobody else should either until the city confirms the boundary history. Either way, the middle of this series is what running to stand still looks like.
Why I am publishing my own inconvenient data
Two weeks ago I wrote that the first time somebody catches prevention people inflating a number, every other number we have published becomes suspect and the whole argument dies. I meant it. Then I pulled the records behind my own favorite talking point and found the second half of the chart.
The line I had been repeating, that Huntsville cut intake and has held near that level since, is right through 2014 and then does work the data will not back for the last four years. Nobody caught it. I am saying it here first, before somebody else pulls these same records and says it for me.
Prevention does not have the institutional weight to survive being caught exaggerating. It also does not get anywhere by publishing only the graphs that flatter it.
What you can do with this by Friday
Pull your own intake for the last three years and split it by age. Under five months and everything else. Most shelters are already collecting it on the same forms Huntsville uses and reporting only the total. No new software, no grant, no consultant.
If your juvenile share is falling, your pipeline is closing even when your headline number has not moved. If it is sitting near half your intake, you have a litter problem that no adoption event is going to touch.
Then publish it. The field cannot get better at prevention while the only number anybody reports is the one that moves for twelve different reasons.
Send this to one person who has not connected these dots yet. The math only matters when more people are running it.
Join the shift to prevention.
Donate to Prevention and fund what happens before the shelter.
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