Best Friends Animal Society is guided by a simple philosophy: kindness to animals builds a better world for all of us.

In the late 1980s, when Best Friends was in its early days, roughly 17 million dogs and cats were being killed in shelters every year. Despite the commitment of shelter workers to the animals in their care, the conventional belief was that little could be done to lower that terrible number.

Best Friends’ No More Homeless Pets campaign created a new vision: A grassroots effort to place dogs and cats who were considered “unadoptable” into good homes, and to reduce the number of unwanted pets through effective spay and neuter programs. Since then, the number of dogs and cats being destroyed in shelters has fallen to approximately 5 million a year. There has been much progress,but there is still much more to do.