Asilomar Accords

The ASPCA is a founding signatory to the “Asilomar Accords,” developed in August 2004 to express the shared mission of a variety of animal welfare groups in the United States and their willingness to collaborate with one another toward the common goal of significantly reducing the euthanasia of healthy and treatable dogs and cats in this country. Among the guiding principles of the Accords was this important statement: “We, as animal welfare stakeholders, agree to foster a mutual respect for one another. When discussing differences of policy and opinion, either publicly or within and among our own agencies, we agree to refrain from denigrating or speaking ill of one another. We will also encourage those other individuals and organizations in our sphere of influence to do the same.” As a signatory to the Asilomar Accords, the ASPCA supports full and open cooperation among agencies and the public in collecting and sharing animal sheltering data and statistics as a first step in the process of decreasing the numbers of at-risk animals in a community. The Asilomar Accords has several measures that were designed to be defined at the individual community level. The ASPCA's focus is on comparing data on a national level, and has a need to have objective definitions that were used for all communities. As a result, the ASPCA does not use several of the Asimolar Accord measures. [See Data Collection and Reporting]