Message from ACC&D's President
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June 2006 Dear Friends,
I became the president and first staff member of the Alliance for Contraception in Cats and Dogs in January of 2006. I continue to be delighted to support this organization and our important goals! We believe that major advances in population control programs will be the greatest contributor to saving the lives of dogs and cats worldwide.
We aim to do nothing short of re-invent methods that we now use to prevent the birth of litters of kittens and puppies.
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When I joined the staff of the American Humane Association in 1994, one of my first initiatives was to create a video and workbook to market the innovation of pediatric spay/neuter (for kittens and puppies as early as eight weeks). For five years I served as executive director of PetSmart Charities. During that time, we granted over $23 million, primarily to local animal shelters in the U.S. A large percentage of those funds helped support the costs of surgical spaying and neutering for shelter pets and for low-income families whose pets would likely have created surplus litters otherwise. I am obviously a major advocate of spay/neuter! Although it was a privilege and a joy to be able to fund many, many spay/neuter programs, I grew frustrated early on at the limitations of our funding. Shelters had such a hard time affording to spay and neuter even the pets they placed in homes, let alone reaching out meaningfully into their communities to affect the source of cats and dogs that would later end up at their doorstep. Each year, they struggled to find funding for overpopulation campaigns. I felt stalled. I knew we had to find a way to stretch our funds farther and help more cats and dogs, and the people who care about them. Non-surgical methods of sterilizing dogs and cats hold that promise. To provide a safe, effective solution via an injection, and without surgery, could reduce the cost of this procedure and simplify the logistics of providing the service (not to mention making sterilization less stressful to the individual dog and cat). More crassly said, what we need is a “shot in the ass” to get that “kick in the ass” we want to go the distance in saving pets' lives!
Until now, there has been no nonprofit focused specifically on achieving this goal. Meanwhile, millions of dogs and cats worldwide suffer and die because, despite the incredible work of animal welfare groups and individual advocates, our tools don’t reach far and wide enough to prevent that suffering.
Please join me in supporting the local and national organizations that do so much for animals day to day. Also, please flex your future vision for building a humane society by supporting ACC&D’s efforts to get us quickly to the next frontier, one in which the dogs and cats born are able to have loving homes. Please join ACC&D as a donor, and if you represent an organization, please become an Organizational Partner, and help us pave the way!
For the animals,
 Joyce Briggs
President, ACC&D
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