What are the Asilomar Accords? 

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In 2004, industry leaders representing animal organizations gathered to find common ground in an otherwise divided animal welfare field. The result was the Asilomar Accords—a common definition and a standard way of reporting shelter statistics. Since then, many of those same organizations and others put their heads together and created the Basic Data Matrix, which serves as a basis for the minimum data shelters should be collecting and reporting. In 2011, the national organizations began a discussion around how to compile a complete picture of the animals entering and leaving shelters in the United States. The result was the formation of Shelter Animals Count: The National Database, made possible by the founding organizations – ASPCA, Best Friends, The Humane Society, Maddie’s Fund, and PetSmart Charities – who provided the funding to bring this vision forward.

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Asilomar Accords: Saving Lives Not Pointing Fingers

• Working together to save the lives of all healthy and treatable companion animals

• The Asilomar Group established a system of classification to assure consistent data collecting throughout the animal welfare community. They defined terms such as healthy, treatable, and unhealthy and untreatable to ensure that the animal situation under consideration is accurately represented by its statistics. The definitions do not determine an animal’s outcome, only to create a standard for categorizing that will be uniform among all agencies. From there, the group adopted a formula to calculate the “live release rate” for both individual organizations (e.g., shelters) and the larger animal welfare community (e.g., feral cat groups, breed-specific placement groups).