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 animal 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.

The next phase of this work – bringing the number down to essentially zero – will take more work and some bold new initiatives.  Shelters are crowded with pit bulls, dogs abandoned after being bought from pet stores, stray cats rounded up on the streets and not looking their very best when they’re brought in, and other pets abandoned or neglected. 

As the flagship of a grassroots network of people and organizations that care about animals, Best Friends continues to lead the way towards this future.  And that's why our purpose remains: A better world through kindness to animals.