Some animal shelter managers around the U.S. have started practicing "return to field" (RTF) policies over the past ten years. ("return to field" means treating friendly stray cats as if they were feral: Sterilize and vaccinate them and return them to where they were found, rather than put them up for adoption or see if their guardians claim them.) This change was facilitated by generous grants from Maddie's Fund and the Best Friends Animal Society. The participating shelters operate in cities that are culturally and historically very different from San Francisco, yet their improved numbers after adopting RTF (lower kill rates and higher live release rates) are cited by ACC management as the reason for adopting the same policy. This is like forcing a square peg into a round hole.

Shelters studied in RTF surveys include one shelter each in Albuquerque, NM; Baltimore, MD; Columbus, GA; Jacksonville, FL; Louisville, KY; Philadelphia, PA; San Antonio, TX; and Tucson, AZ. Most are conservative sunbelt cities in the South, Southwest and East.

These shelters had abysmal numbers due to limited budgets and underfunding, overwhelming pet surrenders and stray impounds, an apathetic public, animal-unfriendly local and state laws, time devoted to animal abuse investigations (like dog fighting), and limited or inconvenient operating hours. None of these liabilities have applied to ACC. After these shelters enrolled in subsidized, three-year "return to field" programs for tame strays and intensive "trap neuter return" programs for feral cats, they reduced the median euthanasia rate of cats by 83%; their median intake rate of cats dropped by 32%; and their median live release rate increased by 53%.

Put another way, since the national average of lost cats claimed by their guardians from shelters has been only 3%, the shelters that enrolled in the new programs learned that simply sterilizing the remaining unclaimed, healthy cats, vaccinating them, and returning them to where they were found not only lowered their numbers of adoptable cats killed (which had alienated the public) but improved their live release rates. Once the cats were back out in the "field" the shelters could wash their hands of further welfare responsibilities, such as warehousing the cats until space was needed for more cats, when the longer-housed cats had been killed. (Shelter staff assumed that if the cats didn't come in emaciated they must have had a consistent, albeit unknown, food source.)

ACC, on the other hand, has maintained an exemplary record in those numbers for decades, facilitated in its partnership with the S.F. SPCA and many partnering nonprofit rescue groups. There has been no need to use such a heavy-handed and less-than-ideal tactic as "return to field." That approach, though obviously preferable to killing, callously throws the cats back into the "lion's den" of outdoor risks. ACC's live release rate for cats, 94% in 2021, has been over 90% since 2014 — without resorting to modified "return to field" tactics. The euthanasia rate for cats from 2006 through 2021 has been under 9.8%.

Besides, ACC sterilizes and vaccinates only those cats who are about to be adopted, not "return to field" cats, who aren't even allowed to enter the shelter. Rather than RTF, ACC's policy should be called "LIF," for "leave in field."

Of course, there's always room for improvement. ACC's first director, Carl Friedman, even said, "We can't claim complete success until we're no longer needed," meaning that, at some point, residents will be doing such a good job in raising and caring for their pets, neither the residents nor their pets will need ACC's services any more. San Francisco's ACC has been closer to that gold standard than almost every other shelter in the U.S. ACC management should stop backtracking and discard its blunt, inhumane and unpopular version of "return to field" as soon as possible.