Richard Avanzino spent his career asking the animal welfare field to imagine things that did not yet exist.
Avanzino, founding president of Maddie’s Fund and one of the most influential figures in modern animal welfare, died Sept. 20 at age 84. He leaves behind a field profoundly different from the one he entered, and a legacy that includes helping establish Shelter Medicine as an academic discipline and veterinary specialty.
Long before saving healthy and treatable shelter animals became a widely shared goal, Avanzino believed the status quo could change.
One early glimpse of that conviction came in 1979, when he was president of the San Francisco SPCA and a dog named Sido arrived at the shelter after her owner died. The owner’s will directed that the healthy dog be euthanized. Avanzino refused to accept that outcome, setting off a legal and legislative battle that ultimately saved Sido’s life and helped change California law.
The public response stayed with him.
“I knew then the American people were ready for a transition,” Avanzino later recalled.
Over the decades that followed, he helped lead that transition. When he became the founding president of Maddie’s Fund in 1999, he brought an ambitious vision for a country in which healthy and treatable shelter animals would find homes, and a conviction that achieving it would require changing not just what shelters did, but what they believed was possible.
For Avanzino, veterinary medicine was essential to making that possible.
Building a field
Today, Shelter Medicine is a recognized veterinary specialty, with academic programs, research, evidence-based standards, and veterinarians trained specifically to address the health and welfare of animals in shelters.
That world did not exist when Avanzino began his career.
Shelters often had little or no access to veterinarians, and sick animals were frequently euthanized rather than treated. Veterinary schools offered few opportunities to study Shelter Medicine, and shelter practice itself had yet to develop the academic standing it holds today.
Avanzino understood that changing outcomes for shelter animals would require changing that.
“If we really were going to cure the injured and the ill and the poorly behaved, we needed to have the medical expertise readily at hand for shelters,” he said in a 2014 documentary about the development of Shelter Medicine.
Under Avanzino’s leadership, Maddie’s Fund invested in developing that expertise. In 1999, the organization funded the nation’s first Shelter Medicine residency at the University of California, Davis. That resident was Dr. Kate Hurley, now Director of the UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program, where she oversees its profound and global impact on the field.
Maddie’s Fund went on to support Shelter Medicine education at veterinary colleges across the country, helping move a once-emerging area of practice into the academic mainstream.
Avanzino understood something fundamental: shelter animals needed more than veterinary medicine transplanted from private practice. Shelters presented their own challenges in infectious disease, population health, behavior, resource allocation, and the care of large numbers of animals simultaneously.
As he put it, a shelter was “different than a person’s private pet, but it’s also different than a herd of cattle.”
Shelter Medicine needed its own expertise.
A partnership with the University of Florida
Avanzino’s relationship with the University of Florida grew out of work already underway in the community.
Alachua County, Florida, was one of the handful of communities Rich selected for funding in a national experiment in animal welfare philanthropy. “He reasoned that motivated animal welfare organizations collaborating through data sharing, joint events, interagency animal transfers, and a growth mindset could reach a point in which healthy and treatable animals were no longer euthanized for space if those coalitions were adequately funded,” said Dr. Cynda Crawford of the UF Shelter Medicine Program.
A delegation of local organizations led by Dr. Randy Caligiuri, then the recently-installed director of Alachua County Animal Services, convinced Rich to take a chance on this Southern community and its rampant pet overpopulation challenges where fewer than one in three pets left the shelter alive. Over the period of 2002-2009, Maddie’s Fund contributed $3.56 million to local shelters, rescues, and spay/neuter programs via the Maddie’s Pet Rescue Project, resulting in a save rate that increased more than 300% from only 29% to more than 90% during the project.
Maddie’s Fund worked closely with UF faculty members during the project, including Dr. Crawford and Dr. Julie Levy, Director of the UF Shelter Medicine Program, as coalition partners representing the College of Veterinary Medicine and Operation Catnip. The success of the Alachua County project and others in Rich’s experiment cemented a focus on funding projects involving collaboration among diverse community stakeholders that persists at Maddie’s Fund to this day. What’s more, Maddie’s Fund never accepted donations from the public and instead asked donors to contribute to their local shelters.
Avanzino saw firsthand both the need for shelter-specific veterinary expertise and the potential for a veterinary college to develop and share that knowledge.
In 2008, he announced a $1.7 million Maddie’s Fund grant establishing Maddie’s Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine.
It was an investment not simply in caring for the animals in shelters at that moment, but in creating the veterinarians, research, and knowledge that could improve care for shelter animals far into the future.
The relationship continued to grow. In 2015, the year Avanzino retired as president of Maddie’s Fund, the foundation announced it had reached a record-setting $11 million in grants to expand Shelter Medicine education at UF. “In total, Maddie’s Fund has contributed more than $15 million to the UF Shelter Medicine program to support faculty and staff positions, veterinary student education, shelter consultations, disease outbreak interventions, research, and national projects like the Million Cat Challenge,” said Dr. Crawford. “This support continues today with Maddie’s Million Pet Challenge and research to improve access to heartworm treatment in marginalized communities.”
By the time of his retirement, the transformation Avanzino had envisioned was well underway. Shelter Medicine had become a board-recognized veterinary specialty. Universities were conducting research addressing the questions shelters encountered every day. Veterinary students could pursue Shelter Medicine education and advanced training. Shelters facing infectious disease outbreaks could turn to specialists for strategies that saved animals who once might have been euthanized simply to stop the spread of disease.
For Dr. Levy, who first met Avanzino when she was a veterinary student and he was leading the San Francisco SPCA, the transformation unfolded over decades. In 2017, Maddie’s Fund honored Dr. Levy with the Avanzino Leadership Award, named for the man whose belief in lifesaving and Shelter Medicine had helped make much of that work possible.
“I’m grateful that we were invited to participate in the wake Rich created,” she said. “I’m proud of the advances we’ve made as a result, especially in the areas of humane care of community cats, managing infectious disease threats, and access to spay/neuter at scale. But our pinnacle achievement is building training programs for veterinary students and working professionals who’ve fanned out to spread this work across the globe. Rich dropped a pebble, and its ripples will compound his impact for generations to come.”
A vision carried forward
Avanzino never regarded Shelter Medicine as a finished project.
“Shelter Medicine, like any medical program, seems to have a never-ending need,” he said in 2014. “These require the specialty expertise and knowledge of shelter veterinarians to help us reach the next plateau.”
More than a decade later, that next plateau is still being built.
Shelter Medicine continues to expand its understanding of infectious disease, population health, behavior, community medicine, access to veterinary care, and the many factors that determine whether pets remain with their families or enter shelters at all. New generations of veterinarians are entering the field, while online education is bringing Shelter Medicine expertise to veterinarians and animal welfare professionals far beyond the universities where the discipline first took root.
That continuing evolution may be one of the most fitting measures of Avanzino’s legacy.
He saw possibilities before the systems needed to achieve them existed. He believed animals who were sick or injured could be treated instead of euthanized. He believed shelters could become places focused on lifesaving. And he understood that realizing those possibilities would require knowledge, evidence, collaboration, and veterinary expertise.
Near the end of the 2014 documentary, Avanzino described a philosophy that extended well beyond Shelter Medicine.
“None of us can do it alone,” he said. “It’s everybody working together.”
The field he helped build is still doing exactly that.