FAIR's Vision

To promote quality adoptions and improve lives for animals and their families until there are no more homeless pets in Pima County.

FAIR's Mission

The Foundation for Animals in Risk is a non-profit, no-kill animal rescue organization that is committed to:

• Rescuing animals from kill shelters and finding them permanent homes;
• Alleviating the suffering of animals caused by neglect, cruelty, and ignorance;
• Educating the community about responsible pet ownership through our youth and adult volunteer programs;
• Working cooperatively with reputable animal welfare groups in activities including, but not limited to, spay and neuter programs; and
• Aiding law enforcement's efforts to investigate and prosecute crimes of animal cruelty.

FAIR's Position Statements

FAIR's Governing Board has approved a set of core position statements that you can read as a PDF document.*

*This document requires the free Adobe® Reader®.

FAIR started around March of 1995. A couple of volunteers working at an adoption center for Pima Animal Care Center (PACC) grew tired of sending the unadopted animals back to die. In an effort to buy them more time, the volunteers started stashing animals in their own homes and those of other volunteers.

The volunteers quickly grew in number and on April 26, 1996, they incorporated. Two years later, on December 1, 1998, FAIR was recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a Section 501(c)(3), tax-exempt organization. FAIR is also proud to comply with the national no-kill standards.

The Definition of No-Kill

The use of the term no-kill has been controversial ever since its inception. Does no-kill literally mean saving every life that is received by a shelter, regardless of the expenditure of resources that might require? Or does it mean saving only the adoptable or treatable animals, with euthanasia reserved only for non-rehabilitatable animals? What about animals with injuries or diseases that can be treated, but at a tremendous, perhaps even crippling, cost to the shelter's resources? Clearly, animals that are unhealthy or temperamentally unsound should not be adopted to the public.

Compounding the issue is the meaning of the word adoptable. Does adoptable only refer to animals that are healthy and old enough to be adopted right now, or does it include animals that may be made well or will become old enough regardless of the cost to the shelter?

While these definitions will undoubted change with time, for now, the animal rescue community commonly understands no-kill to mean that no adoptable animals are euthanized and defines adoptable to mean an animal that is currently healthy and temperamentally sound, such that it can be adopted to the public. In practice, however, euthanasia may be prescribed for animals that, while treatable and hence restorable to adoptablity, would require an excessive expenditure of resources such that the impact on the organization is unjustifiable. Furthermore, an adoptable animal can become unadoptable if it becomes ill or temperamentally unsound while in the shelter's care.

Within these definitions, FAIR is a no-kill animal rescue organization. FAIR only euthanizes an animal upon the advice of a veterinarian or if it has or develops a behavioral or temperamental defect that could pose a health or safety risk to the public or otherwise make the animal unsuitable for placement as a pet.

FAIR, however, goes even further in that we will not euthanize any animal that can be treated with the expectation of a good quality of life after recovery (giving due consideration to the reasonableness of the expenditure of resources) and/or will care for an animal until it is old enough to be considered adoptable. Additionally, FAIR's definition of adoptable animals frequently includes animals that are old, deaf, blind, disfigured or disabled.