Saving Sido: How One Dog Sparked the No-Kill Movement

Sido was a little tan-and-white dog, mixed-breed, pretty, charming and devoted to her owner. Not that different, maybe, from the dog lying at your feet while you read this.

You may not recognize her name, but she more than earned her place in the book of canine history as the four-footed inspiration for what became the modern no-kill movement, and the first life saved during a remarkable period of animal lifesaving in San Francisco in the 1990s.

When Sido's owner, San Francisco's Mary Murphy, committed suicide in 1979, her will left strict instructions that Sido be taken to her veterinarian and "destroyed." The will's executor, Rebecca Wells Smith, said Murphy was afraid no one could take the right kind of care of her dog.

But Sido was in the care of the San Francisco SPCA, and its director, Richard Avanzino, saw things very differently. When Smith went to court to force the agency to have the dog killed, Avanzino refused, vowing that all the SPCA's resources would be used to fight for her life.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/22/petscol062210.DTL#ixzz0rawwKyFB


Richard Avanzino, then-President of the San Francisco SPCA, sharing a smooch with Sido, the dog whose life he fought to save.