Best Friends Animal Society Spotlight — October
Last month we featured the ASPCA. This month, we're rotating to one of the other rescue partners we support: Best Friends Animal Society, the organization behind the no-kill movement in animal sheltering.
This is the post where we explain who they are, what they actually do with the support we send, and why we picked them as a partner alongside the ASPCA and rotating local shelters.
If you've ever wondered what "no-kill" actually means or whether it's a real goal or just marketing language, this post answers that too.
What Best Friends Animal Society is
Best Friends was founded in 1984 by a group of people who believed the United States could end the killing of healthy adoptable pets in shelters. At the time, roughly 17 million pets were being euthanized in U.S. shelters every year. The number today is around 400,000 — still too many, but a fraction of what it was.
Best Friends runs the largest sanctuary for homeless pets in the United States, located in Angel Canyon, Utah. Around 1,600 animals live there at any given time — dogs, cats, horses, birds, rabbits, and others. Many of them have medical or behavioral needs that make them hard to place in traditional shelters.
But the sanctuary is just one piece of what they do. The bigger picture is the no-kill movement:
- Best Friends runs the national no-kill movement, a coalition of shelters, rescues, and advocates working to end shelter killing in the U.S. by 2025.
- They run programs in major cities, partnering with municipal shelters to bring their kill rate to zero. Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Houston, and others have Best Friends-led programs actively working in their shelters.
- They operate the Best Friends Pet Adoption Center in several locations, focusing on adoption events and getting animals out of shelters into homes.
- They publish data and research on shelter outcomes, pet ownership, and animal welfare policy.
- They lobby and advocate for animal welfare legislation at the state and federal level.
That's a wide scope. It's also why the "no-kill" framing — sometimes dismissed as marketing — is actually grounded in measurable, funded work. The goal isn't rhetorical. It's a target with programs attached.
What "no-kill" actually means
This is the part we want to be clear about, because the term gets used loosely.
"No-kill" in the Best Friends framework doesn't mean no animal ever dies in a shelter. It means a shelter saves at least 90% of the animals who come through its doors. The remaining 10% are typically animals with severe medical or behavioral problems that can't be safely rehabilitated, or animals whose quality of life is poor.
A traditional "open admission" shelter takes every animal that comes through the door, regardless of health, behavior, or capacity. Those shelters have historically had kill rates between 30% and 70%.
A "no-kill" shelter either limits intake (so they don't take animals they can't place) or invests heavily in medical and behavioral rehabilitation (so they can place animals who would otherwise be killed). The Best Friends model is the second one — investing in rehab.
The 2025 goal — to bring the U.S. to 90% save rate overall — is ambitious. It's also close. As of 2024, the national save rate was around 83%. The remaining work is concentrated in specific regions and specific kinds of shelters.
This is what your support of Best Friends, however it flows, goes toward. Not rhetoric. Actual programs, with measurable outcomes, in specific shelters.
Why we picked Best Friends as a partner
Same logic as the ASPCA — but with different reasoning:
1. The no-kill goal is the right goal. We could have picked any animal welfare organization. We picked ones with concrete, measurable objectives. "End shelter killing by 2025" is the kind of target you can audit. We trust organizations that publish targets they can be held to.
2. Sanctuary model is unique. Most animal welfare organizations run shelters or advocacy. Best Friends runs a sanctuary — a place where animals who can't be adopted (because of age, medical needs, behavioral issues) live out their lives. That's a specific commitment that most organizations don't make. We think it matters.
3. Local partnerships. Best Friends partners with municipal shelters across the country to bring save rates up. This means support we send to Best Friends often flows to local organizations in regions our customers live in. The geographic reach matters.
4. Transparency. Like the ASPCA, Best Friends publishes annual reports, financial breakdowns, and outcome metrics. The numbers are public. We trust organizations that publish their own numbers.
5. Founder alignment. The Best Friends story starts with a group of people who said "the current system is wrong and we can fix it." That's the same founding energy we try to bring to Cozy Sips. We like partnering with organizations whose origin story is about fixing a broken system rather than managing it.
How our partnership with Best Friends works
This is the part where we want to be careful, same as with the ASPCA. We're going to describe the structure without claiming specific dollar amounts we can't verify monthly, because that's the right way to handle this kind of promise.
Here's the honest version:
We support Best Friends on a monthly basis. The support comes from a portion of our profits, and we publish the actual numbers on our Our Impact page once they're confirmed. We don't claim a specific percentage of revenue that sounds impressive but is hard to verify — we aim for an amount that's meaningful for us and useful for them.
We don't take a cut for marketing. When we mention Best Friends, it's because we support them, not because they're paying us to. The "partnership" in our copy means we send them money, not that we have a co-marketing deal.
The spotlight rotates monthly. September was the ASPCA. October is Best Friends. November is a local shelter. The rotation is intentional — we want to spread awareness across organizations doing different kinds of work, and we want our customers to know about all of them.
What your bag of coffee actually does
Here's how the support flows when you buy a bag of coffee from us.
A portion of what you paid supports organizations like Best Friends. The cumulative monthly support we send helps fund:
- The sanctuary in Utah, where 1,600+ animals live
- The municipal shelter partnerships in LA, NYC, Atlanta, Houston, and other cities
- The adoption programs that get animals into homes
- The advocacy work that supports no-kill legislation
- The data and research that tracks the 2025 goal progress
We can't tell you "your $19.99 bag funded 0.4 adoptions." That's not how general fund donations work. What we can tell you is that we send something every month, and Best Friends uses it alongside the rest of their funding to do the work above.
If you want to learn more about Best Friends' specific programs and how they allocate donations, their official site has the full breakdown.
Why this isn't a marketing gimmick
Same principle as our ASPCA spotlight post. We want to be explicit about what we do and don't do:
What we do:
- Send monthly support to the ASPCA, Best Friends, and rotating local shelters
- Publish the numbers on our Our Impact page when verified
- Mention the partnerships honestly in our copy, without leading with it as a sales pitch
- Rotate the spotlight so each organization gets visibility
What we don't do:
- Round up customer transactions at checkout
- Claim a specific percentage we can't verify monthly
- Use rescue imagery in marketing purely for emotional appeal without naming the specific partner organization
This is the version of the partnership we'd be comfortable explaining in detail. If it doesn't sound impressive enough, that's the right kind of uncomfortable.
How you can support directly
If our monthly contribution isn't enough and you want to do more, Best Friends takes direct donations on their site. They have a monthly giving program if you want recurring support.
You can also volunteer or foster through their network — Best Friends maintains a directory of regional partners across the country.
We're not asking you to do this. We just want you to know how, if you wanted to.
For more on why we built Cozy Sips with the rescue partnership as a foundational piece, our Why Cozy Sips Exists post walks through the origin story. And if you want to see the specific numbers once they're verified, the Our Impact page is where they live.
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Every bag you buy helps support the rescue partners we work with — including Best Friends Animal Society. We'll be back next month with the November local shelter spotlight. If you have a local shelter you think we should know about, reach out and tell us about them.
Brew slow. Sip slow. 🐾
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P.S. The "no-kill" terminology isn't universally loved in animal welfare — some advocates think it oversimplifies and creates false divisions. We tend to agree with some of that critique. But Best Friends' measurable target (90% save rate by 2025) and their municipal shelter partnerships are concrete enough that we feel good supporting the work, regardless of whether "no-kill" is the perfect phrase.