(Beth Clifton collage)
Gregory Castle was multi-talented & well-liked by all, but the Castle dynasty at Best Friends has been a disaster for dogs, cats, pit bull victims, spay/neuter funding, and reaching realistic no-kill goals
KANAB, Utah––Best Friends Animal Society cofounder and former chief executive Gregory Castle, 83, on May 17, 2025 died suddenly from an embolism.
“Born in Cranbrook, England in 1942,” according to a Best Friends statement posted to social media,” Gregory Castle “graduated from Cambridge University with a master’s in philosophy and psychology, and spent his last 41 years in Utah, where he quite literally helped build Best Friends from the ground up.”
Gregory Castle. (Facebook photo)
“Moral philosophy”
Mused Gregory Castle at the 2013 Alliance for Contraception in Cats & Dogs conference in Portland, Oregon, “My diploma says I studied ‘moral philosophy.’ I wonder what my life would have been like if I had studied amoral or immoral philosophy instead.”
“A self-proclaimed cat person,” continued the Best Friends statement, Gregory Castle “lived with as many as 21 cats during the early days of Best Friends. In recent years however, he shared his home with cats Ella and Maggie and dogs, including his beloved German shepherds, Shadow, Sunny and Marley, whom he adopted from Los Angeles shelters and who became his loyal running buddies.
“An avid runner,” the Best Friends statement recounted, and many longtime acquaintances confirmed, “Gregory completed 17 marathons over a 20-year period, including three Boston Marathons, and at 73 became the oldest person to have ever completed the grueling seven-day, 170-mile Grand to Grand Ultra through Utah’s back country.”
Gregory Castle. (BFAS photo)
“Watched for circling vultures”
Elaborated fellow Best Friends cofounder Francis Battista in a March 2018 “Salute to Gregory Castle,” posted to social media when Gregory Castle turned his nine-year role as Best Friends chief executive over to his 26-years-younger wife Julie Castle, “The Grand to Grand Ultra is a six-day, seven-night run for maniacs that starts at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and finishes up by Bryce Canyon and the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument.
“You have to set out with all your own food for seven days, bedding, and personal gear in a backpack. I kept an eye out for circling vultures, but Gregory just kept going and going.”
Admitted Gregory Castle, “You’re going to hit times where you really feel that you’re crazy. You have to just push through that.”
The run raised $200,000 in supporter pledges for Best Friends.
Gregory Castle. (LinkedIn photo)
“Rare sense of humor”
Testified Battista, now the Best Friends board president, “Gregory embodied the ethics of endurance and service, and he had a rare sense of humor.
“Back in the day, when all we could afford was our own entertainment, we regularly put on skits and absurd talent shows. I have seen Gregory perform as a type of Ming the Merciless space villain, Elvis, someone from the Village People, and assorted loopy characters of the John Cleese variety. He loves to laugh. Sometimes, he laughs so hard that he almost falls out of his chair. He is quite happy to be ridiculous.
“Gregory is from Folkestone on the southeast English coast,” Battista continued, “across the English Channel from Calais in France and the area where some of the civilian fleet came from that evacuated the British Army from Dunkirk in 1941.
“Folkestone itself was evacuated early in World War II in anticipation of a Nazi invasion,” Battista explained, “but Gregory’s father, Folkestone’s city engineer, stayed behind to keep everything running. Gregory’s mother was relocated to a safer location and Gregory was born in a country house as an evacuee.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Crackpot cult
The Best Friends Animal Society, now with annual revenues and assets each exceeding $150 million, is loosely descended from a Cambridge ecumenical religious discussion group that evolved into a crackpot cult, but survived early misadventures.
The earliest identifiable media notice of the Best Friends Animal Society founders was a brief article by Colin Frost of The Independent, published on November 21, 1966, headlined “British Cultists ‘Find Paradise’ But Went From Riches to Rags.”
Reported Frost, “Five English youths have returned home from the Mexican headquarters of a cult known as The Process. The attorney who brought them home said he found them living in rags in a disused and roofless salt factory in Xtul, a remote village [in Yucatan] on the Gulf of Mexico. The cult was founded in London,” Frost wrote, “by an English couple, Robert and Mary Ann de Grimston, as an amateur group practicing psychotherapy.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Spiritual & occult research”
“In June [1966],” Frost continued, “22 members — 15 men and seven women — left their six-story house in fashionable Mayfair and went first to the Bahamas, then on to Mexico, where after a hurricane hit they were left without gas, electricity, water or sanitation. The group lives on beans,” Frost said.
Some of the group, including Hugh Mountain, then a 20-year-old Oxford University dropout, now much better known as Best Friends Animal Society cofounder Michael Mountain, soon relocated again, this time to the United States.
Initially calling themselves “The Foundation Faith Church of the Millennium,” the group first formally incorporated in New Orleans in 1967 as “The Process Church of the Final Judgement,” claiming that their mission was to “conduct spiritual and occult research.”
Gregory Castle. (Facebook photo)
Drifting to form Best Friends
During the next five years the Best Friends Animal Society cofounders drifted to Los Angeles; wrote bizarre statements on required public accountability documents, essentially mocking bureaucracy; and staged flamboyant publicity stunts to help promote their activities and proto-New Age philosophy.
Along the way the group, including Mary Ann de Grimston, split from Robert de Grimston and his Process Church. Mary Ann de Grimston remained involved with Best Friends until her death in 2005.
Scattering geographically, the group gathered additional eventual Best Friends Animal Society cofounders.
(See Philadelphia apologizes for killing African-American animal advocates, subtitled “What if the MOVE cofounders had attended Cambridge, or the Best Friends Animal Society cofounders had come from inner Philadelphia?”)
Gregory Castle. (BFAS photo)
Angel Canyon
Time, circumstance, and a common interest in helping animals reunited the Best Friends Animal Society cofounders, as recounted by Samantha Glen in Best Friends: The True Story of the World’s Most Beloved Animal Sanctuary (2001).
Their first animal sanctuary site, near Prescott, Arizona, lacked adequate water and proved inaccessible to visitors.
Best Friends arrived at Angel Canyon, Utah, after a two-year search for somewhere better than the Prescott locale.
The location is just north of Kanab, Utah, and just south of Colorado City. Both were among the last holdout communities of traditional Mormons, including polygamists. While the Kanab polygamists had mostly moved to Mexico before Best Friends arrived, the Colorado City band remained ensconced in fortified homes until a series of FBI raids in 2006-2007, during which Best Friends reportedly took in the polygamists’ animals.
The only Kanab tourist attraction of note when Best Friends came was an abandoned collection of prop buildings used in filming some of the 92 Hollywood westerns that were made at Angel Canyon between 1924, when Tom Mix starred in Deadwood Coach, and 1976, when Clint Eastwood starred in The Outlaw Josie Wales, the last Kanab production.
Best Friends bought the site and gradually turned it into the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary of today.
Julie Castle. (Best Friends photo)
Julie Castle
Initially, to save money, the founders worked under the dormant Process Church nonprofit incorporation instead of reincorporating. They reincorporated in 1995 as the secular Best Friends Animal Society and began rapid growth conceptually promoting no-kill animal sheltering, demonstrated at Angel Canyon, where the Best Friends campus became more-or-less a teaching-and-training facility for would-be no-kill shelter board members and personnel.
“When I first joined Best Friends in 1996,” wrote Julie Castle in a posthumous remembrance, “Gregory was a quiet-natured, somewhat stand-offish Brit who could solve any problem from plumbing to electricity to internet technology to accounting to woodworking.
“It wasn’t until Best Friends asked me to help build out our presence in Salt Lake City that I really got to know Gregory.
“Back then, Best Friends was a small, hand-to-mouth organization. It seemed every day was a struggle just to keep the lights on,” Julie Castle said.
Julie Castle. (Beth Clifton collage)
Marriage
“Somewhere in the middle of our work in Salt Lake City, his calm presence, sharp mind, and very British sense of humor won me over and we were married in 1998. We lived at the Sanctuary near Horse Haven in Cottage #3, which we shared with his 21 cats, two birds, and two dogs.
Julie Castle, born Julie Stuart, is descended from a Mormon family who settled in Utah in 1847, arriving with Mormon church founder Brigham Young. The marriage thereby linked the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary with the cultural history of Utah
“Gregory was thoughtful, composed, a dignified English gentleman who analyzed everything,” Julie Castle recounted. “He was extremely intelligent, but very modest about having shared the same college at Cambridge as Prince Charles, Trinity. He loved music and played the bagpipes, flute, harpsichord, and violin. He was a goofball too.
“He loved Monty Python,” Julie Castle said, “and was part of the Footlights club, the Cambridge dramatic club that produced three of the founders of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
“He was full of endless talents,” including “learning to fly planes,” and “building a harpsichord from scratch.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Transformed Best Friends
But Gregory Castle did not become the public face of the Best Friends Animal Society until after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
When Gregory Castle did, formally succeeding Michael Mountain in 2009, who stepped down after more than 20 years, the Best Friends Animal Society lurched from a reputation among other no-kill movement leaders for enthusiastic, well-meaning frequent ineptitude, to much better focused efforts that transitioned the originally idealistic organization into a slick corporate entity that over the past 20 years has led “no kill” resolutely in multiple wrong directions.
Not that any of the 18 Best Friends Animal Society personnel now paid from $182,000 to $527,000 per year are likely to admit it.
Whether or not any of Best Friends’ strategic and tactical mistakes over the past two decades have actually saved animals’ lives, as advertised, all of them appear to have made money.
Francis Battista. (BFAS photo)
Hurricane Katrina
Explained Battista in his March 2018 “Salute to Gregory Castle,” Best Friends reached a transition point after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Instead of working with most conventional humane societies out of the Lamar-Dixon fairgrounds rescue center, under incident commander Dave Pauli of the Humane Society of the U.S., Best Friends, the Humane Society of Louisiana, and several other no-kill humane societies worked out of their own “emergency shelters in Tylertown, Mississippi, and Metairie, Louisiana.,” Battista recalled, accessing New Orleans by boat from a Winn Dixie supermarket parking lot.
The no-kill rescue efforts were haphazard. Several times the Best Friends personnel transferred truckloads of pit bulls and substantial sums of money to transport scammers who were supposed to deliver the pit bulls to no-kill facilities in the Northeast and Midwest. Some of the pit bulls disappeared en route. Some were found dead where abandoned along the way.
Some of the purported no-kill facilities were hoarding operations. Some did not even exist.
(Beth Clifton collage
Bonanza
Best Friends was not alone in being scammed. Neither was Best Friends alone in remaining on site long after local authorities asked outside rescuers to leave, as their presence was no longer needed. But Best Friends was the biggest, most visible no-kill organization participating, and as such, reaped a publicity and donations bonanza.
“Katrina thrust us onto the national stage,” Battista recounted, “but also blew us off course from our mission of working to end the killing in shelters. We emerged from Katrina with a significant disaster response operation with tons of gear: boats, trucks, RVs, generators, portable buildings, a mountain of cages and kennels, radios and satellite phones. We trained and ran mock disaster drills. When natural disasters didn’t happen, we found them in hoarding situations — rescuing 1,500 rabbits in Reno and 800 cats in Pahrump, Nevada — and then helped out after disasters in Lebanon, Peru, Haiti, Mexico and even Ethiopia.
“This was all great and valuable work,” Battista wrote, “and each was a remarkable demonstration of principle, but none of them advanced our mission to bring about a time when there are no more homeless pets. Meanwhile, a disaster on the scale of Katrina was happening every week in our shelters.
Gregory Castle. (Instagram photo)
“Stabilized the organization”
“Gregory stabilized the organization and got us back on track with our mission,” Battista assessed. “He led Best Friends through the challenging exercise of prioritizing our allocation of resources around a very simple standard: reducing noses in and increasing noses out.
“That is to say, every program that we had, and we had a lot, had to measure up with regard to two simple criteria: Did it reduce the number of animals entering the shelter system (noses in) or increase the number of animals leaving the shelter system (noses out)?
“If a program didn’t meet one of those criteria, it was cut or de-prioritized. This was tough work, and almost everyone had to say goodbye to a pet project that we were doing for legacy purposes, rather than proven impact on achieving our mission.”
That much made strategic sense.
Gregory Castle.
(Best Friends Animal Society)
“The most responsible and reliable person I know”?
Battista also praised Gregory Castle as “The most responsible and reliable person I know,” a questionable perspective in view of the irresponsible outcome of many of Gregory Castle’s subsequent moves.
First came Best Friends’ role in accepting, establishing, and promoting a 90% “live release rate” as the benchmark for an animal shelter becoming “no-kill.”
This came about through an agreement brokered in multiple stages over several months in 1995 by Maddie’s Fund called the Asilomar Accords. The Asilomar Accords were initially meant to establish uniformly agreed upon statistical norms for the animal welfare sector as a whole.
Acting on the advice of No Kill Advocacy Center founder Nathan Winograd that the initial Asilomar Accords draft failed to establish accurate criteria for accounting for the handling of feral cats, Michael Mountain withdrew Best Friends from the Asilomar Accords.
Then-San Francisco SPCA president Richard Avanzino, who was founding executive director of Maddie’s Fund, Ed Duvin, and No Kill Directory founder Lynda Foro at the 1998 No Kill Conference.
Definitions
At that time there were already two widely recognized standards for “no kill,” apart from shelters simply declaring themselves to be such. One was the No Kill Directory/No Kill Conference standard promulgated in 1995, which included that “Implicit to the no-kill philosophy is the reality of exceptional situations in which euthanasia is the most humane alternative available.”
The other standard for “no kill,” now called the “PCR,” was the per capita euthanasia rate for whole communities, all shelters combined. The PCR recognizes that “no kill” shelters cannot by themselves serve the needs of an entire community, but can contribute to a low per capita euthanasia rate by providing spay/neuter, adoption, and fostering services that animal control agencies often cannot.
Nathan Winograd.
Asilomar Accords
Gregory Castle brought Best Friends back into the Asilomar Accords after the Accords scrapped the nuances of the previous definitions in favor of the much more easily manipulated 90% “live release rate,” irrespective of which animals a shelter handles, under what circumstances.
Best Friends, the No Kill Advocacy Center, and Maddie’s Fund then took the lead in pressuring tax-funded animal control shelters as well as nonprofit humane societies to pursue a 90% “live release” rate by whatever means possible.
Gregory Castle did issue three specific prescriptions for making Utah a no-kill state, Los Angeles a no-kill city, and finally, for making the U.S. as a whole “no-kill” by 2025: this year.
The Gregory Castle prescription sounded reasonable, but left dangerous loopholes.
The first part of it was “Reducing the number of cats and dogs going into the shelters in the first place, primarily through spay-neuter programs.” This, unfortunately, opened the way to closing shelter doors to animals who might have to be euthanized.
Gregory Castle. (BFAS photo)
Cats & kittens
Second was, “Intensive care for kittens born to feral community cats and brought into shelters by concerned people or animal control officers. These kittens need, in addition to spay/neuter and vaccination services, to be bottle-fed and socialized so that they’re suitable for adoption.”
The problem there was, and is, that redefining cats at large as “community cats” left no one responsible for them, encouraged “outdoor pet-keeping” without necessarily getting cats sterilized, normalized anonymous cat-feeding in problematic places, and opened the way to “return to field” animal control, meaning dumping friendly cats found at large right back where they were found, instead of giving them a chance at owner reclaim or adoption.
(See San Diego cat control trial verdict & L.A. shelter fine expose “no kill” failures.)
Along the way, the “community cats” definition exponentially escalated conflict between cat and bird advocates.
(See Feral cats poop where someone feeds them––& that’s the big problem.)
ANIMALS 24-7 pointed out the probable consequences of calling cats at large “community cats,” instead of distinguishing between feral and stray cats, in a 2016 four-part series: What to call cats, & why it matters: evolving terms; “Vagrant” or “feral” cats; Feral cats & street dogs; and “Community cats” vs. community health.
Gregory Castle. (Facebook photo)
Pushed pit bulls
Last and most damaging, Gregory Castle recommended “Working to overturn the undeserved reputation of pit bull terrier type dogs for aggression and showing them as the great pets they can be.”
Under Gregory Castle, continuing under Julie Castle, the Best Friends Animal Society made pit bull promotion a focal program, including funding efforts to repeal breed-specific legislation.
Twenty years later, U.S. pit bull fatalities have increased from eight in 2004, with 86 total in the preceding two decades, to 59 and 52 in each of the past two years, and 639 total since Gregory Castle’s pro-pit bull decree, plus hundreds of other pit bull fatalities in other nations that did not previously have pit bull issues.
The number of pit bulls inflicting fatal and disfiguring injuries on humans in the U.S. is up from 79 in 2004 to 561 in 2024, and has topped 700 three times in the past 10 years.
Pit bull lobbyist Ledy Vankavage.
(Best Friends Animal Society photo)
Pit bull advocacy has not really saved pit bulls or adopters
The Best Friends Animal Society has succeeded in significantly increasing adoptions of pit bulls from animal shelters and rescues, but has not visibly slowed pit bull births, abandonments, impoundments, or owner surrenders.
Best Friends pit bull promotion has, however, significantly damaged the former reputation of animal shelters as the safest place for families to adopt a dog.
As of 2004, only three dogs adopted from animal shelters were known to have killed anyone in the 147 years since shelter adoptions began in the U.S.
More than 100 shelter dogs have participated in killing at least 59 people since then. Sixty-eight of those dogs were pit bulls and pit mixes. Twelve others were closely related “bully breeds.”
And about half of all dogs in animal shelters are pit bulls, half again more in 2024 than in 2004. Pit bulls still account for about two-thirds of all shelter dog euthanasias.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Progress toward “no kill” nationally has gone backward
Finally, the U.S. as a whole is still no closer to becoming a no-kill nation than it was in 2004, according to data gathered by Shelter Animals Count: see Best Friends’ no-kill by 2025 goal is not just rolling over & playing dead.
Only if one goes by the highly suspect data gathered by Best Friends’ own subsidiary Shelter Pet Data Alliance, a fraction the size of the Shelter Animals Count data base, can the Best Friends drive to make the U.S. no-kill be credited with making headway.
Meanwhile, Best Friends’ efforts to enforce Gregory Castle’s 2004 prescriptions, instead of emphasizing spay/neuter without loopholes, open admission to animal shelters, and a “safety first” approach to handling pit bulls and other dangerous dogs, have become ever more coercive and manipulative.
(See Best Friends’ no-kill initiative power play, by Ed Boks.)
Almost everyone who knew Gregory Castle seemed to like him. But outside of the circle of allied and affiliated organizations that Animal Politics blogger Ed Boks calls “The Consortium,” the predominant perspective from the field seems to be that the leadership tenure of the Castle dynasty at Best Friends has been a disaster, for dogs, cats, and genuinely getting to no-kill sheltering by spaying and neutering the most problematic segments of the dog and cat population out of existence.
(Ed Boks collage)
Who are “The Consortium”?
“The Consortium,” as defined by Ed Boks, “refers to the country’s largest and most influential animal welfare groups” concerned primarily with dogs and cats, which collectively shape sheltering policy, funding priorities, and public messaging in the United States.
This network includes, lists Boks, “Maddie’s Fund, the Koret Shelter Medicine Program, the Best Friends Animal Society, the Shelter Pet Data Alliance, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, PetSmart Charities, the National Animal Control Association, Human Animal Support Services, Outcomes Consulting, and Team Shelter USA.”
Beth & Merritt Clifton with friends.
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The post Best Friends Animal Society cofounder and former CEO Gregory Castle, 83 appeared first on Animals 24-7.