Redefining animal rescue

It has been a long time! I am sorry for not writing for the past few months. Life has been crazing and finding the time to sit down and write was a daunting thought. We’ve been busy making improvements at the shelter, including a new septic system and changing our building to accommodate Pets Alive, a non-profit spay-neuter clinic. My personal life has also been a bit crazy, I am a real estate broker by day and have been amazingly busy for my first year in the business. I also married my beautiful wife Ashley earlier this year and we are expecting our first child, Ella Leigh, next spring.

I am committing myself to writing columns more frequently going forward as we have a lot of awesome things happening with the shelter in the coming year and I think breaking them down will be super important. I’ve gone into the history of the shelter a bit in past columns but at the beginning of 2020, the Greene County Humane Society would have been considered a high-kill shelter.

n March of 2020, we made leadership changes and started paving a new direction. We had tons of grandiose ideas right from the start, but all of them needed planning and work to make them realities. We have been finally getting to where the fruits of our labor are paying off. In the past three years, we have continually met the qualifications of a “no-kill” shelter, installed a surgery suite to have a vet perform spay/neuter surgeries on-site, expanded public outreach programs, pushed annual adoption numbers to levels never seen in years prior, and many more things.

I could talk all day about what we have done and plan to do, but before that I want to discuss what I like to refer to as “The Seven Pillars of Successful Animal Welfare,” as I likely will reference back to it in the future. This is a method that I’ve been continually developing and improving on over the past three years. Many rescues and animal welfare organizations work tirelessly to take in and care for stray and unwanted animals, many times to the point of burnout or bankruptcy.

There are almost always more animals than spaces to put them. My personal nature is to be a problem solver. I hate to work tirelessly to pick up the pieces of a problem without working to get to the cause.

An analogy I use is this: you and some friends are driving down the road and start to notice boxes lying in the road. You stop and pick them up. You keep driving and keep stopping to pick up more boxes. Pretty soon your car is overflowing with these boxes and you are getting low on gas. You keep grabbing boxes and trying to find a place to fit them. Eventually, you just can’t take anymore on and you are sitting in the middle of the road, frustrated and confused. This is the rut that most animal welfares get stuck in. They are always at the back end, picking up the mess. With the seven-pillar approach, if when you first came across boxes, you had gotten out to start gathering them but sent your friend speeding ahead to try to find the source, you would have found a truck with its back doors standing open, letting the boxes fall out.

Your friend could have flagged the driver down, slowed the truck and maybe eventually got the doors closed so that boxes would stop falling out. This is the approach that I wish more organizations were able to take. While they are picking up the mess that already exists, they should also be diligently working to chip away at the root of the problem. The principle of working in multiple areas to get to the root of the issues is what I’ve based the seven pillars on.

Here are my seven pillars and synopsis of how I feel they should be implemented:

• Spay / Neuter - Preventing overpopulation and unwanted animals

At the core of the problem, we have too many animals. We have unaltered animals reproducing and creating more unaltered animals. It’s an endless cycle. A welfare organization should work to improve access to spay/neuter services, whether that is by assisting with the cost, offering the services, raising awareness of available services, etc. We have offered spay/neuter vouchers for the past 10 or so years that help Greene County residents with the cost. In the past two years, we have offered some services where we have availability to the public at a low cost. This is a major reason we have worked so diligently to get Pets Alive to open a low-cost spay/neuter clinic alongside us in our building so that the public has access to the services and a reduced-cost option.

• Microchipping - Getting animals home quickly

A microchip is a small RF chip implanted under an animal’s skin. When a microchip scanner passes by the chip, it gives off a unique code that is registered to the owner and saved in searchable databases, so that the owner can quickly be contacted to get the animal back. Too often, animals get away accidentally and get picked up and taken to a shelter. The owners want to find the animal, but sometimes don’t look at the right shelter/rescue to find their pet. This means that the owner might not find their pet and the shelter/rescue has another animal that they assume was abandoned or a stray that they have to take care of until an adopter comes along. A microchip prevents this and the animal doesn’t need to sleep in a kennel.

The owner can be reached, the animal is picked up and it quickly gets to go home.

Reuniting animals with their proper owner is a great way to keep kennels open for animals that do not have homes.

• Public Assistance - Helping people keep their animals

Often when someone is looking to surrender or rehome an animal, it isn’t because they are a horrible person.

They feel they have no other options. They may be struggling to buy pet food, pay for needed vet care, not know how to properly handle their pet, lack of temporary housing/boarding, etc. Being able to offer assistance where possible and keep an animal in a home is often much cheaper than what it would cost to bring it into the shelter. Being able to identify these needs and offer options for an owner to keep their animal is another great way to prevent animals from coming into the shelter in the first place.

• Community Education - Teaching the public about animal welfare

This is simply working to educate the public about important things such as spay/neuter, microchipping, Trap-Neuter-Return, availability of services, vaccinations, proper dog handling and so on. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” I’d go on to say an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for improving animal welfare.

• Legislation - Laws and ordinances that promote animal welfare

This can be a touchy subject, because there are many different outlooks on government involvement in our lives. The fact of the matter is though, most places, including Greene County, have very little in the way of animal welfare laws. Things that could be addressed with updated legislation and funding for animal welfare, mandated spay/neuter and microchipping, licenses, oversight and limits on breeding, and minimum conditions for care such as dogs can’t be left chained to a tree in freezing weather, and so on. Laws can also be enacted to hold shelters and rescues to a higher standard such as requiring microchipping before adoption.

• Community Involvement and volunteerism ; Getting the public involved

Rome wasn’t built in a day and it wasn’t built by a single person. Getting people involved in the success of improvements to animal welfare, is crucial to its success. Community involvement could include donating, fostering, volunteering, sharing posts on social media, educating their friends and many other things. It doesn’t have to be physically coming to a place and interacting with animals. Just having support and people talking about the mission and end goal makes a huge difference, but there also needs to be volunteers because making a true impact takes a small army.

• Shelter and adoption - Housing and adopting out unwanted animals

I intentionally put this as the last pillar. I do that because I think that taking animals into the shelter and housing them for adoption ultimately should be reserved for the times when the first six pillars weren’t successful. It is not a perfect world, no matter how hard you try, you will never prevent every situation that would cause an animal to be stray, unwanted or needing to be rehomed. That is why sheltering and adoption are still vital but if successful, the other six pillars have hopefully made a major impact on the constant state of overcrowding to allow the animals that are in the shelter to get more attention and to more quickly find a great fur-ever home.

If you’ve made it to this point without stopping, I applaud you and appreciate you reading. I have been continually adding to this method. I originally started with three pillars, then went to four, then six and now seven as I see more things that are needed to create success.

At the Greene County Humane Society, these are things that we have been ambitiously working toward for the past three years and we have a long way to go, but we believe we have set the groundwork and are working towards future success.

To stay with my tradition of closing with a quote, I want to share a Norman Vincent Peale quote which was on a sign that hung in many classrooms as I went through school. This quote always meant to me that there is nothing wrong with having ambitious goals, because even if you don’t succeed 100%, you will be further than you would have been otherwise.

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Kegan is the president of the Greene County Humane Society Board of Directors.