Think Before You Get a Dog

You may have seen this video--I found it on Stumpy's blog here.  I plan to forward it to some of my Shelter friends.  While actors are reading the voiceovers, the excuses are the ones I hear every day at the shelter.  Watch it.  Share it.  And thank you, Stumpy!

The Volunteer Arms Race of Dedication

In the 10 years I’ve been doing animal rescue work, I’ve found that disputes and divergences are rampant among the rescue community.  Animal rescue work is a highly emotional enterprise, and it attracts tireless, but strongly opinionated people.  It’s extremely challenging to get people to sign on to a single course of action—which is why groups tend to splinter and re-splinter as people choose to pursue their own view of what needs to be done.

One core problem we have as volunteers is that we are not affiliated with a 501(c)(3) group.  We work as a loose network, with only minimal oversight provided by the County.  Registered 501(c)(3) groups do work with the Shelter, but we don’t have a dedicated (privatized) group that runs the Shelter. The County runs the Shelter.  The head honcho is a Constable, which gives the entire endeavor a police-law enforcement sort of mentality.

Our volunteers end up in an arms race of dedication—with the pressure to do more and more.  This weekend, I was at two events, and was gone from my own dogs from 8:30 a.m. to 9:20 p.m., except for a brief stop to feed and run my own animals.  

At the second event, a large off-site event, I did not stay to the bitter end with the Off-Site Coordinator, who still had to oversee the return of about 20 animals to the Shelter, plus finish paperwork.  Not mention she had the two or three loads of stinky blankets shoved into her van.  My guess is that this volunteer didn’t get home, whereupon she still had to tend to her own foster dogs, wash the dirty blankets, and take care of her own needs.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find out she collapsed into bed about 1:00 a.m.

When new people begin doing off-sites, they plunge in full force—one twenty-something man and his girlfriend hauled 12 large dogs to a Wine Festival and adopted 7, with a “promise” from someone to come on Sunday for one of the 4 remaining dogs.  The couple expressed amazement that everyone couldn’t have this sort of “success”—after all, the man told me, they took photos of each dog and made up professional flyers for each animal, plus they bathed all their dogs before the event. 

I felt like such a slacker—I don’t bathe my Shelter dogs and only make up flyers for my individual fosters.  I did keep my mouth shut, though, and didn’t comment on how many dogs might be returned from that event once the festival-attendees lose the glow from their wine-tasting.

Between the volunteers who bathe and haul, the ones who spend hundreds of dollars out their own pockets to provide outside veterinarian care for the Shelter dogs, the ones who hijack their family’s bathtubs and fill them with newborn puppies, and the ones who create “kitten hotels” in their spare bedrooms, we aren’t lacking for dedication.  But sometimes I wonder if our volunteer work is actually hurting more than it helps.

Certainly the animals benefit, but one fact remains:  no matter how much we do as volunteers, the dogs and cats, puppies and kittens keep coming in to the Shelter.  Our local Craigslist brims with animals up for sale or re-homing.  Backyard breeders park their pickups on busy roadsides and offer purebred puppies for sale.  We have a “Puppy Store” in the area and another pet store that sells puppies and kittens in the local shopping mall.  Our newspapers are chock full of classified ads peddling animals.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep plugging along—I may not bathe the big dogs I haul to Off-Site Events, and I don’t take home litters of puppies to nurse along,  but I’m in this for the long haul.  Pacing myself is the key.

Overheard at the Shelter's Front Desk

Some Things I Wish Our Clients Knew

I answered the phones yesterday afternoon at the Shelter. I am a volunteer, not a County employee. We had a particularly challenging run of clients, on the phones and in the lines at the clinic front desk.

Here are some things I wish our clients knew:

1. The County does not provide comprehensive veterinarian services. Our "clinic" is to a Vet's office as the Redi-Clinic at the grocery store is to a primary care doctor, with even more limitations. We dispense shots at low-cost as a courtesy service to residents. We dispense a variety of medicines to our adopters to combat symptoms of illnesses in recently adopted or fostered animals. We do not have any way to offer bloodwork, full exams, or even fecal smears. We aren't deliberately trying to deny your animal services, it's just not feasible.

2. The Shelter is not a Pet Store. We rarely have full tabs on our "inventory." Even if I have done a complete walk-through, I cannot accurately say whether we have any Pomeranians, Yorkies or Siamese cats. The facility covers nearly an acre, with at least 80 dogs in each of the three adoption rooms. There are approximately 500-600 animals--cats, dogs, puppies, and kittens--in our system at any time. The only thing I can recommend to phone shoppers is to visit us.

3. Unfortunately, I cannot help you find your lost pet over the phone. I cannot put you on hold and go look for your black and white cat--we probably have at least 20 black and white cats. Nor can I leave the phone and go look for your Lab mix. We have three hundred Lab mixes. You need to come to the Shelter personally, preferably with a couple good photos of your pet, and do a full walk-through with a staff person or volunteer. You also need to know that we are not the only animal facility in the area. Trying to find a lost pet is a frustrating task that requires you to do on-site visits. If you pet is lost, YOU have to be the advocate.

4. If you adopted or fostered an animal from us, or if you are interested in a particular animal, please, please have the paperwork in front you when you call. I can help you better if you have the animal's ID number, which is sometimes called a kennel number. It is on your paperwork and it is displayed on the kennels. Names change, genders are entered incorrectly, and the computer will only access an animal by its ID number.

5. I DO care about our animals. I am not trying to avoid serving you. However, I rarely have the answer to any question more complicated that our address right at my fingertips. Please be patient, and know that I am doing my best when I say, "Good afternoon, Montgomery County Animal Shelter."

Shelter Dogs Head to Aggieland

Texans take their college rivalries seriously—the faithful alumni “bleed” orange (UT Longhorns), maroon (Texas A&M), or scarlet (Texas Tech). We have slogans with hand signals: Hook ‘em Horns; Gig ‘em, and Guns Up! Our mascots are animals: Bevo the brown and white Longhorn, Reveille the collie (who is the highest ranking Cadet), and Midnight Matador the coal black quarter horse (ridden by the Masked Rider). And a “House Divided” is one where one child attends A&M and the other attends Texas Tech.

My son is a junior at Texas Tech, but I have to give a big kudos to those Texas Aggies. Yesterday, our Shelter embarked on a new program—thanks to the connections of our Off-Site Adoption Team Leader—we are sending the first round of 10 female dogs to the Vet School at Texas A&M in College Station (70 miles north of our Shelter) where the dogs will be fully vetted and spayed as part of the school’s hands-on training program. If not adopted by the students or staff in Aggieland, the dogs will be returned to our Shelter, where we will find them homes. The University covers the costs for all aspects of their involvement.

I spent yesterday at the Shelter, helping Dr. Ryan, our Director and Veternarian select and prep the dogs. We focused on adoptable dogs from the Blue Room. We also tried to select a mix of fairly healthy dogs in order to boost their chances for placement through their exposure at the University . This task was harder than it sounds.

We have mostly Black Lab mixes, and many of our dogs are badly infected by mange. Others are heartworm positive. And a disturbing number of our current dogs are heavily pregnant. While we crouched in front of the kennels—me holding the quivering dogs while Dr. Ryan pulled the blood samples for the SNAP heartworm tests—a stoic American Staffordshire was giving birth to a litter of puppies in a kennel shrouded with a blanket to give the birthing mom a little privacy.

When I peeked in on the dog, she had eight tiny puppies of all different colors, each about the size and just as floppy as Beanie Babies. She was licking the tiny pups clean of afterbirth and gave me a serious eye.

Meanwhile, we worked up kennel cards for each of our 10 females—we did the heartworm tests and gave vaccinations, and in some cases gave names to dogs that had none. An air-conditioned van will come from the University to fetch the dogs and those who aren’t selected by adopters will be returned next week. Small medical complaints will have been addressed and the dogs will be clean and well-rested, and the next 10 dogs will head out to College Station. Meanwhile, we now have 10 slots in the Blue Room for new dogs. This is a good thing because we’re overloaded with incoming animals.

So to the Vets at Aggieland, I gladly give a “Guns Up!” Thanks, Aggies, for giving our dogs a second chance!

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Photos of Texas College Mascots courtesy of the Interwebs

Happy Foster Mother's Day!

Spike, a young pit bull mix currently available at the Montgomery County Animal Shelter in Conroe, TX (www.fmctas.org), is counting to three in hopes that he will find a foster-mom, or even better yet, a forever-mom who will teach him how to be the dog that he can be!

Happy Mother's Day to all the women who volunteer to help make the world a better place for animals--the Puppy Holders, the Kitten Cuddlers, the Dog Transporters, the Kennel Cleaners, the Towel Washers, the Chief Poop Inspectors, the Paper Filers, the Blog Writers, the Dog Walkers, the Dog Bathers, the Photographers, the Advocates and the Legal Watchdogs!

Guarding Against Burnout

Observation: The Shelter receives an endless parade of abandoned, unwanted, surrendered, forgotten, left-over dogs.

I place one in foster here, adopt-to-foster another, see the finalization of the adoption of a third dog, and take another foster home. Four, eight, 10, 25, 32 dogs—maybe a few more—so far this year have come into my advocacy as a volunteer for my county Animal Shelter. I have lost one foster dog to distemper (Queeny, a heeler mix who I nursed for more than a week), returned one foster back to the Shelter (Darla, who bit my own dog) and have seen at least three of my “adoptions” return to the Shelter.

What am I doing wrong? That’s the question that arises—and it is one of the first symptoms of burnout.

For the past two weekends, I’ve not done Off-Site Adoptions, and my team leader coordinator is frustrated with me. Last week, I wanted to celebrate my daughter’s 15th birthday on April 11th, and I had church obligations Friday and Sunday. Plus I had an emergency vet visit.

Yesterday, we had our second day of extremely wet weather—we recorded more than five inches of rain at our house between Friday and Saturday. Many of our Off-Sites were cancelled due to the weather. I could have helped or led one, but didn’t.

This morning, I declined to run an Off-Site because of church obligations. My church services let out at 12:15 p.m. By the time I come home, change and get to the Shelter it is after 1:00 p.m. Getting animals and getting to the local PetsMart can take up to an hour. If I don’t pack up and leave the PetsMart by 3:00 p.m., the Shelter staff leaves before I arrive back at the Shelter. Unloading animals and finishing paperwork takes at least 30 to 45 minutes, and generally consumes an hour. By now it is 4:45 p.m. I’m exhausted, the dogs have missed the feeding time, and in the brief time I was at the PetsMart, I may not have completed any adoptions.

Frustration builds. This is another symptom of burnout.

It was not easy to tell my Team Leader I will not be volunteering Off-Site today. She is frustrated, too. She sees PetsMart locations without our presence. She sees dogs that languish in the Adoption Room. She tries to be five places at once. I don’t want to see her burnout. But the danger is there.

I want to volunteer. I will continue to volunteer. However, I can’t do it around the clock, every weekend. I don’t like to haul six dogs to a PetsMart and do all the set-up and take-down by myself. And on the days there are no adoptions, it is depressing. No matter how many hours we invest, the dogs keep coming into the Shelter.

Our volunteers are awesome and dedicated beyond belief. However, when we crash in burnout, it hurts us and our families. And it hurts the dogs. Succumbing to guilt when we can’t staff every event does nothing to help to the dogs. There will always be more dogs. We have to focus our energy, and pace ourselves for the long haul.

How do you guard against burnout? What works with your group? Please leave me your thoughts.

Post-Exchange--Dogs Deserve Freedom

I am finding my way slowly into the blog world of animal rescue. The first blog I came upon is Dogs Deserve Freedom (DDF), at http://dogsdeservefreedom.blogspot.com/ I had been reading as a "lurker" for some time. Her passion for justice and love of animals fills DDF's posts!

I owe DDF a thank-you for providing me with the nudge I needed to start my own blog. Back in early March, I was reading the DDF blog and realized I wanted to write about the same things. That same day, I designed a banner and uploaded my own blog. I added DDF to my "Blogs I Follow" list and I check it often to see what is posted and who is reading. I'm still learning how to use the blogging tools, so please forgive me that I don't yet know how to highlight the link. Drop by if you haven't already sampled "Dogs Deserve Freedom."

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Vintage dog graphic, scanned from my personal collection.

Nathan Winograd Seminar

Just home from an all-day seminar held in downtown Houston with Nathan Winograd, the renowned and outspoken voice for “No Kill Shelters.” Eight hours later, my head is aching from the statistics, the step-by-steps, the exhortations, and the swell of strong emotions that come from hanging around the rescue-and-shelter crowd all day long.

Much of what Winograd said—and emphasized, and re-emphasized—is found his book, “Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America” (2007), but the whirl of numbers and the constant references to the handful of shelter which have actually implemented the Winograd-style no-kill model makes me feel just a bit like I’m getting a hard-sell.

I know I’m supposed to feel empowered, but instead I feel a bit like I do after watching those infomercials for amazing home-gym sets or the Malibu Pilates chair—yes, it could happen, but probably not in my world.

Sure, I agree that “euthanasia” is a euphemism for killing. I avoid the term “killing” around pre-teens, but don’t hesitate to clarify it to those old enough to face the facts. I totally support Trap-Neuter-Release, although our shelter doesn’t formally offer any such program. And I whole-heartedly agree that changing the bureaucratic system requires patience, persistence and more tenacity than it takes to snatch a pig’s ear away from my miniature pinscher.

But emotions and enthusiasm aside, I wonder if the dedicated, hard-working rescue-and-shelter advocates I work with could set aside the rivalries, squabbles and back-stage tensions that hamper the effectiveness of our own volunteer programs and associated 501 c3 groups. The county’s bureaucratic machine tolerates all our efforts, but I’m not sure how seriously they would take us if we approached them with Winograd’s hard line. My feeling is that the County would just pat our collective heads and wait for us to tear ourselves apart from inter-group struggles.

Winograd mentions the problems of egos among those who control the reins of power. Of course, Winograd is no retiring wall-flower. Most rescuer-and-shelter folk (and I include myself in this group)are not immune to the crippling illness of egomania. I try to stay out of the petty dramas, but I have succumbed to temptation in the past.

I need to mull over Winograd’s message, and peruse his book again (I read it when it first came out a couple years ago). Right now, though, I need a break from saving lives. I simply need to cuddle up with my dogs (including my foster) before tomorrow’s off-site adoption event.
What’s your take on Nathan Winograd’s No-Kill Equation? Leave a comment and let me know.

What I Do on Weekends

On Fridays, I go to the shelter, select some dogs from the Adoption Room and put “off-site” tags on their kennels, then on Saturdays and Sundays, I haul the dogs in the back of my minivan to various locations (PetsMarts, bookstores, pet-gift stores and the like) hoping to place dogs in good homes. Ideally, I am saving a shelter dog’s life by finding it a loving, forever home. The reality is that I’m doing the best I can NOT to rent puppies. In the dog-rescue arena, however, cute, cuddly puppies and small lap dog always win out over the adult dogs.

The big black dogs are ignored as people lift up the soft, floppy lab babies or the speckled beagle-mixes or the fluffy shepherd-hounds. The medium-sized brown dogs are passed over if there is anything—adult or puppy—that looks like a Chihuahua, even if that critter is too tall, long-backed, sickle-hocked and snappish. The nine-month old adolescent dogs—the ones who were smooched on and loved over as puppies—jump and bang against their crates, clamoring for attention because no one ever taught them basic manners.

People come in with amazingly detailed shopping lists—“I want a white female malti-poo.” Or “We’re looking for a black-and-tan dachshund puppy.” My personal eye-roller is “We want a dog that won’t get too big.” I generally ask the potential adopter, “Show me with your hand how big is ‘too big’.” The person may hold their hand at least knee-high, but they’ll often add: “I don’t want anything over 25-pounds.”

Meanwhile, my portable crates are filled with soulful eyed coonhound mixes, eagle-eyed Australian cattle dogs who need day-jobs, and, of course, the dime-a-dozen lab and retriever types who bring new meaning to the word “boisterous.” Not one of these dogs is close to weighing 25 pounds.
If they can’t find their shopping-list dog, people often fall in love with the puppies. And all too often those puppies end up in a shelter several months later as untrained, leggy, and wildly exuberant not-quite-adult dogs. These “teenage” dogs have it roughest—they don’t have the cuddle-currency of a puppy, and since they often are not quite housebroken (many owners take a lax stance on the potty issue, so the dog never quite gets the routine down) and lack even basic leash training, they’ll be passed up, again and again.

Even my best adult dogs don’t stand a chance against the puppies. Every shelter volunteer will tell you about the amazing, awesome, superb and wonderful adult dogs we have seen in the kennels. But it’s an uphill battle trying to match these animals with the right family—and those cute puppies don’t make the job any easier. Combine the puppy factor with the fact that many adult dogs enter the shelter system for shaky reasons (yard too small, schedules kids won’t care for the animal, people are moving, and it’s no wonder more animals than ever need loving homes.

So my weekends are spent with kennel-crazed shelter dogs. I put collars on them, spritz them with doggie perfume, then lavish as much attention on them as I can—walks, ear rubs, a little basic command-practice and lots of treats. And when an adoption match-up works, I know that I’ve at least done a small part in saving one dog. But I won’t rent you a puppy.