What to Expect When Expecting Kittens
Apr 01, 2025 Cat carrier after cat carrier of tiny little mews arriving for intake. Streams of fosters coming and going as they bring kittens for exams or pick up a new litter to take home. Volunteers bustling around the nursery, doing chores and keeping kittens fed. That’s a typical spring day at the Neonatal Program nursery at Austin Pets Alive!. APA!, which pioneers innovative lifesaving programs designed to save the animals most at risk of euthanasia, accepts over 2,000 kittens into its program each year. Kittens come from...
Hays County Contract Update
Mar 25, 2025 Partnership between Hays County and Austin Pets Alive! for Pet Resource Center to Conclude Austin Pets Alive! (APA!) has announced the conclusion of its partnership with Hays County in managing the Hays County Pet Resource, Education, and Research Center (Hays PRC). The conclusion comes after the Commissioner’s Court voted to terminate the contract to re-evaluate how to proceed with animal services in Hays County. Since its inception in April 2023, this collaboration has been instrumental in providing essential resources to...
APA! Encourages People To Adopt During PetSmart Charities National Adoption Week
Mar 24, 2025 AUSTIN, TX – MARCH 24, 2025 – Pets are family, and can bring hope, companionship and unconditional love to their people. Adopting a pet in need of a home can bring joy to people and also impact communities, alleviating strain on overcrowded shelters. That’s why Austin Pets Alive! (APA!) will bring adoptable pets to the Southpark Meadows Petsmart, 9300 S I-35 Frontage Rd, Austin, TX 78748, on March 29 and March 30 from 12 pm to 3 pm for PetSmart Charities® National Adoption Week, taking place March 24 –...
APA!’s Shelter Pet Hospital Wish List
Mar 20, 2025 Since April of 2024, we’ve seen the reality of new facilities begin to take shape, with the ground breaking of our future APA! Shelter Pet Hospital. Now we are nearing the end of the construction of our hospital, built to serve the pets in APA!’s care, whether located at the shelter or in a loving foster home. With the walls up, the utilities on and the dedicated spaces meticulously planned, we need help furnishing the building with items like a stainless steel table, lockers, and shelving. We are looking to our...
Urgent Freeze Fosters Needed
Feb 18, 2025 Austin, it’s happening again! The temps are dipping into freezing and below starting today and lasting the remainder of the week. With the pending extreme winter temps headed our way we’re working to move 57 animals — 50 dogs and the current 7 Barn Cats to sleepover, foster or adoptive homes! While we do have working heaters in every kennel building, these are “open-air” kennels, meaning they can be drafty and being made out of concrete, not an ideal place to spend a night in these extreme...
Austin Pets Alive! Transport Program Saves 10,000 Lives
Jan 30, 2025 In early 2021, when Texas faced one of the most severe winter storms in its history, the Austin Pets Alive! Transport Program emerged out of desperation to save shelter animals across the state. What began as an urgent effort to move as many pets out of harm’s way as quickly as possible has since evolved into a full-scale program. Now, just four years later, we celebrate an incredible milestone: 10,000 lives saved! When our teams reflected on the work accomplished in February 2021, it became clear that this was more than...
The Trickiness of TLAC
Jan 28, 2025 Our main shelter, named Town Lake Animal Center and located in the heart of Austin, has provided a space for us to save so many lives. We’re grateful for this space though due to its age, it does present some challenges. We’ve been scrappy over the years with how we address those challenges, but there are limitations to what and how we solve them. Watch this video to learn more! [embedded content] Source: Austin Pets...
New year, Same Pets.
Jan 07, 2025 The term “long stay” is one that has many different interpretations within the sheltering system, but when examined closely, each interpretation can be whittled down to this: a pet that has found itself in the shelter for an undesired period of time. Over the last decade, thanks to some deep data keeping by a particularly involved volunteer, we’ve gleaned that January happens to be a month of promise for long stay pets. While we don’t know the “why,” historically at APA!, January typically sees...
50 Homes For Dogs By New Year’s Eve To Begin Emergency Shelter Renovations
Dec 27, 2024 Austin Pets Alive! has received permission from the City of Austin to make urgent repairs to our kennels and long-overdue renovations to our 70-year-old shelter that will ensure better care, comfort and safety for our animals and staff. We’d like to begin the work as soon as possible, but several steps must be taken before we can begin. First, we need to move as many dogs as possible into foster or adoptive homes so that we’re operating with just 100 open kennels. We’ve been working towards our 100 kennels goal...
A holiday message from APA! CEO Dr. Ellen Jefferson
Dec 24, 2024 APA! Supporters, I’m ending this year thinking about miracle workers like you — and the difference you make for pets like Furby, a 6-pound puppy who recently came through our doors at Austin Pets Alive!. We took this golden doodle puppy in from Austin Animal Center, because of his urgent medical state. He arrived with bruising on his abdomen and serious neurological issues, possibly caused by blunt force trauma. The tiny dog couldn’t even sit up on his own, though he kept trying — Furby’s...
