Implement pet support services with this free course
Looking to add more pet support services for your community? Maddie’s® University’s free, self-paced course, Pet Support Services, is for you! By offering pet support services, you will help keep pets with their families and out of your shelter. Pet Support Services programs are not hard to implement; you can start by retraining your current intake staff and giving your field officers the tools and training they need. You can scale your program as you listen to your community members, discover the gaps in your current...
6 Cheap—and Even Free!—Ways to Get More Lost Pets Back Home Today
Getting lost pets back to their families is always a top priority. It’s a mission with extra urgency when shelters are full, and getting fuller with every passing day—and of course here’s July 4, right on the horizon, with all the lost pets those boom boom skies will bring. We know. We know! And we’re here to help. Here are six inexpensive, some even completely free, ideas that you can start implementing today to help you reunite more pets with their people—so they’ll be home snoozing on the couch...
Treat First-Time Foster Caregivers Like Trial Adopters & Other Lessons from the Pandemic
Listen to our interview with Dr. Lisa Gunter, the Maddie’s Fund Research Fellow at Arizona State University, about her new research into dog fostering during the pandemic, and how shelters can apply her findings to expand their foster programs and save more lives. The audio from this piece was transcribed using an automated transcription service. Please excuse any typos or incorrect patterns of speech. HASS: Hi, I’m Arin Greenwood, a writer with HASS. I’m so pleased to be speaking with Dr. Lisa Gunter, the Maddie’s...
How to Expand Veterinary Access, Increase Revenues, and Prevent Burnout
[embedded content] Veterinary care is expensive, and can be hard to access—causing pets to go without needed treatments, and be given up to shelters. This in turn contributes to burnout among shelter workers, veterinarians, and veterinary staff. The Open Door Veterinary Collective is working to change that. This nonprofit, founded in 2021, has developed a business model for nonprofit, for-profit, and government veterinary clinics that prioritizes access to care, and increased revenue. In addition to helping keep families together and...
These free communications kits will help you get word out about fostering, space crises, and more
This is a guest post written by Human Animal Support Services and HeARTs Speak. When you share your organization’s support for keeping people and pets together, it helps spread awareness of new kinds of safety net support available to members of your community—while also helping to redefine the role of animal services and reduce judgment of families in crisis. But getting the word out about community-focused sheltering isn’t always easy, especially for organizations with small (or even nonexistent) marketing and...
Animal Welfare Has a Cruelty to People Problem
These are real quotes taken from different animals organizations’ actual social media posts: “I told them never to get another dog again because they are shitty people.” “Shitty humans should never have dogs, cats, children or any other dependents.” “I would go live in my travel trailer hitched to my Jeep in the Walmart parking lot before I would dump my dogs anywhere let alone in a high kill shelter!” “Horrible people, pray they never get another animal.” “If you can’t afford...
Why Would Anyone Buy a Dog From a Backyard Breeder?
Why would anyone buy a dog from a “backyard breeder”? Why wouldn’t they come to a shelter instead? Something as simple as a shelter only being open on weekdays, when most people are at work, is one of the 11 barriers we’ve identified here that can make the difference between coming to a shelter, or acquiring a pet in another way like from a breeder. To be clear: we are not advocating for people to buy pets from breeders. Rather, we must recognize, and fix, the ways we are making it hard for good people to...
These Animal Service Officers Carry Bags of Fence-Fixing Gear, All Donated, in Their Trucks
Animal service officers with Cabot Animal Support Services carry bags of fence-mending tools around on their trucks. When a dog gets loose, or if they see a fence with a hole in it leaving the potential for a dog to get loose, the ASOs fix the fence. This is Cabot’s Fences for Fido program. It’s as simple as that. The reason this program exists is more complicated. Five years ago, CASS’s director Mike Wheeler wrote a citation for a man whose dog got out. The dog got out again. Mike wrote another citation. ...
6 Tips for Building a Barrier-Free, Inclusive Foster Base
The ASPCA LA Foster Program launched in 2017 in partnership with the County of Los Angeles Department of Animal Care and Control (LA DACC). The first step we took to creating our foster volunteer base was making kitten fostering accessible to anyone who wanted to help. We also dedicated our efforts to supporting a successful foster experience by focusing on 4–8-week-old kittens who were still at risk in the shelter and yet were an easy group of kittens for new fosters to care for. Within the first year of our program, foster...
These Innovators Are Working To Make Veterinary Care More Accessible To All
Veterinary care is expensive, and can be hard to access—leading to pets going without needed treatments, and being given up to shelters by their families, who believe this is the only way for a loved pet to get the care they need. The Open Door Veterinary Collective is working to change that. This nonprofit, founded in 2021, is developing a business model for nonprofit, for-profit, and government veterinary clinics that prioritizes access to care, and increased revenue. Open Door sees major upsides for shelters and the communities they...
