Animal Welfare Professionals

Participate in the first question of the week of 2019 by telling the community 1-3 goals you have as they relate to the animals in your work/life!

Creating goals related to your work as an animal welfare professional or even as a pet caregiver can help start your year off on the right paw. Plus sharing your goals can help spark ideas for others.

Wishing you nothing but wags and purrs in 2019!

One of our goals here at the Nevada SPCA is to decrease our length of stay. We are actively working to find out what may keep an animal in our care for longer than necessary and using open adoptions as a way of finding more homes for animals in a quicker way. By allowing more foster to adopts, and medical treatments inside of homes instead of in the shelter. 

One of my goals is to make the public more aware of our wonderful senior dogs and to get as many adopted as possible

I have a goal to allow my dogs to sniff more on walks. It's a small goal but I find myself often trying to rush through our walks, get more exercise, and get home faster to do other things. Dogs learn about the world through their noses. Letting them sniff at the "peemail" on our walks allows them to learn about the other dogs, animals and people in our neighborhood and gives them a mental workout. I like how Ahimsa Dog Training puts it:  "asking a dog to not sniff during a walk is the same as asking a person to walk around wearing a blindfold."  (If you want to read a great article about why it's important to let your dog sniff, heres a good one:  https://iheartdogs.com/why-its-important-to-let-your-dog-sniff-during-walks/ )

So sniff on, Gidget & Dexter! And I'll take the time to smell the roses while you read peemail. 

As it relates to my work:  Continue to build a strong collaboration/partnership with Oklahoma municipal shelters so they can become partners in our Transfer program with Dumb Friends League.  

Today I will take Elmer, my foster hound dog to a behavioral veterinarian for assessment.

He came to my home about 5 weeks ago deemed not adoptable having failed 2 adoptions the last resulting in a bite.  Elmer was on "death row" and I became his only hope.

I had been walking him for months including outings to the park and treats [he loves McDonald's chicken nuggets]--he is a wonderful dog.

I believed he was misunderstood--his behavior comes from issues with fear and trust and he will need a understanding home with most importantly, patience.

It is the small things that add up every day for these animals--we just need more people doing them!!

"Saving one dog will not change the world but surely for that one dog the world will change forever"

Saving Elmer has been the best thing I did last year and hopefully it will be the highlight of 2019.

One of our goals for the rescue is to start a solid foster program.  We've been brick and mortar since we started (which is a good thing) but now it's time to up the saving - we can only do that by finding more space outside of the rescue.  We want to go from 3 foster homes to 30!

If you'd like assistance I'm happy to help! We've got a ton of resources you can use. You can email me at duer@c.maddiesfund.org

Hi Kelly!  Thank you, yes, we sure do need help and resources.  We are in the process of hiring a part-time coordinator and as soon as she/he lands on our doorstep, your the first email :)  Our goal is to have them on board early February.  Thank you so much for your offer.  We have no real program right now so building the right way from the ground up is a great opportunity for us to get it right.

Hi Kelly, I am one of three foster mamas Fearless Kitty Rescue has. Kristen is amazing in our organization for obtaining grants  and setting up programs. I hope to help train volunteers on the care required in becoming a foster parent. The rewards are priceless and would love to hear more about how to set up and train.

Well, life saving is ALWAYS on the top of the list, but other goals for 2019 include body cams for our officers, a thumbs up for a bond to add kennels and building resiliency for our staff and volunteers. I can't wait!

Get our shelter built.  We have an architect's rendering, some funding (not enough) and now are working with local builders.  We currently work out of the City's shelter, which is old, and in a location not easy to find for adopters and those looking for lost pets.    Recruit 3 new quality board members.  Launch our first ever annual event.  

My over-reaching goal is to try and get our canine volunteers involved in more than just coming for a weekly dog walking shift. I've got three things I'm going to try and encourage more of them to join in on:

1. Field trips and off-site events. We have just a couple people who do these, and I would love to get more volunteers comfortable with the idea of taking a dog somewhere new. Right now I'm trying posting requests on the behalf of particular dogs, and it seems to generating a little interest. One fairly new volunteer ended up doing 3 field trips in as many weeks, and seemed to have as much fun doing something new as the dogs she was accompanying!

2. Generating adoption promo content. I know plenty of them are taking cute photos of the dogs while cuddling or out on walks, so I want to encourage them to send them to our social media staff member, and give them the funny stories and individual quirks that will help the dogs stand out.

3. Get more volunteers to foster. We do have a lot of volunteers who come because they are not able to have a dog in their current housing and need some canine time, but I'd love to get the others involved in fostering, even just short-term, "weekend" fosters for stressed dogs. These folks often already know a fair bit about these dogs and common behavior issues we see in the shelter, so it would be ideal if we add some of them to our foster homes.

(I should probably also add organizing my office/storage space to this list!)

Our goals this year are to 1) recruit a few vets in our area to do mass spay/neuter events because we DESPERATELY need spay/neuter resources in our community...2) Host at least one free/low-cost vaccination clinic for the community and 3) to implement TNR in our community even if it's small-scale. Our current euthanasia rate at our local shelter is almost 70% for cats/kittens because we have no TNR in our community :( Lofty goals for a new rescue but we're ambitious! 

Goal 1. To educate people on the benefits of caring for homeless animals. 2. TNVR 20 cats (out of pocket until I can create fundraisers). 3. Create an online store that would donate most of the profits to schools and animal shelters. 4. Obtain information to do a mass TNVR program.

One thing I'm especially excited about is that due to a change in interpretation of state law, we are working on a plan to start helping stray cats from one of the counties in our metro area that doesn't have services for stray cats. (Previously the understanding was that we couldn't legally do this.) We have never done strays before so we have a lot to work out, but we are excited to be able to help this population that for decades we have been unable to directly assist! 

I’m looking forward to help train volunteers who foster how to care for bottle babies.

For my dogs at home I want to make sure I'm incorporating more off leash adventures into their weekly routine. They get standard neighborhood walks but they're always so much happier (and so am I) when they're able to just explore on their own. 

As a volunteer, I want to use my techy computer and design skills to continue to help the rescue. Last year, I worked on several flyers for fundraisers so this year I'd like to help redesign graphics that are used at events and would love to finally redo the rescue's website and bring it into 2019!

For 2019 the Community Cats Podcast has a lot of goals:  Produce 52 shows, 52 Blog posts(we are doing 2 series one on trappers tip and tricks and another of Felv+ adoptions-anyone is welcome to participate), assist over 40 groups through community cat grants, run a couple online conferences(www.onlineconference.com).  Launch the golden trap award!  Lots of great things happening for cats around the country and the world and the CCP wants to be there to cover the stories!

For the No Kill South Carolina initiative, the 3 main 2019 statewide goals are:  save every healthy dog, dramatically expand community cat programs and increase the quality of care in open admission shelters thru shelter assessments and support. 

One of our goals this year is to dramatically increase both dog and cat fosters and increase our 'doggie day out' program

I love the idea of a 'doggie day out' program. Would you mind sharing a little about how yours works?

My goal as a grant writer and animal lover is to find funding for our lifesaving programs so they are sustainable and impactful.  At times it's a tall order but our staff and animals deserve the opportunity to thrive. 

As a new organization, we plan to 

1) provide support and resources for municipal shelters that will dramatically improve shelter stays for animals 2) introduce innovative, life-saving programs 3) share knowledge with other groups/grow our network so that resources and ideas can be widely distributed for immediate impact

My goals are to make the public aware of how wonderful our senior dogs are.  To make the public award of our adoptable seniors, we have a page on Facebook called Golden Nuggets, devoted to seniors only.  We also do a senior adoption at Pet smart once a month

My goal as new director of my shelter is to work on our town ordinances to better work for the animals in our area that we are in trusted to help. 

Another goal is to establish a transport group to move animals that have been here a while out of our shelter and into a underpopulated area.