Animal Welfare Professionals

Is your organization saving its historical documents? Its organizational paperwork, early newsletters, position papers, etc? When I was researching animal-shelter history it surprised me how much information had disappeared forever. With North Shore, for example, we don't have positive documentation of the identity of its principle founder. Animal shelters and pets are an important part of our civic and personal lives, and even though historians have neglected these topics in the past, there is growing interest in them today. Make sure your organization saves its historical documents so future generations can see the wonderful work you did. Who knows -- your rescue may turn out to be the the next Austin Pets Alive or Best Friends!

Thanks for this important reminder! I have been trying to save everyting from gala invites to eoy appeals, so important!

The "little things" can provide clues that fill out the picture for a future historian.

When I started 4 years ago with Hillsborough County Animal Services (since renamed The Pet Resource Center), I inherited scrap books that date back into the 1960s that are quite interesting. The evolution in 50+ years of animal control and public sheltering is amazing. I would have never thought to do something like that but it was nice someone did all those years ago. Every so often we have a case or issue that has its origins decades ago and we find articles that help us put things into perspective. We probably don't do as good of job today as they did back then because of online versus real newspapers and there are years where there is little information, but it is a valuable archive. (attached are 2 1960s examples)

That's great, Scott, so happy to hear you are keeping up the tradition! In addition to newspaper articles, internal documents can be a gold mine for a historian. The reference to a Euthanaire machine is interesting. It was in Florida that one of the first protests against a Euthanaire was made, when animal-welfare activists stole the compressor of a machine, rendering it inoperable. 

We keep things like programs from events, newsletters, mail appeals, articles in newspapers and magazines. We've kept more of the administrative stuff than I wish, but it's not so much cultivated as just never sorted! I'm trying to be more selective about what I save now!

Those are all great things to save. Photographs can be really important too, and today they can be saved in digital format. If you run out of storage space perhaps a volunteer could scan some of your documents for archiving.