Most pet surrender begins before the shelter. Everybody in this group knows that. What we have been short on is a way to get a whole county to act on it before the animals show up at intake.
We are trying something new in Blount County, Alabama, and it is moving faster than I expected, so I wanted to lay it out here while it is still early enough to be honest about what is working and what is not.
The project is called the Blount County Pet Community Project. Underneath it is a High-Impact Clinic model: free wellness outreach days (rabies, core vaccines, heartworm testing, microchipping) paired with spay/neuter through transport and vouchers, plus a Community Cat TNVR effort. Standard prevention work. The part that changed the response was not the programming. It was the framing.
We stopped walking into town councils with an ask. We are not asking Blount's fifteen-odd municipalities to fund a nonprofit. We hand each of them a community project they co-own, and we lead with what the town gets: named as a partner in the press releases, the PSAs, the flyers, the signage on clinic day. The town gets to be the one that brought free rabies shots and spay/neuter to its residents. That is a very different conversation than "will you write us a check."
Honest status, because this group deserves the real numbers and not a highlight reel. County Line committed first: $800 for year one, hosting a clinic at city hall, and a donation box. Locust Fork has money in the budget with two conditions. The county commission is leaning warm. We are on agendas or already presented across most of the incorporated towns, roughly fifteen jurisdictions in the pipeline. Committed cash today is still just County Line's $800. This is early. I am not going to pretend a pipeline is a bank account.
The hardest part is not the towns. It is the vet. Blount County has about four veterinarians for the whole county, and the national vet shortage is real here. Finding a vet to run rabies on clinic days is the current bottleneck, and I would take ideas from anyone who has solved rabies-day staffing in a rural county.
Here is the piece I did not expect. We started a plain hyperlocal Facebook page, Blount County Pets, about six days ago. It is at 968 followers tonight and still climbing, in a county of about 60,000, before a single clinic has run. That is demand showing up before we have spent a dollar on services. When a commissioner asks whether anybody there actually cares, that number is the answer.
None of this is anti-shelter. The shelters and rescues in and around Blount (and surrounding counties) are necessary and they are stretched thin. The whole point of getting upstream of intake is to give the downstream side room to breathe. This is the layer that is supposed to make their job smaller next year.
If you want to run a version of this in your county, I will hand you the whole playbook: the council proposal, the budget, the community-project framing, the clinic model. No charge, no catch. I would rather ten counties run this rough than one county run it perfectly and keep it to themselves.
And if you have already done a county-wide municipal cost-share model, I want to hear what worked and what broke. That is the part I am still learning in real time.
Comment here or message me and I will send the playbook.
#AccesstoCare
#CommunityCatManagement
#Medicine,SurgeryandSterilization
#PetSupportServices*
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Join The Shift To Prevention.
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
calendy.com/animal-angels
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
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