Animal Welfare Professionals

On Thursday, April 2, 2026, join Maddie's® Monthly Foster Connection at 12pm PT/3pm ET. Jordana Moerbe, Director of Lifesaving Partnerships and Medical Care at Austin Pets Alive!, will be discussing how animal shelters can shift from a kennel-centric medical model to a foster-centric clinic ... See More

I'd love to take a look at it. Send your email to catspawjamasrs@gmail.com and I'll send any feedback to you directly. ------------------------------ Michelle DePrima Cats Pawjamas Rescue Society Olathe KS ------------------------------ See More

Hey, I run a similar program at Animal-Angels Foundation in Central Alabama. We call our equivalent The Bridge, with crisis foster as a sub-program. We have hit this exact wall a few times in our first year and the answer has gotten clearer the more we run it. The contract is the answer. You already ... See More

Julielani, Yes, I did mean the tools you suggested, envisioning them on a shelf on the wall. However, I much appreciated your expansion of "outside the kennel" as the place to start working on the transition. That's easy for me to do as a volunteer. I will continue to share this discussion with shelter ... See More

Hi Augusta, Thank you for trying the plan and for sharing the observation because I actually think it highlights something important about the emotional side of kennel return. My impression is similar to yours: the food may have helped the dog enter the kennel, but the kennel itself may not yet have ... See More

Hi! We run a program called Shaina's Safe Haven, named after a volunteer who sadly passed away. The purpose of this program is to offer temporary foster care for people who are in a situation that does not allow them to care for their pets temporarily, such as a hospitalization, eviction, house fire, ... See More

The New York Times reported today that HUD is circulating an internal memo that would dramatically narrow Fair Housing Act protections for assistance animals. Emotional support animals would be largely excluded. Service animals would face tighter scrutiny too. The justification HUD is using is the ESA ... See More

Karen, the history you laid out is real and worth respecting. Spay/neuter is the biggest prevention win the field has ever produced. From 17 million dying in shelters in the 1980s to under 500,000 today, that is decades of work and it is the playbook everyone points to. Here is where I want to push ... See More

I couldn't agree more: prevention absolutely works better than repair. But what I'm seeing now in animal welfare isn't a field that hasn't figured out prevention. It's a field in crisis. And when people or systems are in crisis, prevention can become out of reach. For someone worried about their ... See More