Best Friends Animal Society

Home is more than four walls and a roof 🏡 It is a place where we should feel safe and loved 🧡 Everyone deserves a home — and that includes pets in shelters 😸🐶    Shelter and rescue workers like you are working hard to find homes for every pet, but the reality is that today, not every dog and cat gets to experience the love and comfort of home. 💔     All we need is just 6% more people to choose to adopt versus purchase their pets to close the national lifesaving gap and #SaveThemAll! 🧡   Help us #BringLoveHome for pets across our nation - share and get your community involved in lifesaving! 🧡🐾 Visit bestfriends.org/home to learn more.

Are you looking for ways to grow professionally in your animal services career? Proactively taking charge of your professional development is key to moving forward in the field of animal services. Here are some tips to help you advance: 🌟 Show interest and ask for recommendations on what would make you a strong candidate for promotional opportunities. 🌟 Find a mentor such as a colleague or teacher. 🌟 Pursue and document your own professional development (check out free online resources like Best Friends Network and Maddie's University). 🌟 Ask if your organization will provide professional development opportunities such as training or conferences. Explore more about career development, how to increase lifesaving, and more in our Finding Success in Animal Services course (formerly Studies in Contemporary Animal Services). Class begins August 28. Learn more at https://lnkd.in/gWz4tMHs #CareerDevelopment #AnimalServices #ProfessionalGrowth #FindingSuccess #ProactiveLearning

Is your shelter using the proven strategy of Field Return to Home (also known as Field RTH/RTO)? Check out our recent blog about it, written by Best Friends Director of No-Kill Advancement Tawny Hammond, MIS. As Tawny explains, it's a win-win-win. "Keeping pets in their homes reserves precious shelter space for pets in need of emergency sheltering. It saves families time, heartache, and the cost of fines that many cannot afford. And it saves stress on the pet who may do very poorly in the animal shelter." Read the blog: https://lnkd.in/edtWhdeC

🥹⚠️ Warning: joyful, possibly tear-jerking reunion videos ahead ⚠️🥹   At Gateway Pet Guardians in East St. Louis, IL, getting pets back home to their families is a big deal.   Jill Henke, Director of Operations, says one of the most important things about their Return to Home program is "creating this culture of obsession with it. It has to be as exciting to you as getting a dog adopted."   Gateway prioritizes not only in-shelter Return to Home, but also community reunifications. To learn more about how they've used Finder to Foster programming to increase their capacity and get more pets back home, watch Jill's breakout session from the 2024 Best Friends National Conference: No Room at the Inn: Engaging the Public in Housing Lost Pets.   https://lnkd.in/eZBE4fsN

"Petco Love Lost understood that the average person is not going to do more than 1 to 3 things to try to find a pet because of how overwhelming it is," says Kaitlyn Pappas, Pet Resource Manager of Pima Animal Care Center. "So they highlighted the top 3 steps that are most effective in trying to locate the owner out in the community: 1) posting on a uniform platform (Petco Love Lost in this case); 2) talk to your neighbors (the vast majority of dogs are only found three doors down from their house), and 3) check for ID or a microchip." PACC decided to put these steps into action for their own community. They removed their shelter software's lost and found reports from their website and moved everything to Petco Love Lost. They highlighted the three steps above on their lost and found pages. The results have been staggering. They've found that found reports have increased by 49% and lost reports have increased by 42%, which has led to a 101% increase in community reunifications! You read that right...101% MORE pets made it back home to their families without EVER entering the shelter. Hear more from PACC Pet Resource Manager Kaitlyn Pappas along with Michele Figueroa (PACC), Nick Walton (Best Friends Animal Society), and Lorien Clemens (PetHub) at our Return to Home webinar, "Lost and Loved: Empowering Your Community to Get Lost Pets Home," sponsored by PetHub, Inc., on Wednesday, August 7, at 5pm ET. Save your spot and register today: https://bit.ly/3Wg2I6z

When Nick Walton, Best Friends Senior Manager of National Shelter Support, was an animal services officer in Fulton County Georgia, he was working calls in one of his regular neighborhoods when he heard a loud "bang." Someone had thrown a glass soda bottle at his ACO van. Rattled, he drove off and worked calls in another area. But relationships were important to him as an officer, so he kept working on building relationships in that neighborhood. Within a few weeks, he had a chance meeting with the person who threw the bottle. What he learned was that the person had had very negative experiences with animal control in the past...to the point that Nick completely understood why they threw the bottle. They likely never would have assisted with a request for information (like "do you know where this dog lives?") because there was mistrust and no relationship there. Now, Nick is passionate about helping animal control officers learn how to build relationships and trust in the field so they can save more lives by working with the community. He'll be a panelist on our upcoming Return to Home webinar, Lost and Loved: Empowering Your Community to Get Lost Pets Home, on Wednesday, August 7, at 5pm ET. He'll share actionable tips for increasing Field Return to Home. "The answers to our problems are in the community," Nick says. "Animal Services just hasn't historically done a good job of bringing the community along with us." Sign up for the webinar to learn more from Nick and our other panelists: https://bit.ly/3Wg2I6z

This is the story of six shelters across the South: three shelters that had achieved and maintained 90% lifesaving, and three shelters that had not yet achieved that benchmark, but with leadership who were determined to get there. See for yourself the 🌟 AMAZING 🌟 progress that can be made when we work together: https://lnkd.in/gfeKJx8j The Best Friends Shelter Collaborative Program strategically pairs Peer Mentors (leaders from shelters that have achieved a 90% save rate) with Peer Fellows (leaders from shelters working toward a 90% save rate). 🤝 Williamson County Regional Animal Shelter worked with Lampasas Animal Shelter 🤝  Gulf Coast Humane Society worked with Portland Animal Services 🤝  Lumpkin County Animal Shelter worked with Forsyth County Animal Shelter "They build lasting relationships," says Bethany Heins, Director of Best Friends' Shelter Collaborative program,"...building a broader community, where no one is alone, and we all work together." Learn more about becoming a Peer Mentor for the Shelter Collaborative program: https://lnkd.in/gB-aq5Ek Photo: Shyah Johnson, WCRAS Animal Care Supervisor, driving a transport for a recent dog swap between WCRAS and Lampasas

Have you been seeing fewer Return to Home outcomes? You're not alone. According to the Best Friends 2023 National Data Report, only 475,000 dogs were reclaimed in 2023, as compared to 605,000 in 2019. For more insights about this trend, check out the rest of the Best Friends 2023 National Data Report: https://lnkd.in/gtqVHrpU

We caught up with some Best Friends National Conference attendees to find out what animal welfare organization inspires them the most. Each of their responses felt like a warm hug, and this video has just a few!   Join the virtual hug fest and tag the organization that inspires you every day in the comments! And be sure to tell everyone why they're so inspiring 🤩

"This is the future of animal welfare, and you are a founder." - Julie Castle, CEO, Best Friends Animal Society Watch Julie Castle's keynote speech from the opening session of this year's Best Friends National Conference in Orlando: https://lnkd.in/e-8ickCC Were you there? What did you think?