Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:05] Hi, I'm Wendy Hill, and welcome back to another episode of Confessions from the Home Office. So this week is spring break for us, and so I'm gonna go away from the normal topics about marketing and business ownership, and we're gonna talk about something that may be a little bit hard to hear. So every 13 seconds, a healthy dog or cat is euthanized in a U.S. shelter. And this is according to the Humane Society of the United States. And you may think, gosh, that's awful, or that sounds high.
[00:00:36] But as long as I can remember, we've had a problem with just overcrowding of shelters and so many homeless animals in the United States. And since the pandemic, things have been really strange. So at first, during the pandemic, when everybody was stuck at home for a while, you would hear, we can't get puppies. We can't get adoptable dogs. Or for once, we actually don't have as big of a problem with adopting because so many people are going out and adopting pets because they were home, their kids were home, they had more time. And I thought, you know, this is a great thing. Maybe, you know, a lot of these. The pets that come out of the shelters have to be spayed and neutered. Maybe this will kind of turn things around. But then the tide shifted. People had to go back to work, and the economy started to tank a little bit, and housing prices went through the roof. People were losing their homes and having to move to rentals where they couldn't take a pet, and people just started dumping dogs. So if you are on Facebook, you will see that. Well, my feed, because I follow so many rescue pages and just pages around this area. People are finding animals constantly. And even the. The shelters are just. They're completely maxed out, and the rescues are maxed out. And I. I just wanted to get on here today and talk about it because, you know, if you know me or you've watched anything about my podcast, you know, we have a bunch of dogs here. And thankfully, my husband loves dogs as much as I do. And so I want to give you some stats of some things just so you can think about it. And then by the end of this episode, you'll know some ways that you can help. You don't have to be an animal lover to help the situation. There are so many things that you can do. So here's national estimates, and these figures may vary state to state. There doesn't seem to be like one organization that compiles all the animal stats, but they're all pretty close when you do the research. So approximately 6.3 million companion animals enter US animal shelters nationwide each year. 6.3 million. That's a ton of animals.
[00:02:47] Of that. The mix is like 3.1 million dogs, 3.2 million cats.
[00:02:53] The number of dogs and cats entering the shelter annually declined for a while, and now it's going back up each year. And I have a feeling this number will be bigger after we get the stats. This year, approximately 920,000 shelter animals are euthanized. Almost a million a year are just put down. And I know sometimes they have to be put down because they've been hit by a car or they have a terrible disease or they have terrible behavior issues that probably can't be fixed because they've been abused or just problems. So for that, 920,000, 390,000 are dogs and 530,000 cats. So a lot more cats euthanized than dogs.
[00:03:41] So 4.1 million shelter animals are adopted each year. So that's good news. But that's still a lot of animals that are left.
[00:03:51] And then about 810,000 of those animals who enter shelters are returned to their owners. So shelter workers and people in the community are doing great job of trying to find the owners. So if one gets brought in by animal control or gets dropped off or somebody finds one, there's all kinds of ways. You can post online and go through pawboost and different places, and a lot of times those animals are reunited. So I'm not an expert, but I've talked to a lot of people for a while. I've always been interested in, you know, helping animals, animal advocacy, that type of thing. But back in 2012, my kids and I got involved in doing this almost kind of like a hobby, passion, whatever you want to call it. With me working from home, I could kind of rearrange my schedule and we could. We could do things. So in Greenville, South Carolina, where I am, we have two big shelters. We have Greenville County Animal Care, and that's a. That's run by the.
[00:04:50] The county of Greenville. That's, you know, government funded.
[00:04:54] It's huge. There are hundreds of dogs there. You may look on their site and see 40 or 50. They have a ton in the back. They have to keep the ones for court cases. They have a ton of cats. They have. They even sometimes have farm animals there.
[00:05:09] And it is just crazy. The staff over there, the people that are working in rescue and intake and all that, they do a great job, and they have to be exhausted then There's Greenville Humane Society, which is nonprofit. It's smaller.
[00:05:25] They do not receive government funding, as far as I know. I believe they're just completely private and, you know, donations and grants.
[00:05:33] And they have a ton of animals, too. And they do a lot of surgeries there and helping animals who've been shot or amputees, a lot of medical cases, a lot of mom and baby situations over there. So we have two great shelters, and then we have all the rescues around. Some are local, some are just an individual, some are organizations, some are regional, some are up north in the south. We have an issue with. We don't really have spay and neuter laws around here. So people. So people are just letting their animals reproduce like crazy. And, you know, it's just. There's just a lot going on and there's a lot of people involved. So we have the shelters or the rescues. We have volunteers.
[00:06:19] We got involved just trying to help because we heard about that There were so many animals, especially Greenville county animal care.
[00:06:30] And we started working with several rescues, and we started going over to the shelter. My son was old enough to start doing a little bit of volunteering with, doing some kennel cleaning with kittens and things like that. So we went over there. I have a couple of quick stories to share. So one summer, kids and I were going to go out, and I got a message from a girl that I knew locally that was helping with some rescues as a volunteer. And she said that there was a golden retriever over at the shelter that had a green dot by her name. And at this shelter, green dot means scheduled to be euthanized. She was old. She had hip dysplasia. She had, I think, had been living outside, like on a concrete pad. They thought she was 9 or 10 years old. And we said, well, we'll stop by and take a look. Maybe there's something, you know, maybe somebody we know that could foster her. A rescue had said that they would probably take her if they could get a foster. So we'll go take a look. Maybe we'll get some pictures. And we got over there and we saw her. And my son was like, I'll foster her. And you think, why would you let your kid, who's probably like, at this point, 11 or so, say that he's gonna foster a dog? But I just saw the look on his eyes. And so they did a heartworm test on her. She was negative. And that's how we ended up with Daisy. She was a foster fail. We brought her home, fleas, mess we had to give her a bath in the driveway and give her a, a flea pill before we could even let her in the house.
[00:08:00] Best dog ever. We had her about two and a half years. She did have bad hip dysplasia, so we got some meds for her. She loved my son. She loved all of us. She used to sleep right behind my desk here.
[00:08:14] Just fantastic. So, you know, we woke up that morning, we had no idea that we were going to end up with a dog. And it was like we didn't even have one. She was kind of like a speed bump on the floor.
[00:08:23] So, you know, there's ways to help. You can go and foster. If we had just said we were going to keep her for a couple of weeks and then the rescue found an adopter for her, that would have been fine. But she, she just made a place in our heart and I'll never forget that. So, you know, there's a lot of animals and shelters that are scheduled for euthanization just because of issues and that might be one that you want to go take a look at. I, I had no idea until that day that there were ones that were already marked that were going to be put down. You could still go look at. Course they're wanting to get them out there, but that was just kind of a feel good story. We've also helped animals get to transport. So up north we have great rescues that will take animals. They have stricter laws up north and so spay and neuter is, tighter laws up there. Not able to put dogs out on chains and just leave them out. I'm not saying everywhere. I don't know the laws everywhere, but I do know they don't have the issue as much as we do down here. So rescues up north, if you can help them, help them because they pay for transport and they move vans and truckloads of animals up north probably at least once a week, maybe twice a week just from this market here. So we've helped before if someone's had an animal or two and foster and they need to get to transport and they had to go to work that day, hang on to them that morning or hang on to them overnight, make sure everything's okay. They have to have a health certificate from a vet before they can go. And then we've driven them to transport and, and made sure that they got on the air and then that they arrive up north and go into foster adoption up there. So that's a good thing. And my kids have helped with that so much that they Understand the process with it and summers and things like that. It was so much fun for them just to get to know a dog for 12 hours and know that they're going to be okay.
[00:10:18] And then we had some things that were a little scary, so we agreed to foster a dog later. It was a puppy named Mocha. She came from maybe Lawrence county shelter, and she broke with Parvo about two days after she got here. She just went from happy and fun. She was sitting in a chair in my office watching me work to sick sick. So we had to get her to a vet. A rescue, I think it was up north had already claimed her. We did get treatment for her. She was so sick. I really didn't know she'd make it. I go check on her every day and really thought I would get the phone call. So finally she got over the hump and we brought her back here. It wasn't too hot or too cold at the time. I can't remember. It was probably spring that she was here. So we couldn't bring her back in the house because we didn't want anybody else to get sick. Even though all our animals were older at the time. You just don't want to take the risk.
[00:11:09] So we set up a little hospital in the garage. And so she had a huge crate. And a neighbor of mine is a vet tech, and she helped and we set up.
[00:11:19] We did sub Q fluids, so we did IVs and to help keep her hydrated and everything, and she was fine. And then she went and got on transport and went up north. So we've done all kinds of crazy things around here, but it's been. It's been great. But I'm one of those crazy animal lovers, and I know a lot of you probably aren't. And probably some of you say, well, I like animals. I don't want one in my house or I travel too much or whatever, and that's fine. No, not everybody has to be as crazy as I am. But. But I want to tell you a couple of ways that you can make a difference.
[00:11:49] So you could foster temporarily or tell somebody that, you know, that could be interested in fostering temporarily. You can keep a dog for a week, you can keep a dog for a month, you can keep a dog for a weekend. It gives space. And the people at the shelters and the rescues are still marketing these dogs. And they will tell you how you can also market the dog while you have it. You could take it to a restaurant where you could eat outdoors. You could put pictures of the dog on Facebook and videos and show how much fun it is or that it's a couch potato and doesn't really need much care, that type of thing. You can volunteer at shelters. Don't take your kids to the shelter and think that they can volunteer. The shelters are pretty strict. I think you have to be at least like 16 to do that and just because of safety. So make sure that if you're taking kids to the shelter that they're in high school.
[00:12:39] But you can go to shelters, walk dogs. You can drop off newspapers, you can drop off food. You can help with administrative tasks. Maybe they need somebody to come in and just help them with paperwork or help them walk a dog and check their behavior. You can donate supplies. So just dropping off a bag of cat food, dropping off a bag of dog food, dropping off towels, looking on list for rescues and on shelters and seeing what they need and dropping a few things off, or having most of them have Amazon wish list, sending that. You can just do that in a few minutes. And you have made a huge difference. A lot of shelters now and some rescues because of we've had Hurricane Helene in this area. And just with the economy they keep. They have like food banks and so people can come from the community that say, I could keep my animal if I had a little more food for them. And that way they can give out the food and keep the pet with the owner instead of the pet coming into the shelter.
[00:13:39] Financial donations. Most of these rescues are nonprofits. The Greenville Humane Society is a nonprofit. Any place where you can get a tax deduction, give it to the animals. If you're thinking about a new place to donate, they all need the funds. There are some rescues around. I know one local dog squad. They will post fundraisers that you can share on your Instagram profile. I've done that before. And watch the donations come in. When they have to take a dog to a. Like to an emergency vet when there's an emergency case, that type of thing, you can help transport animals. There are some rescues that need people instead of doing transport, they might need to move them two or three states. And they. It's kind of like Pony Express where you drive the dog two hours and meet the next volunteer and then go. And the dog keeps going until they get where they need to go. Or if someone's been fostering an animal and they have a health certificate and they're ready to go on transport, but maybe they just can't make that transport because of work or another commitment, you can meet them and pick that dog up and take them with all their paperwork and get them ready to go and then you can just spread the word. So I'm constantly sharing things on social media, but I've actually shared stuff before. And then the animals gotten adopted. Maybe not because of my post, but I'm hoping maybe. And I've had people actually go and adopt animals and then show me I got this dog or I got this dog and now we've had him for years. And they didn't even know about the county shelter because they were new in the area or they didn't even know about a certain rescue just because they didn't follow all the pages which would be impossible to know everything.
[00:15:16] You can sponsor an animal. So sometimes they'll say, you know, can you just sponsor the cost for this animal? They need surgery or something else or heartworm treatment. You can do that. Trap, neuter, release is for cats. So a lot of times shelters will do programs where they'll rent out or give you traps where you can go get cats, bring them in, have them spayed or neutered. They tip their ear to show that that's what they what's been done and then they get put back out. Like if there's a feral colony, cat colony somewhere, someone needs barn cats and that keeps them from reproducing the thousands and thousands of kittens that a one cat could, could end up creating. You can advocate for animal friendly legislation in your community. I know some things are going on in Greenville county here in South Carolina. I don't have all the details. I know there' some meetings with county council and trying to get some stricter laws on things and just protect the animals. We have a huge problem here with lack of spay and neutering in the way animals are treated and left outside.
[00:16:23] You can also learn pet first aid in case you ever see a dog that's been hit on the side of the road or you see a dog that's limping down the road, how to approach the animal and what you can do until you can get it to care, get someone to help you get that dog to emergency or urgent care.
[00:16:42] There's also big spay and like neuter a thons with some of the organizations. You could, you could help with that. You don't have to go help do the surgery, maybe help check people in, maybe you help make appointments, maybe you confirm appointments, maybe just spread the word about it and then think about if you're like a photographer or a marketer or a videographer, anything like that. You could go offer to take pictures. What if you take really cool pictures and videos and that helps the shelter or the rescue get these animals adopted. We all want to see what the dog looks like besides just standing there looking sad with a scarf around its neck. We want to see do they, do they play, do they growl, did they like to chase a ball, how are they with kids, that type of thing. So if you have any of those skills, even just going once and doing that for 10 animals, that is huge. So I just wanted to get all that out here because everything in my feed right now is we're overcrowded. This is going on. This is going on. The rescues are maxed out, volunteers are maxed out, the shelters are maxed out. Animal control can't even get out to get to check on animals that need to be checked on. And so I just wanted to kind of spread the word and maybe give you some ideas of things you can do again. You don't have to be a crazy animal lover like I am, but I think that everybody can help just a little bit. And, you know, just even buying a bag of food and dropping it off or shipping something through Chewy or Amazon or you find out maybe one of your neighbors or the spouse of a co worker works in animal rescue and they need something and just even a one time donation, that's huge. So that's it. I'm gonna put some rescues that I know up north and locally and some other things in the show notes for this. And if any dog rescues see this and they want to be on the podcast at some point and talk about the rescue and what they're doing and what they need, you're totally welcome to do that. Just get in touch with me and I can update the show notes as many times as I need to. So if I miss something or somebody needs something added in there, hopefully someone else will see, just let me know. And that's it for this episode of Confessions in the Home Office. Next week we'll be back talking about marketing and all that good stuff, but today just need to talk about the animals. So everybody have a great week and I will see you soon.
