Great shelter ad

I'm planning to do Wildlife fostering, so had an orientation with the Humane Society/SPCA who has taken over that function now. It was very interesting to go to - the shelter I do my kitty volunteering through is run by the City, so rely mostly on City funding, so has no money.

This shelter is private not-for-profit, so work hard for fundraising and do so many amazing things.

They have a really nice ad, which I thought I'd share -
They also have a novel way of advertising dogs - one of the things they do is put them on YouTube! http://www.youtube.com/user/peninsulaspca

So people can subscribe to that channel and get notifications when new dogs are up, and SEE the dog in action rather than just a photo. I think it's great!

That is SOOOO cool - and I hope a great way to get them the right homes. I'd be interested in how well this approach is working

What a great idea to put the dogs on YouTube!! So much better than just a picture in the paper. And that add was awesome!

Sarah, that ad is so beautiful, I'm sitting here crying like baby. It captures exactly what makes animals so precious, and exactly what we humans ought to emulate in them.

And I'm going to talk to our shelter about using YouTube -- maybe making those videos can become my way of volunteering! Thanks so much for sharing all this!

These guys have an open door policy - they will take any animal brought in to them, but they also have one of the highest adoption rates in the country. And in their "not adopted/euthanised" numbers includes animals dead on arrival, animals that never go up for adoption due to sickness or aggression (they do behaviour modification to try and make the animals adoptable), and also includes a higher rate of wildlife death because they do the wildlife rescue for the 3 surrounding counties, and they are usually in a bad way, so a lot don't make it.

So they are a big shelter, who gets in a LOT of animals - they placed nearly 20,000 animals last year, run a lot of outreach programs - they do mobile free spay and neuter clinics for low income earners, they have a mobile adoption van, they've just kitted out 2 big Emergency Response trailers for situations like earthquakes, oil spills, and are in the process of getting 2 more. Volunteers can get their own dogs trained up to become Canine Good Citizens, then take them into the community to visit nursing homes, and hospitals and the like.

They have over 1,000 active volunteers! The volunteers can do play time with the cats and dogs, training (of the dogs), or do mental stimulation for both cats and dogs - they have toys and games purely for mental stimulation like for cats - finding treats hidden in a box, searching for catnip they've hidden somewhere, interactive games etc. I think that's an awesome idea - they really go to a lot of effort to keep the animals happy.

Something else I was impressed with - last year they had a big ringworm outbreak, and rather than euthanising like most shelters do, they worked with UC Davis vets to TREAT the animals! It took about 3 months to treat them, but they saved and adopted out again the majority of the animals.

I wish every shelter could be run like these guys run theirs!