It’s Time to Let the Dogs Out! After visiting over one hundred shelters, one thing we’ve realized is that too often people aren’t aware of what’s happening in their community’s shelter and sometimes they aren’t aware there is a shelter in their community. This is a recent message we received on Facebook: “…just wanted to…
Bertie County is a small county most people pass through on their way to vacation on the Outer Banks. The county’s tiny shelter is the next to last stop on a road that ends at the regional jail. The shelter sits on a property prone to flooding, and although the county has had plans to…
Why are there so many dogs dying in our southern shelters? This is the question that has been posed to me again and again in podcast interviews, on social media, in emails, and quite often, in person. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that question and I don’t necessarily have a concise answer,…
Two thousand dollars a month. That’s how much Floyd County, Kentucky pays for the Floyd County Animal Shelter. That number includes the salaries of all three people who work there ($7.25/hour), the food, the utilities, the medical, everything for the approximately 900 animals that come through the shelter each year. When we visited there were…
Ruby has been the director of Butler County Ky. Animal Shelter for five years. As a former vet tech, she brings a lot of critical skills and animal knowledge to the job, but what she really brings is some serious smarts, of-the-charts resourcefulness, and a commitment to saving lives. The tiny shelter handled over 600…
In Robertson County, Tennessee, just outside Nashville, there are actually three municipal shelters. In addition to the Robertson shelter written about in the previous post, we also stopped at a tiny shelter ten minutes away— Greenbrier Animal Control. This small shelter has ten kennels and was currently housing 12 dogs. Shelbie is the only ACO…
WE’RE Letting the Dogs Out! Notes from our Founder, Cara Achterberg Three years ago, Nancy Slattery and I sat in a bar in Alabama, exhausted after another long drive and shelter visit. It was in that bar that we launched the idea of Who Will Let the Dogs Out and our mission to raise awareness…
While in Tennessee we spent a day with one of my favorite rescue women – Britt. Britt is a volunteer and outreach coordinator for CASA Transport . As part of that role, she spends a lot of time visiting dog pounds and shelters around middle and western Tennessee. She scouts out the dogs, gets pictures…
It took some doing, but we finally found the Forrest City Area Humane Society which partners with Forrest City Animal Control to save animals. The blue cement building was a mile down a narrow unmarked road that ran beside the train tracks and eventually petered out into a dirt/sand road before arriving at the shelter…
After a week in North Carolina visiting 6 shelters, we learned a lot. Despite now visiting over 100 shelters, each visit teaches me something new about the challenges of saving dogs in the south and/or reminds me of some of the solutions. As exhausting as it can be, every single trip reinforces why we go…
