John has been the shelter director and ACO for Pendleton County (KY) Animal Shelter for seven and a half years. When he retired after 22 years as a Firefighter/paramedic, his wife Bonnie told him he needed to find something to…
Mercer County Animal Control Center Kentucky was full when we visited (like every other shelter we’ve visited in the last year), but only a handful of those dogs are adoptable. That’s because the shelter took in thirty dogs seized in…
Our first stop in Kentucky was at Leslie County Animal Shelter. Like many municipal shelters, it was located right next to the waste transfer station and the jail. The building is a simple concrete one that houses the staff, medical…
Bracken County is a no-stop-light county in northern Kentucky, not too far from Ohio. The Bracken County Animal Shelter is a simple metal building with 14 kennels and a tiny office/storage area. It may not look like much, but Heather…
If we had visited the Harrison County Flora Shropshire Animal Shelter in Cynthiana, Kentucky, a year ago, we might have heard a very different story. A change of administration under Judge Executive Jason Marshall and the hiring of co-managers Jessica…
I have a question: Is keeping an animal alive the same as giving them life? At our 28 shelter visits this year, we met dogs who had spent months, even years at the shelter. We met others who had grown…
Kentucky is different. Now that we’ve been to over twenty Kentucky shelters, at least when it comes to animal shelter, that much is clear. Municipal animal control shelters usually fall under the realm of the sheriff’s department, the agriculture department,…
Dogs just aren’t moving. Like everyone else’s, my foster dogs linger as adoptions have slowed down all over the country. And no matter how many efforts are made to ‘clear the shelters’ or ‘sponsor’ dogs, dogs just aren’t moving. The…
This year marks five years for WWLDO, and we’re evaluating the impact we’ve had and mapping out a plan to greatly expand that impact. As part of that process, we recently polled some of the shelters we visited in the…
Walking this morning as the sun rose and the cows on either side of our dirt road watched me warily, I thought about attitude. How it can make or break a day, a situation, a life, really. Right now, things…