So many shelters, so many dogs.

I knew at the start of this trip it would be a lot and that keeping all the dogs, directors, and shelters straight might be a challenge. Having Nancy with me helps. I badger her with questions interrupting her work (she spends HOURS editing pictures not just for me and this trip, but to send to directors to use in their efforts to get dogs adopted).

“Which shelter was the one with that cool blue dog with the Catahoula spots?”

“Do you remember what the director said about whether they give Bordetella vaccines?”

“Was there a school bus parked in the yard behind the shelter?” (I actually asked that question more than once, vehicles seem to factor largely in rural southern shelter spaces.)

Nancy doesn’t always have the answers, but sometimes she does or sometimes her pictures provide the clues.

Maybe it was easy to mix up the shelters, as we visited two of four shelters that are literally within a few miles of each other in a county southeast of Nashville. Clearly, there are many people who care about animals in Bedford County, TN, but from an outsider perspective, I wondered if they were duplicating efforts and whether working together and pooling their resources might be a smarter solution, at least for the dogs. There wasn’t much time to examine that idea as there were dogs to meet and stories to hear.

We started at Shelbyville City Animal Control, arriving late because Read more ›