Our first stop on our March 2025 shelter tour was the Danville Area Humane Society Virginia. About an hour from Greensboro, North Carolina, Danville is a large, open-intake shelter on the southside of Virginia in the hometown of my alma…
The following post was written in 2019, right before Nancy and I formalized our work as Who Will Let the Dogs Out that December. It’s been five years, but the sentiment is still the same: What We’re Bringing is Hope…
“I like to fix things,” explained Ginny, the director of Tazewell County Animal Shelter in southwest Virginia on the West Virginia line, when I asked how she came to work at the shelter. Prior to that, she’d been working for…
Last week’s shelter tour was inspiring. To be honest, I had braced myself, expecting the worst, as headline after headline declares shelters everywhere are overwhelmed. And yet, we met amazing people making the most of tough situations. For sure the…
You know something is different from the moment you pull onto the campus at Rockingham Harrisonburg SPCA. They hadn’t opened yet to the public, but the parking lot was filling up and the place was bustling with volunteers walking dogs,…
Westmoreland County Animal Shelter sits at the end of a lane, past a young vineyard, just outside the town of Montross. It’s a large, well-kept cement building surrounded by grassy space. We met Deputy Kriz, one of the Animal Control…
Northumberland County Animal Shelter is on the path to proving that it’s possible to operate a successful, open-intake municipal shelter that saves nearly all the saveable dogs (and cats) in a rural area with few resources. They have all the…
This Sunday we will be heading off on another shelter tour – this time sticking close to home. We’ll be visiting six shelters in my home state of Virginia. On our way out, we’ll have a quick, fun stop at…
It’s a pipe dream that every county in every southern state should have a progressive animal shelter that functions as a community resource and adoption center. There are simply too many small counties and too many stretched budgets. Instead, many…
Owner surrenders are swamping this tiny county as they labor on offering foster care and advocating for spay/neuter.