Rethinking Shelter Work: The 5 Tenets of Responsible Sheltering

Tonight, we are gonna talk about the five tenets of responsible sheltering.

And I wanna just start with telling you why we created the five tenets of responsible sheltering.

So, the main reason is because the current movement that we have going, the no-kill save them all messaging, is really misleading and confusing the public, and we feel like focusing on that is, is not helping at this point, and we need to talk about other things.

Because focusing on that number, that no-kill number, and the idea of saving them all, is incentivizing a lot of bad practices like closing the intake, like warehousing, we see a lot of that when we're out on shelter tour, and leaving animals where you found them.

That is another bad practice that we are seeing.

And, and frankly, really, at this point, focusing on a live release number while our stray population explodes, our shelters are overrun, our rescues are overwhelmed, and citizens cannot get the help they need, is not helping.

It's unrealistic at this juncture in history as the numbers are beyond adopting our way out of this.

Our aim should not be to reach a percentage, but for shelters to do the job that they were created to do: help animals and people.

We believe that we need a new way of talking about effective and successful sheltering, and we're calling that responsible sheltering.

Now, when I talk about responsible sheltering, I am primarily focusing on municipal shelters.

Although if you are a nonprofit shelter or a rescue who operates in a municipality that has no animal services, then this would be you.

Or if you're a nonprofit shelter contracted to provide animal services in some capacity, this is also you.

But that said, that doesn't mean that what we're gonna talk about tonight in this webinar does not pertain to rescues.

Rescues are a critical piece of the puzzle, and they really enable shelters to shelter responsibly.

So, I want you to keep this in mind as we go because I feel like this is at the core of some of the misunderstandings in this country.

The words shelter and rescue are not interchangeable, yet we treat them that way.

A shelter, you know, by definition, is providing protection and care.

And a rescue, they were created to save lives.

That's their job.

So a shelter's job is to provide protection and care.

A rescue's job is to save lives.

So we're trying to keep those separate in your heads as we're going along tonight.

So Who Will Let The Dogs Out?, I started going out in 2018.

We formalized in 2019.

So since then, we've made over 227 visits in 17 states.