Lizzie

We had a bit of an emergency situation with a young, pit mix named Lizzie this week. She'd been at TLAC since October and had been very cute and fun. I couldn't understand why she hadn't been adopted yet, except that she barked and acted crazy inside of her kennel. Once outside, though, she was a different dog. She was calm, sweet, good on the leash, great manners, smart, silly...

All of a sudden this week, her entire personality changed. She was lethargic and wasn't interested in being with people. Perhaps she was sick, but the animal behaviorist on staff thought she had kennel stress and was really depressed. Makes sense to me. On Wednesday night, staff notified us that if she wasn't adopted by the weekend, she would be euthanized. We volunteers jumped into high-gear and did whatever we could think of to help her. We put up flyers all over town. Some offered to foster Lizzie at their house, until we could find a home. Many offered donations to sponsor her - to attract a rescue group to come and rescue her.

(The donations part will come up later in the post, so I want to add a little more about that here. All rescue groups are low on cash and over-full on dogs. It's common for people to "sponsor" a dog that they really like, but can't foster themselves, in order to entice another group to pull the dog. We volunteers have done that a couple of times in the last few months. We gather up a pool of donations and then send out a plea to the rescue groups. It usually works.)

Thursday night we got wonderful news. First, staff (some on their holiday vacations) discussed the issue and decided to allow a volunteer to foster Lizzie. Fostering our dogs is something the volunteers have wanted to do for a long time. TLAC staff decided to let a volunteer foster a dog for the first time a few weeks ago and it worked wonderfully, and at our last meeting, they mentioned continuing with this on a limited basis.

However, right after we found out that we could take her home and foster her, someone came in, who saw a flyer, and wanted to adopt her!! She's going home today!!

Of course, we are all thrilled. Then, this morning, we get this email from TLAC staff:

Donations: When the information was posted regarding Lizzie's status, several of you offered to donate funds for her placement. Financial donations are always accepted but should not be dedicated to the care of one specific animal. The Pet Placement donation account helps to provide care for their medical needs, medical reatments, grooming needs, dental care, etc.

Euthanaisa Decision: When the staff makes the difficult decision to pull an animal from the adoption program for euthanasia, it is made with careful consideration about what is best for the animal. These situations are not about what is best or easiest on our own human emotions but on the needs of the animals. It is already very difficult to make these decisions and we respectfully ask that you trust the TLAC Management Team to always do what is best for the approximate 25,000 animals annually entrusted in our care.

What You Can DO: As a volunteer, you can help by staying committed to the opportunities that you have as a volunteer. Sign up on the Yahoo Group calendar for a regular, steady time to volunteer. Interact with the animals AND with the people that are looking to adopt one of our animals in a positive, proactive manner of customer service. Market the attributes of the dogs to potential customers.

After getting Lizzie adopted in a day and avoiding euthanasia, this is the only correspondence we received from staff on this matter.

Why the defensiveness? No one questioned staff when told that Lizzie couldn't remain in the shelter past the weekend. No one accused staff of anything. We heard that Lizzie was in trouble and we did what we could to get her out of the shelter environment asap. We greatly appreciate staff giving us the head's up about Lizzie's situation and then giving us permission to foster her (although, they only allowed the fostering after we pressed for it; they could have easily offered it up themselves, but did not).

This staff/volunteer relations issue is very interesting to me and is the one of the topics I'll be exploring further with this blog.

I'll just end this post now with "WAY TO GO, LIZZIE!!"

First Post!

I'm back to being an official volunteer at Town Lake Animal Center in Austin (Yay!), after a 2 month break, so I guess now is the right time to start documenting my experiences there. I was not allowed to be a volunteer for two months, because I would not give my social security number to the city of Austin. They have decided that volunteers need to undergo criminal background investigations (cbis) in order to keep volunteering to protect children from sex offenders. In order to run a background check, you need a name. Possibly a date of birth if the name is common and a search returns something. You don't need a social security number. However, the city said that if we didn't give them our ssn, we couldn't be volunteers. We offered to go to the city courthouse and have a cbi run, at our expense, so that we didn't have to give them the information, but they wouldn't accept that.



Well, after enough complaining, 2 months later they have told us that we can return as volunteers and do not have to give them our social security numbers. So now I'm officially back, although not much has changed. I was still able to go and work and hang out with the dogs as a member of the community when I was not allowed to be an official volunteer. But for some strange psychological reason, it does feel better to be an official volunteer now, so I'm pretty excited to have this behind me.



Why was I so against giving up my social security number? I have two main reasons. The first is the new Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which was passed in 2006. The law turns anyone into a "terrorist" who "intentionally damages or causes the loss of any property (including animals or records) used by the animal enterprise, or conspires to do so.” Many groups have argued that profits could be considered property and people utilizing their First Amendment rights, like organizing boycotts of companies who are mistreating animals (and thus, affecting profits), could be punished. See the Humane Society's response here: http://www.hsus.org/web-files/PDF/109_AETA_factsheet.pdf



Anyway, I suppose I've become paranoid over these last couple of years. I'm not giving my social security number up so that the government can easily start a profile of me.



The second reason is that I don't trust the city to keep my information safe. Not long after we learned of the city's intention with the cbi, TLAC "accidentally" gave out all of our email addresses to an outside party for lobbying purposes. So I don't have a whole lot of confidence in the city and their processes.



Ok, great, so now that I have all of that documented and behind me, I hope to move forward and post on current issues at TLAC.