Shelter Transformation in Tennessee
Thankfully, Maury County Animal Shelter was much changed from the last time I was there. That was clear from the faces of the dogs.
We met with Jack, the new director, and Maily, a volunteer leader; both are new to Maury and having a positive impact on the place.
When I visited Maury nine months ago, I spoke with the woman who handled intake who told me that while she sometimes asked why people were dumping their animals, she had no choice but to take them. Now, while still an ‘open-intake’ shelter, people had to make an appointment to surrender their pets, and the earliest appointment was usually a week or two away. Similar to a waiting period for buying a gun, that gave them time to reconsider and possibly find another way to rehome their pet rather than dump it at the shelter out of frustration or desperation.
Instead of barren kennels and isolation, now the dogs in the adoptable area had filled Kong toys and other toys, blankets, and as many as three walks/playtime with volunteers each day. Maily had managed a huge well-laid-out whiteboard that included information about the dogs, places for comments from volunteers, and directions for all the volunteer jobs so that anyone who showed up could get right to work without the direction of the volunteer coordinator or the director.
Not only did the board keep volunteers from wasting their time, it gathered more information about individual dogs, and ensured that dogs were getting equal attention. There were bins of Kongs waiting to be filled and big jars of treats available to be given out — that was such a change from my last visit!
All of the dogs on the adoption floor were spayed/neutered, microchipped, and up-to-date on shots. They were ready to walk out the door with an adopter that day. Jack didn’t want someone to choose a dog and then have to wait a week or more to pick it up (many will get tired of waiting and never show up for their new pet). There were about a dozen or so dogs in Adoption, but we visited on a Monday after a busy adoption weekend.
The majority of the dogs we met were in the ‘Stray Hold’ area where dogs are legally required to be held 72 hours before they can be adopted, pulled by rescue, or destroyed. Dogs in Stray Hold are kept there until they are reclaimed by owners or have had the necessary vet and behavior attention needed to move them to Adoption.
When I visited last fall, dogs were lingering in Stray Hold for months and months, stressed and neglected.
They were still held in Stray Hold far longer than is good for them, but efforts were being made to not only move dogs up to adoption faster, but to ensure they had exercise and attention while they waited. It was a bit of a struggle because before volunteers could handle them, the dogs had to be evaluated by a trainer and staff; and before they could go to adoption, dogs had to be spayed/neutered, shots updated, etc. None of that could begin until the 72-hour hold was up.
Maury did not have a vet on staff and relied on vets that came in on Wednesdays. In a shelter this size, that inevitably meant a backlog. It meant dogs still waited in Stray hold for weeks, sometimes longer. Jack had to juggle his desire for dogs to be immediately adoptable for an impatient public with the importance of moving dogs out of Stray Hold as quickly as possible. He was working to get more veterinary help, knowing it was the key.
Many municipal shelters utilize inmates to do much of the work. While from the public standpoint (and the budget standpoint) this may seem like a good plan, for the dogs’ sake, it’s a terrible one. Shelter staff have no say in which inmates are assigned to the shelter and no knowledge of their ability with animals. One of the most important jobs of a shelter employee (or volunteer) is to follow a strict cleaning and handling protocol to ensure that infected animals do not spread diseases like parvo, ringworm, and a host of others to the general population. Using inmates makes this difficult to enforce, so Jack had moved much of the work and most of the animal handling over to staff. Hoping to counter the inevitable push back at added work, he also invited an outside group to evaluate staff compensation and determined that a raise was in order for shelter employees.
The most powerful key to changing the culture of a shelter and saving more dogs is leadership. I’ve seen this again and again in shelter after shelter. One positive, motivated person can make the difference between a shelter that is a community partner, saving dogs and educating the public and one the public eyes as a place to dump the animals they don’t want to deal with.
When I visited before, it was hard to pin down the LRR (Live Release Rate), partly because the director did not show up to meet with me. To be honest, I never know for sure what that number means because there are many different interpretations of it that can vary shelter to shelter. Is it the number of ‘treatable, adoptable animals’ that make it safely out of the shelter through return-to-owner, adoptions or rescue? Or is it just the number of animals that come to the shelter for any reason that make it out alive? And what is ‘treatable, adoptable” and who makes that judgment?
One big difference between my first visit and now was that Jack seemed willing to be transparent about just about everything. He’s been in shelter work for over twenty years. He’s seen a lot. He’s learned a lot. He agreed that LRR is very open to interpretation. He didn’t know the numbers off the top of his head, but later he sent me an email that said Maury has euthanized 108 of the 1096 animals they’d taken in since January 1 (it was June when we visited), more than half of those he said were very sick kittens (they had a virus come through, a strain I’ve never heard of). That puts their LRR somewhere around 90%. Not a terrible number as far as municipal shelters go, but not nearly as good as Williamson County Shelter, just thirty minutes away.
To be fair, though, as we drove into Williamson we couldn’t help but notice it sits smack dab in some of the poshest suburbs you’ll encounter in Tennessee. There was money and volunteers and community support to spare at Williamson. They have a large staff, a well-equipped building (with ‘catios’ and a full veterinary suite), a full-time vet (and two techs), a full-time volunteer coordinator (to organize the plethora of volunteers we were literally tripping over). This created an atmosphere that was positive and bustling with activity.
At the time, Williamson’s LRR was somewhere around 97%, and Chris, the kennel manager who gave us a tour, told me that they really stressed that last 3%.
Williamson is an example of all a shelter can be — engaged in its community, caring expertly for its animals, and saving every possible animal they can save. I asked Chris if their numbers were going up or down in terms of intake and without hesitation, he said, “Up.”
So a great building, full staff, veterinary access, and lots of money still didn’t stem the flow of unwanted animals. I asked Jack at Maury what he thought the problem was and while he told me that was complicated, many-pronged situation, he thought the only solution that would bring real change was a ‘paradigm shift’ in terms of how people think about animals.
“This is a work in progress,” Jack said to me many times on our tour, and he was right, Maury still has a ways to go in terms of care and in terms of shifting that paradigm, but so does this country. That much is still clear.
Note: Since this first trip, I’ve gone back two more times and am in the midst of planning another trip in January, despite COVID restrictions. The situation has not improved, despite a brief flurry of rescue adoptions at the onset of the pandemic. Now the shelters and dog pounds are filling again and the desperation level only rises.
I am posting the stories of our trips in the hope that they will motivate more people to help, to spread the word, and to consider donating what they can in terms of time or resources to help the dogs that have been forgotten. You can find more information on all of the shelters, pounds, and rescues that we’ve visited and how to help them directly on our website, Who Will Let the Dogs Out.
Together, we can let the dogs out.
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