As COVID cases continue to rise in Florida, many organizations are seeking to rethink their workplace safety guidelines and protocols. Leaders are grappling with decisions about mask mandates, vaccination requirements, and how they can best protect employees and the public they serve. Below are some resources that my help as you navigate changes in your organizations policies.

Pethealth Inc. is proud to announce the return of the Diane & Bob Hoover Annual Innovation Award.

Animal shelters do not often have the opportunity to commit to a major renovation or new building project. So, the decision to start fresh with a new facility or to transform your current space needs to be thoughtfully considered based on a variety of factors, including fundraising capability, site availability, and animal capacity needs now, and at minimum, a decade into the future. 

Understanding your fundraising capacity is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You cannot properly evaluate fundraising capacity without some analysis of your current and future needs.  However, you won’t be able to fully define the scope of the project until you know how much money you can raise. We recommend a needs assessment to understand how much it would cost to design and build the project if you were to undertake a major renovation or potentially build a whole new shelter. With this information, your fundraising feasibility consultant can do his or her work more effectively. 

The State of the State in 2020: Florida’s Animal Sheltering Trends and the Road Ahead from FAAWO on Vimeo.

With increasing number of natural disasters, there is a need for effective and efficient ways to manage the number of animal transfer to and from your organization. As evidence with California fires or the hurricanes in Louisianna this past year, more and more transfer networks are being created to help get animals quickly out of harms way.

That’s whyPetPoint, in coordination with Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), have built the all-new Transfer Manifest Report — a report designed to make transferring animals, even in emergencies, easier than ever before.  Display the animals ready for transfer, along with their vital medical details and behavior status, in a report that opens in Excel for easy sharing or sorting.

The Association for Animal Welfare Advancement is back with another episode of The Intake. Jim Tedford, the President and CEO of The Association for Animal Welfare Advancement, interviewed Steve Zeidman, Senior Vice President, Software Solutions from Pethealth Inc. and the 2020 recipients of the Diane & Bob Hoover Annual Innovation Award, Adan Parra and Michele Anderson from El Paso Animal Services.

Though El Paso Animal Services have multiple worthy initiatives, their focus on using technology to reunite more pets with their loving families was inspiring. Fueled by the creation of Lost and Found pet reports, El Paso’s Pet Finder Map is an interactive and comprehensive tool. It’s become a central location for the community to post a photo of their lost pet or view pets found.

How we occupy and move through spaces have been altered by our need to adapt our lives to controlling the spread of COVID-19. It’s now routine to drop-off and pick-up your pooch through the window of your car while waiting in the veterinary hospital’s parking lot. We suspect that many shelters have already adapted operations by, for example, moving some adoption processes on-line, limiting how many potential adopters can be in the lobby at one time, or making your people-traffic go in one direction with separate entrance and exit doors and floor-mapping flow through animal housing.

There are several design techniques that were already prevalent in the animal sheltering world that others now realize will help make all buildings safer to use and occupy during our time of COVID-19 and afterward. Those in the animal care community already know that air quality, flow and filtration help control the spread of airborne pathogens. Compartmentalizing animal housing into smaller spaces makes it easier to contain a disease outbreak and sanitize a space more rapidly. Automatic door openers make it easier to bring crated and non-crated animals through the doorway and provide a touchless entry. 

Across the industry, 2020 was an unprecedented year requiring transformation. We at 24Pet understood as a result of COVID-19, our shelter partners may have experienced heightened levels of stress as they continued to care for animals in need and may still be experiencing that. Our industry pivoted to a new normal and we committed to supporting animal welfare and our shelter partners through challenging times. Despite 2020’s challenges, together, we were able to help advance many aspects of your organization’s practices through initiatives that include:  

Beginning January 1, 2021, all FAAWO member organizations (and any staff members associated with that organization) are eligible for 50% off your annual AAWA membership dues! This partnership aims to bring animal welfare professionals the most thorough and up-to-date training and resources from both a local and national level. 

While our goal in the animal welfare industry is to find pets their forever home, part of that involves reuniting lost pets with their families. Early 2020, Pethealth and PetCo Foundation conducted a study of 1400 shelters in North America to learn more about the number of pets being reunited the previous year.

Here are some highlights:

Combating homelessness or a domestic violence situation is a cause that the Humane Society of North Central Florida says some shouldn’t deal with alone.

“And they will not leave that situation if they cannot take their pet with them,” mentioned Margot DeConna the Director of Advancement at the non-profit.

Courtesy of Florida Politics

On November 12, 2020, nothing could dampen the excitement at Humane Society of Tampa Bay (HSTB), not even a tropical storm. Though Eta pounded the Tampa Bay area with wind and rain during the early hours of Thursday morning, by afternoon the clouds had broken, and HSTB staff and volunteers were busy preparing for the Grand Opening of the long-awaited DeBartolo Family Animal Shelter. That evening, HSTB donors, friends, volunteers, staff and Tampa celebrities such as Mayor Jane Castor and Titus O’Neil gathered under the stars in the Lasher Family Courtyard to celebrate. The new shelter not only offers increased space for events, a recently launched Humane Education Program, and fully equipped surgical suites and intake areas, but it doubles the capacity for animal housing and will allow HSTB to save twice as many animals each year.

For more than 70 years, the Society operated from the ramshackle building at 3607 N Armenia Avenue, making the best of limited space, no climate control for animals, and structures crumbling from age. Despite the antiquated facility, HSTB placed thousands of animals each year by using space efficiently and creatively and maintaining a cheerful, happy environment for the people and animals who visited.