Inside Animal Services with Haven Humane

Most people know Haven Humane as the place to adopt a pet, but there's much more to the organization than finding homes for animals.

In this episode, Katie and Steve sit down with Haven Humane CEO Jim Lewis to discuss the organization's partnership with the City of Redding and its role in providing Animal Regulation Services. From responding to stray animals and dangerous dogs to investigating animal cruelty and enforcing local animal ordinances, Haven Humane plays an important role in protecting both people and pets throughout our community.

The conversation also answers some of the most common questions residents have about animal regulation, clears up common misconceptions, and explores what responsible pet ownership looks like in Redding.

Whether you're a pet owner, considering adopting a pet, or simply curious about how animal services work, this episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at the people, programs, and partnerships that help keep our community safe while promoting the humane treatment of animals.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

I'm Katie.

SPEAKER_02 0:07

And I'm Steve, and this is the City of Reading Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Most people know Haven Humane as the place to adopt a pet, but that's only part of what they do.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

Haven Humane also provides animal regulation services for the City of Reading, responding to calls involving stray animals, barking dogs, dangerous animals, cruelty investigations, and more.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Today we're joined by Haven Humane CEO Jim Lewis to talk about the organization's role in our community, how its partnership with the city works, and what residents should know about the services they provide.

SPEAKER_02 0:34

We'll also cover some of the most common questions they receive, clear up a few misconceptions about animal regulation, and discuss what responsible pet ownership looks like here in Reading.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Whether you're a pet owner or just interested in learning more about how these services operate, we hope you'll come away with a better understanding of the work Haven Humane does every day.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

That's a good start. I'm Jim Lewis. I'm the CEO at Haven Humane Society. I actually started with Haven in 2011. So I've been here 15 years now. I started out as an adoption specialist. I was just at the front desk helping folks find their forever dog for their family. I became fascinated with what our animal regulation officers were doing out in the community, being on, you know, the front lines of animal welfare. And that intrigued me. So I started doing some ride-along and volunteering with the animal regulation department until eventually a spot opened up there. I was an officer for a couple of years before moving into management and then into the executive role as the director of operations for the last five or six years. And then October of 2025 is when I became CEO of the organization after Mark Story retired last year. So yeah, since then I've been in the CEO's office and I'm just really excited to kind of push the organization in a positive direction and build on everything that's come before and just become a stronger member of the community.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Well, welcome, Jen. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. And it sounds like you've got a wealth of information on Haven Humane. So maybe we just start with a big picture, high-level overview. For people who aren't super familiar with Haven Humane, just give us a big picture. What is Haven Humane and what does the organization do?

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Sure. So Haven Humane Society is a nonprofit animal welfare organization. We hold contracts with City of Reading, City of Anderson, and Shasta County. For City of Reading, we provide animal regulation services, sheltering services. For City of Anderson, we do the same thing except we're there Monday through Friday. We're a city of Reading, we're 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. In the city of Anderson, we're just kind of eight to five Monday through Friday. And then APD handles the calls in the off hours. And then Shasta County, we are their sheltering agency and a community partner with them, but the Shasta County Sheriff's Department operates their own animal regulation department, who then just brings animals into Haven to shelter. We have a uh Spay and Neuter Clinic. We spay and neuter about 5,000 animals a year. We provide vaccine clinics, low-cost vaccine clinics, once a week at our clinic. We do twice a month TNR, that's trap neuter release clinics, low-cost and or free to help with the cat issues that we have in all of the communities around us. And the Spain Neuter Clinic also is a full-time hospital for all of the animals that are at Haven Humane Society on any given day. We have about two to 400 animals in our care at any one time. So our hospital takes care of all of them. We also have an adoption center, the Morgan Adoption Center. We added that in 2012, and we've been doing adoptions out of that building since then. We do about 2,000 to 2,500 adoptions a year. We have a kitten nursery that operates round the clock during kitten season, which is around April to November. It seems to get longer every year as summers get longer and springs get longer. We're one of only 1% of shelters in California that have a kitten nursery on site. But that allows us to take in those orphan kittens that don't have any other help. And we have people, like I said, around the clock to make sure they're getting the care they need. And we do a lot of education and outreach with going to schools to do presentations, to help do fundraising with different organizations, outreaches at different events in the community, and lots and lots of adoption myths.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

Well, and Jim, I mean, it's pretty amazing. Really, it's it's such a robust organization and so much more than, you know, I think there's that myth out there that it's, you know, not just Haven, but in general, that it's, you know, this place where you go to adopt a dog. But like like you're saying, it's a whole wealth of services and amenities and things that are really for the betterment of the community. Maybe we could touch a little bit on you mentioned that that City of Reading partnership specific to animal regulation and sheltering. What exactly does that consist of? How does that work? And also, what type of calls are your animal animal regulation officers responding to on a typical day?

SPEAKER_00 5:00

So our contract with City of Reading includes the animal regulation and animal sheltering. So during normal business hours, around eight to eight, it's kind of seasonal depending on the weather. We have officers out patrolling, usually two out patrolling each side of the city. We respond to calls all day long, anything related to normal pets, right? So it could be anything from dogs barking, and we try to help neighbors settle disputes that way before it has to go any further. We respond to animals running loose, dogs in traffic, aggressive animals at large, bite reports and bite quarantines, feral cats, anything you can think of really that that includes a dog or a cat, especially, we will respond to. After hours, we respond to emergencies only. So uh injured animals, dogs in high traffic areas, that type of stuff, we'll respond to 24-7.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

There's only two people, you said, that are doing that every day?

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Right. We have two officers out in the field at one time, plus one in the office, and then we have Vena officers that also patrol in Anderson, and they can go back and forth to each jurisdiction as needed if we need extra help anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

I'm just saying because it seems like from the size of our community and just some of the numbers that you rattled off of the animals that are in your care, I would imagine that's a they probably have a long list of things that they need to address every day.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Yes, they have very busy days. They they work 10-hour shifts and do as much as they can, plus the on-call at night. You know, and with the animals that we're seeing, the 400 animals that are in our care at any one time, we also have employees on site. So we we have about 50 employees that are here taking care of all those animals on a regular basis. So it's not, you know, the two animal control officers doing everything to do with the animals, but they are the people that are out in the field every day.

SPEAKER_02 6:46

And Jim, you know, some of those things you mentioned, like complaints maybe between neighbors regarding barking dogs or aggressive dogs and things like that. When should someone, again, speak maybe speaking specifically here to the city of Reading community members, when should someone call Haven Humane directly versus calling Reading Police Department or Reading Code Enforcement on some of these topics?

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Almost anything that's related directly to the animal welfare or involving pets should go to animal regulation first. And that number is 241-2550. That connects you directly to Reading Animal Regulations. And for anybody who's listening outside of the city of Reading that also works for the Anderson folks. But yeah, that that's your best place to start, whether it's barking, whether it's dogs running loose, whether it's a dog bite, we'll we'll kind of get the ball rolling on any of that stuff. For dogs barking, it's it's really sustained barking, is when it becomes an issue that we can respond to. If a dog barks occasionally when someone walks by or knocks on your door, it might be annoying, but it's not violating any type of code yet. So then we encourage neighbors to talk to each other and of course be a community. That's our big push right now, is just trying to emphasize our spot in the community and everybody else's spot in the community. We're not a monolith and the community is not a monolith. We all need to work together. But if a dog is barking on and on and on for hours at a time, give us a call. If it's sustained barking, like 10 or 15 minutes nonstop, give us a call. We can send an officer out and see what's happening. And, you know, we always want to start with education first and then enforcement. So we'll just talk to people before we do anything else. We're not out to just write as many tickets as we can or anything like that. It's really about just building good neighbors.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

Well, and I could imagine some of those situations might be tricky to handle anyway. If an animal regulation officer comes out and let's say the dog isn't barking at that moment, then it really is a he said she said battle for for lack of a better way to describe it. I feel like if we take that one step further, right, barking dogs might be annoying. But we've had quite a few complaints come through the city feedback channels that are about either aggressive dogs or not necessarily bites, but like aggressive animals that neighbors are feeling like there's an aggressive dog in their neighborhood or whatever. How do you determine whether or not a dog is aggressive, especially if you don't have an officer, let's say, that's on the street watching it at the moment? You're you're just you're going on hearsay, basically. So how do those officers determine if what they're hearing actually is true?

SPEAKER_00 9:09

It would it would begin with a conversation with the owner of the dog, if we have the owner and the reporting party. And that's when you start to try to wade through the he said, she said stuff and get to what's going on. It's also about being able to read dog body language and removing some preconceived notions or preconceptions about different breeds of dogs. You know, there's a tendency for people to call in frantically about an aggressive pit bull running through the neighborhood. And then when our officers arrive, the aggressive pit bull jumps onto them and it's just, you know, begging for attention. But sometimes that there are those preconceived notions that this dog must be aggressive because of its breed or because it's running. But to answer your question more directly, if we're not able to see whatever is happening happen, there is a process for neighbors to do written statements and things like that. Of course, at some point then it will become public who's complaining about who. So there can be some hesitance to do that. But if we can't catch something happening in the act, then there's not a ton we can do without people corroborating it. There it, you know, dogs are required to be on a leash when they're not in their yard or at the off-leash dog areas in the city of Reading. So just being off-leash, even if you're not aggressive, is a code violation. But again, it's all about education and trying to make good neighbors versus enforcing everything immediately.

SPEAKER_02 10:31

That makes sense. I wonder, Jim, talking about this partnership specifically, how unique is this partnership with the city and an age and an agency such as your own connecting and kind of working together on this? I mean, I'm assuming because you all are the specialists in this field that it works really well. But what would you say is is maybe the main advantage of this style partnership between uh Haven Humane and the city at Reading?

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Yeah. I just want to point out too, I because I think you said a Haven Humane. So we are the only Haven Humane. Humane societies and AS or SPCAs are both a term, like a grocery store. So we're all separate from each other, we're not related to each other, we're just serving a function. So Haven Humane Society has nothing to do directly with like Butte Humane Society down in Chico. We just serve similar functions in the community. So just to clear that up, because that is a common thing that people think we're part of the Humane Society of the United States, or we're part of the ASPCA, or that we all talk to each other or you know, send animals back and forth, and it's just not the case. That said, to answer your question, it's it's a very common partnership between a nonprofit and a city to serve animal regulation and sheltering functions. Our funding is about 25 to 30 percent from the contracts that we hold with the three jurisdictions, and the other 70, 75% is all nonprofit donation driven. A municipal shelter that doesn't have that nonprofit arm, you can imagine, is working on a on a smaller budget. They're able to give far less time to the animals that come into their care. So part of the function of the of animal regulation and sheltering is to take in those trays, stray animals, make sure that animal welfare is being enforced throughout the community. But if you can't get those animals adopted out, then unfortunately you're left in a situation where you don't know what to do with these animals because they're continuing to come through the door. And especially with dogs, you can't turn away the dogs and say, sorry, we're full, we're not gonna do our contracted function anymore until we get some animals out. It's just not allowed. So that's where the nonprofit and cities or jurisdictional partnerships spring from. So yeah, really like the adoption events that we hold, the dogs that stay with us for 150, 200 days before they finally get their get adopted or kittens that are in foster care for two, three, four months before they're old enough to be spayed and neutered, that really wouldn't be possible for a municipal shelter who doesn't have the nonprofit side.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

And since we're kind of on the topic, because you mentioned it, so I was I was gonna ask what exactly a kitten nursery is. And it's something I haven't heard that many places do. So it's it sounds like it's a pretty specific function. And given the cat population in our area, how does that work overall?

SPEAKER_00 13:22

Yeah. So a kitten nursery, yeah, like you said, it's fairly unique because it takes the person power and hours to put in to get it done, right? Kittens need to be fed when they're newborns every two hours. So you can't really do that while taking care of the other 300 dogs and cats on your campus without a dedicated space for them. But in our community, we I mean, everybody knows there's feral cats, there's stray cats, there's community cats, they're all kind of different versions of similar things. But they are out in most of our neighborhoods, and if people are not getting them spayed and neutered, they have kittens, and of course, those kittens have kittens, and it's a cycle that never ends. So kitten nursery allows us to take in newly orphaned kittens. These are kittens, you know, days to a week old that have no real chance of survival without their mom. Now, some of the time people are bringing in kittens that have a mom waiting behind a bush that, but she's not gonna come out till you leave, just like with wildlife. It's best to leave them there and try to watch from a distance and see if a mom is going to come back for them. But if you're reasonably sure that no mom is gonna be returning, or if you can pick up the mom and the kittens at the same time, then they can come in and they can go straight to the nursery, which is reserved solely for kittens basically under four months old. There's no contact in there with older cats or dogs or anything like that. So it's a fairly clean place to be. And there are staff around the clock can bottle feed every couple of hours. For the really newborn kittens, they have to stimulate their bottoms so that they can go to the bathroom. It's something their mom would normally do. They use little toothbrushes to brush the kitten's fur. The mom will usually be, you know, grooming them with her tongue, and so that like helps soothe them. And then they stay in like a little neonate area until they are weaned onto eating food on their own and starting to go to the bathroom on their own. And then they move into a what we call like the toddler or teenage area where they have a little more space and start being actual kittens. And from there, once they're big enough to be adopted, they will head over to our spay and neuter clinic, get spayed and neutered, thus ending the cycle of breeding, and they can go back out and get adopted. In the meantime, the other hugely important part of the kitten nursery is that we want their stay there to be as short as possible. The best place for a kitten to be, besides with its own mom, is in a foster home where it can be socialized with the people there and not, you know, grow up in as much as we make it to try to feel like a home for them. It is a cage when you're at at a shelter. So we try to limit the time that there's that they spend actually in the nursery and just get them out to foster homes. So I think last time I looked, we currently had 290 cats and kittens out in foster care and foster homes.

SPEAKER_02 16:09

Wow, that's a lot. I mean, that's amazing. We're good. Jim, talking speaking of orphan kittens and stray animals in general, as the resident expert here, if if every pet owner did just three things, what would make the biggest difference in reducing stray animals?

SPEAKER_00 16:23

Oh, I mean, number one with a bullet is spay and neuter. That that's our biggest issue. In the last couple of years, our intake has increased about 25%. I ran the numbers when I took over as CEO, and 20% of that increase is puppies and kittens that we didn't used to get. So to put it in like anecdotal terms, you know, 10 years ago we would have maybe one litter of puppies in the shelter at a time, one pregnant mom about to give birth, something like that. Now we almost always have two to four litters of puppies. Or, you know, we have a group of four months olds, we have a group of five month olds, and we have some that are just being born. So there's always puppies, that is, dogs under six months old at the shelter, which used to be more of a rarity. So yeah, number one with a bullet span here, that's where most of the increase comes from. Our adoption numbers and rescue numbers and return to owner numbers all are growing every year. Like we're setting new records for the number of animals that are getting placed. Unfortunately, we set new records for the number of animals being intaked as well. So without those puppies and kittens there, that number would shrink and we would be able to actually, you know, be more effective here. Let's see. Number two, contingency plans. Like what happens if something comes up? Have you bitten off more than you can chew? If you have so many dogs and cats that you can't provide care for them when they need the care, what happens to those cats and kittens? Or dogs and cats, sorry. We don't always have space for owner surrender animals if if you can no longer take care of it. We are so busy with all of the stray animals coming in that we can't help directly with owned animals. It's kind of a uh like a snake eating its own tail thing because then some of those animals become strays that we then take in. So I think, yeah, kind of contingency plans. If your life changes suddenly, what are you gonna do with the pets in your life? And can you afford to take care of the pets in your life? Number three, I think just socialization, training, affection for the animals, all of that stuff so that we don't run into the issues where if a dog does go missing or does get out, or a cat comes into the shelter, shows up with someone else's house, are they well-adjusted, socialized animals who are going to be easy to get back home if possible, to find a new home for if that's needed, if they end up at the shelter that they will kind of roll with the changes in their their life and can be adopted quickly? Or do they need to stay here for weeks and weeks and weeks while we slowly get them used to our processes and teach them how to be a dog again?

SPEAKER_01 19:00

And I did have a question too on just like what does it look like? I've got a stray cat in my backyard, I know it needs to be spayed or neutered. What do I need to do to get it to Haven on one of those days?

SPEAKER_00 19:13

So for those days, the the cats have to be in a trap. So we're we're treating the cats like feral cats. That's the purpose of those days. So the cats have to be in a trap. So you can, you know, purchase one from a local hardware store or a big box store, can come and rent them from us. But essentially you'll set the trap with food in it. The cat goes in and a door closes behind it when it steps on a pressure plate. And then you just have to show up here first thing in the morning, get in line, and try to be one of the lucky people that gets their cat taken in. I can't tell you honestly that it's all, you know, it's always gonna work out because there are so many cats that are waiting to get done and so many people trying to get it done that it it takes a real effort of someone getting here early in the morning, making sure they're one of the first people here so that they can get the cat done. If you can't do that, and if the cat is friendly, there are vouchers available that can help offset the cost of spay and neuter. So if you're taking it to another vet or to our vet, to our clinic as a regular, you know, spay and neuter, which is a little more expensive, it's a little more, it just takes a little more care and time to do and includes more services, then you can, you know, just hold on to the cat and make an appointment and bring it in, use the voucher to help offset the cost. And those vouchers can be used at other veterinarians.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Okay, and then you can't make an appointment. You have to just show up early. And if you don't happen to be one of the people who can get in that day, you just, I guess I'm just like walking through the process. Take the cat back, open the trap, try again on another, on another day. Or if you are one of the lucky people who get in, what does that process look like after the cat is spayed and neutered? Do they recover at your facility and then you come and pick them up later, or do you just have to pick them up immediately and kind of let them back out into the world?

SPEAKER_00 20:55

Yeah, great question. So you you've trapped a cat, you've taken it to our clinic either first thing in the morning, Monday through Thursday, as one of our seven daily feral cat appointments, or you bring it into one of our Thursday spay and neuter clinics that are reserved for feral cats only. You drop off the cat around three to four that afternoon. You're gonna come back to the shelter or to our clinic and pick up the cat in the trap. It'll be recovering from the surgery. You'll get some instructions on what to do with the cat once you get it home. But essentially, yeah, you are going to make sure it's fully aware of where it is and that it's not under anymore and it's not still groggy from any anesthesia or anything like that. And then you can release it back. Some people do keep that, you know, in a spot in there. They might have a spare room that they keep them in, or if your garage is climate controlled, you can keep them in there until they're you know fully recovered after a few days. But in general, it's just gonna be same day trap, neuter, and release.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

If we could pivot to dogs, yeah. So can you walk us through what Happens when a stray dog arrives at Haven. And I guess to build on that, you touched on it a little bit earlier where sometimes you know dogs are there for months on end. But how long do animals typically stay before they're adopted? And then I guess what does that look like if they end up not getting adopted as well?

SPEAKER_00 22:15

There are two, if we're we're just going to talk about stray, stray dogs. You know, we do other types of intakes, whether it's protective custody for people who may have been arrested, someone who goes to the hospital and has a dog with them when they get sick or injured, that kind of stuff. But that kind of has a different path for stray dogs. First, we have the dogs that are picked up in the field by our officers. So when our officer arrives and picks up the dog, they're going to do grab a description, check for a collar or any other identification. They're going to scan for a microchip. And the microchips, they're about $30 from most places. You can get them cheaper from us, depending on the day. And they just hold the information that a tag would hold basically. You call a number and we can get the address, phone number, email of the owner. So they're going to gather all that information. They will also, if it's found in front of a resident, they will, you know, check that residence. They will go up and down, you know, houses on either side just to double check. It's not, doesn't belong right where it's found, or someone doesn't recognize the animal. They'll call into our office, check the microchip information, again, the tag information. If there's a license tag, that also has your home address and phone number associated with. We'll do everything we can to make contact with an owner and then return that animal in the field before it ever gets to the shelter. Our big push right now is exactly that to prevent them from coming into the shelter at the first place. If there's any way we can find an owner for this dog before it ever gets to the shelter, then we will make that happen. Next, the officer drives it down back to the shelter. They might keep the dog on their van for a little while in case the owner calls in, right? So they'll go to the next few calls, weather permitting and you know, condition of the dog permitting, and cross their fingers that we get some get a lead before they end up actually coming down and impounding the dog officially at the shelter. Once it gets here, a quick exam, it's gonna get its vaccines, its basic vaccines, the DA2PP, which is like the distemper parvo vaccine, and then what's called the Bordatella, which helps prevent kennel cough. It's not 100% effective, but we do what we can. And then it gets gonna get scanned for a microchip again, it's gonna get checked for ID again. It might ring a bell of one of our intake people and, like, hey, we recognize this dog, and they'll go up again and try to find that out. And then it kind of enters a kennel and awaits the next steps. If you come in through the counter, say you find a dog and you are not in the middle of you know something else important, you can take it down to the shelter directly. When you get here, we are gonna ask you a bunch of relevant information about the dog, how you found it, where you found it, your information. We're gonna do all those same steps that we did out in the field. We're gonna check for identification, we're gonna scan for a microchip. If it has any of that stuff, again, we're gonna reach out to the owner. We'll we'll ask you to wait in the lobby if you can, just hold on to the dog while we make some of those calls. Because again, we're trying to prevent the dog from being impounded officially into the system. If we can get a hold of an owner right then, then great. We'll talk to the owner and say, hey, we have someone here with your dog, they would like to bring it back with you or meet you somewhere or whatever. Do you guys want to connect? Or we can say, hey, it's here in the lobby. Just come, if you come down right now, you can pick up your dog. If that's unsuccessful, then we will next ask you, the person who brought the dog in it, hey, are you interested in fostering this dog until we can find its owner and or it's ready for adoption? And if that's the case, we do an intake on the dog. It does the same thing as the health exam, its basic vaccines. And then if you are able to foster it, we'll send it back home with you with any supplies that you might need, and with the understanding that when the owner comes in looking for their dog, we can say, hey, it's at this person's house who's fostering it. We're ready to get it back to you, though. They don't want to keep the dog. And then we can get the animal back that way. If the owner never comes in and you're fostering it, then you can bring it back at the end of its hold period. So every animal that comes in has a state mandated hold period before it can be adopted or anything else. So that's that's about four to five days. And then once that's over, you can bring the dog back to us, or you can continue fostering it until we can get it, its surgery, and it's officially ready for adoption. And if you opt to do that, then you can also keep it all the way until the day at Find It's Forever home. We have uh a kiosk at PetSmart in running that we're at Wednesday through Sunday. So foster parents will show up there with the dogs that they're fostering and we'll market them for adoption there. And then we do a lot of adoption outreaches and stuff. We do one at the Sundial Bridge at the branch house. We do a monthly adoption event there, and we've been doing them at the Grange Co-op as well. So there's multiple places the foster parents can bring their dogs and try to market them for adoption. If you did not opt to foster for us, it does the same as an officer bringing the dog in. So it will go after its exam and vaccines go into a kettle. During its initial time here, we're going to observe it each day for any health or behavior concerns. We're going to do a behavior evaluation to kind of determine if there are any big issues, food aggression, dog aggression, toy aggression, anything like that that would, you know, raise a red flag that we need to make sure we warn potential adopters about. And then once it's available for adoption out of its hold period, it moves up to our adoption center. It gets spayed and neutered on the way if everything's working correctly. Sometimes there's a delay demanded on if it's kitten season and we have 400 kittens, but and then yeah, it goes up for adoption. So you asked about the you know time limit of dogs, how how long they can be here, what happens if they're not adopted. So we do everything we can to find every animal a home. There are animals with behavior issues or medical issues that might preclude them from being available for adoption in the first place, and humane euthanasia might be the option there. We also market those dogs that have a medical or behavior issue that might be workable, but not in a shelter environment to other groups. So we'll call rescue groups and things like that that pull dogs from shelters and can be a little more intensive in their care with them than a shelter can be. Once you're up at the adoption center, you've been cleared medically and behavioral, behaviorally for adoption, then there is no strict time limit. It's going to come down to each animal individually. And it's it's it's a balance of their medical, their behavior, the space we have, their length of stay before we make any kind of humane euthanasia decisions. We've had dogs that have lived with us for over a year before they finally are adopted. We've had dogs who just do not handle a shelter environment very well, and we can't afford that whole amount of time. And then we have times where it's just the intake is overwhelming our ability to place animals into homes or rescues or foster groups. If you pay attention to our social media, you'll see we do foster Fridays. Every Friday we highlight another animal that could use foster care to try to open up space for another animal and get that animal a break from the shelter. We post different animals each day. We do pets of the week to try to always highlight what we have here. We do a lot of free adoption events. We have one coming up. July 18th is when it starts, is the Bissell Empty the Shelter event. And we'll do fee wave adoptions. And then in September, we have a couple of free adoption dates. August and September, we have some free adoption events scheduled as well. If you can watch our social media to see when those happen. But yeah, one of the biggest obstacles for dogs in a shelter environment is the boredom, the stress. They're not in a home. Like I said earlier, we try to make it as much like a home as we can. But the really sad reality of an animal shelter is that your dogs are mostly most likely in their kennel for 22 to 23 hours a day. And if they can get out for a walk for an hour and some socialization, that's great. But you have to have a big volunteer base and staff base to do all of that stuff, and which we're lucky enough to have volunteers that do that each day. But it's still not enough for a dog to be, you know, happy. We provide enrichment in kennel for all of the dogs. We have a lot of ways we do that from different types of toys that can go into their kennel with them. We use peanut butter a lot. We can smear it on frisbees and hang it on their kennel door so they can lick. We fill Kongs with peanut butter and kibble and let them work on those. We have slow feeding toys so that they can work for their food instead of just eating everything and then going back to their bed. We have volunteers who and staff both who work with what we call the Quiet Kennels program, where essentially throughout the day, we encourage each person that walks through the kennels to pause at each kennel and take some kibble from a pail that's on the outside of the kennel and give it to any dog who is not barking and has four feet on the floor. You don't have to ask them to do anything else. You just watch if they're being quiet and they're four feet on the floor, give them the kibble. It rewards them for that calm behavior, which then helps the other stressed dogs stay calm. So we do as much as we can with our means to make it enjoyable while they're here. But the best thing for a dog in a shelter is to get out of the shelter.

SPEAKER_02 31:47

Well, and Jim, on that note, I'm curious. I mean, it sounds like you're saying, you know, the goal is always 100% adoption, but that's probably not the reality of the situation. What is the adoption rate at Haven and how does that compare it to maybe industry standards?

SPEAKER_00 32:01

Yeah, well, I mean, there's a big push throughout the industry, both directions, on the no-kill issue. So a no-kill shelter is a shelter that has a 90% live release rate. So that's adoption, rescue, return to owner, or other live outcomes. And then any other shelter they consider a kill shelter. There's been a lot of pushback on that because of warehousing of animals and things like that, where you know, dogs end up being in the kennels and then they're stacked up in crates in between kennels, disease spreads, dogs are not happy. It's not a humane situation for an animal to be in, but it's it's the extremes that shelters are going to to try to achieve no-kill status. We right now, you know, some there is a mistaken belief sometimes that we are a no-kill shelter because the way we operate falls in lines with or falls in line with the way that no-kill shelters operate. So long story short, to get to the meat of your question, we have an overall live release rate right now this year of 71%. For dogs specifically, it's 82%. So 82% of our dogs are returned to their owner, adopted, or sent out to a no-kill rescue somewhere. Cats are, I think, just under 60% right now, which kind of coincides with kitten season. So if you're taking in a huge number of neonate kittens, which is the kittens that you know might still have their umbilical cord attached, their eyes are crusted shut with the URI, they're cold when they arrive at our shelter. Many times there's nothing we can do except for humane euthanasia of those kittens. So that really brings down your cat save rate. As the kittens that we've intaken this year that are out in foster care and in our kitten nursery end up being old enough to get adopted and everything like that, and have a what we call a disposition, so they're no longer a shelter animal. That number should climb back up and raise our overall save rate and our save rate for cats. It's just with there's so much just waiting for something to be done because it's gonna take two or three months for them to be adoptable. We can't say we adopted them out yet, they're just sitting here. So that should improve that number. My goal for Haven Humane is to as much as possible and responsibly increase our save rate each year by 10%. That's a really like, you know, pie in the sky type goal. 10% each year is a huge number to achieve. So I might be shooting myself in the foot here, like proclaiming this. But so last year we were just under 70% overall at the end of the year. Right now we're at 71%. So I'm trying to keep us at 70% this year, 2027, try to get us to 80%, 2028, try to get us to 90%. And we'll see what happens. You know, it's it's not something we can do by ourselves. If we take on the role of the place that takes in all of those dogs and as many of those kittens as we can, there are several other groups in the community that also take in a lot of kittens and a lot of cats and do a lot of span meter outreach. So we're not the only group in that fight. But if we take in all of those animals, but we can't find enough community members to help us through foster adoption donations, anything like that, then we're at a standstill. If all the shelters around us are also full and can't help take the pressure off us by taking animals, and if rescue groups are the same way, they have animals that they're holding on to until they're adopted. They don't have space to help take more animals until their animals are adopted, then we really run out of options besides warehousing more and more dogs in an inhumane condition. So that's my plea to the community. If you want to see change, you have to be the change. People say it all the time. We just had an all-staff meeting where that was the entire basis of everything I told our staff and volunteers is no big change happens without little changes. So we need to make as many little changes as we can to achieve the big change we want to see.

SPEAKER_01 36:19

And Jim, is there a breed or maybe a size of dog that tends to linger in the shelters longer than others? I guess I'm asking if there are community members who do have like a heart to adopt a dog, and you know, maybe they want to try to adopt the dog that wouldn't otherwise be adopted. What kind of dog is that?

SPEAKER_00 36:39

Yeah, I mean, an older dog is always going to be harder to place than a younger dog. The public is generally interested in, you know, a dog under a year old, they want to be able to train it from the time it was a puppy. You know, I find in my own adoption history, I've mostly adopted adult and or senior dogs. And they come pre-trained. You don't have to teach them how to go to the back door and yell to be let out. They already know that. They've been through it before. They know the basic rules. They might have some quirks that you need to work out, but you really have it's what you see is what you get versus a puppy where you're not sure what kind of dog they're gonna grow up into. So I think it's just a good move in general. Who wants to deal with a puppy mess? Except for our wonderful foster parents who take on letters of puppies and keep them until they're old enough for adoption. So yeah, you know, adult and older dogs, larger breeds, you know, anything over 60 pounds is gonna stay a lot longer than anything under that. And with the way landlords and insurance companies work, a lot of times people are looking for under 25 pounds. So anything sort of mid-size to large size is gonna be harder for us to place. They're gonna be harder for us to adopt out, but also harder for us to send out to the other groups, the other rescue groups, because they also want animals that they can adopt out. They're not necessarily looking for the dogs that are gonna take up one of their spaces for a long time. They need the turnover just like we do, which we're incredibly grateful. No matter what type of dog another group takes from us, we are grateful because it allows us to spend more time on the dog that needs more time. And then finally, special needs dogs. So a dog that has a chronic skin condition. It might be easy to treat, but expensive to treat. You know, if you need to give it an allergy medicine every day for the rest of its life that costs $100 or $200 a month, that can be a big ass for someone coming in to adopt a dog. But really, that's you know, a hundred or two hundred dollars a month to change an animal's life or save an animal's life. There's dogs that have other things like you know, dental issues that will need to be addressed in a couple of years. So you know you have to be ready to start taking care of that soon. And then dogs that don't love other dogs. That's huge one for us.

SPEAKER_02 38:54

Well said.

SPEAKER_00 38:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:55

Jim, as we look to wrap things up, I thought we could do a quick rapid fire round. We'll we'll see how it goes. Some questions might be tougher than others. So we'll just give it your best shot. So dogs or cats.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

Oh, I am I'm currently at three dogs and two cats at home. So dogs are just edging them, the cats out right now, but I love them all.

SPEAKER_01 39:14

Okay. Biggest misconception about shelters.

SPEAKER_00 39:18

Uh you know, the Disney dog pound animal control officer with the net over his shoulder working in conjunction with a uh shadowy figure.

SPEAKER_02 39:28

Good one. Good one. Well said. Favorite adoption story.

SPEAKER_00 39:31

Oh, favorite adoption story. Wow, that's a tough one. I'm just gonna use my own right now because I like to talk about my dogs. My dog, Lana, who I adopted just over a year ago now, came from a situation in which there were over 20 dogs in one place. It was a big hoarding thing. Unsocialized dogs who didn't know love at all. She came up to our adoption center and a volunteer approached me asking for help to get her out because they knew I have like a uh have a soft spot for scared dogs. They just like break me down. So I asked me if I can get help because this dog will not leave its kennel. Every time we put a collar on her neck, she just pancaked to the concrete and like refused to move. And I was like, no, you just gotta keep walking, she'll follow you. No, that's not the case. So I we had I had to pick her up, bring her outside, set her on the sidewalk, still wouldn't move. I had to set her on the grass. Okay, now she'll take some tentative steps. And she got stuck. So I ended up just I don't know how she did it, if she felt some connection, but I just was like, you know what? We're walking to my office. I'm just going. So I start walking, and then she's behind me. She follows me right into my office. You know, she freezes at every doorway, but she eventually comes into my office. And I put her back in the kennel that night, and then the whole night I'm just thinking about her being panicked and scared in the kennel. So the next morning I decide to foster her. I had just lost my dog three months before to old age. So I wasn't planning on adopting it. I wasn't ready that, but I kept her for about three months as a foster dog, and she just kept bonding more and more. She still to this day growls at every new person she meets. She runs and hides under my desk if I bring her to the office. At home, she is the biggest little angel baby. She sleeps with my cats, just a perfect dog, except for the stranger danger thing. But anyway, everyone kept saying, How's your new dog? I said, She's not mine. You know, I'm I'm just uncle right now. And long story short, my wife was like, Are you kidding me, Jim? You're gonna get rid of this dog. It's not gonna happen. Just, you know, deal with it. I'm like, no, no, no. It's it's she's just a foster. I'm strong. I always tell my family, like, the more foster animals we keep, the less foster animals we can help. Because we're running a room. Yeah. Anyway, she was my Christmas dog that year. So, and yeah, I have her, and she's just, I guess, my kids are 16 and 19, so I guess now she's my she's the little kid in my house that I can dote on.

SPEAKER_01 42:00

Great story. That's a great one. Okay, what's the most unusual animal you've cared for?

SPEAKER_00 42:05

You know, the most unusual animal was probably a Hila monster. I didn't care for it personally, but it did come in, and I cannot remember the story behind how it got here, but we only had it for a short time. We had to call in the Department of Fish and Wildlife because it's not legal to be owned or adopted out here. So they they came in and took care of that and found probably a sanctuary for it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:30

That's awesome. One thing everyone should buy for their pet.

SPEAKER_00 42:34

Oh, one thing every you know, whatever it wants, take it to a store and just let it on a long leash down the aisle and see what it's drawn to and give it that.

SPEAKER_01 42:44

You probably already answered this one earlier, but we'll ask anyway. Puppy or senior dog?

SPEAKER_02 42:49

Senior dog. Perfect. Licensing, optional or required? Required.

SPEAKER_01 42:56

Okay. And one word that describes Haven Humane.

SPEAKER_00 43:00

Compassionate.

SPEAKER_02 43:03

Okay, well done, Jim. You've survived the lightning round. So so, Jim, maybe in in closing, if if listeners remember just one thing after today's conversation about Haven Humane, what what do you hope that is?

SPEAKER_00 43:15

As much focus as we put on all of the animals in our care and in our community, I think it's important to remember that we also impact all the humans in this community, whether they're animal owners, live next door to animal owners, or anything else. It's not just an animal thing, it's a person thing. And I'm gonna add on to that, it's what I said earlier. The little changes make big changes. We can't do any of the stuff that we're doing alone or any of the things that the community wants us to do without support and help from the community.

SPEAKER_02 43:50

Well, well said. Yeah. I feel like we we covered a broad spectrum, but anything else you want to make sure we touched on today that we haven't already discussed?

SPEAKER_00 43:57

You know, just I I'd like to extend an invitation to everyone in the community to come down and visit the shelter, see what we're all about. We're open for visiting Monday through Saturday, 11 to 5. We have a lot of dogs and cats to see. You can kind of see what enrichment activities we're providing for the animals. And if anybody is interested in learning more about us, I try to be as open a book as possible. So people are welcome to reach out and ask me questions, ask our staff questions. We're happy to answer.