From the CEO
SOON AFTER THE COVID-19 CRISIS hit her neighborhood in Orlando, Florida, Emily Park started looking for ways to help. She distributed some Best Friends kindness cards, inviting people to contact her if they needed assistance with things like dog walking and pet supplies. And on Easter Sunday, she heard back from a family whose main wage earner had been furloughed and whose unemployment benefits were caught up in a bureaucratic bottleneck.
Emily posted a message on NextDoor.com, the social site that connects people to their neighbors, and it all took off from there. Soon she had brought together a whole team of volunteers who were not only dropping off pet supplies but even preparing meals and delivering them to families in need around the neighborhood.
Emily is just one example of the many silver linings to be found in this dreadful pandemic, as more and more of us come together at a local level to do what we can for each other and for the animals around us.
Another example: Since the end of March, when the Best Friends lifesaving centers and shelters across the country had to close temporarily because of the pandemic, we’ve been seeing a major uptick in people wanting to foster homeless pets or adopt them. Could this be the wave of the future? Could we be entering a time when people work together more and more to identify homeless animals and place them directly into good new homes? And could the era of communities looking to city shelters to care for and house all homeless pets be coming to an end?
One hundred and fifty years ago, the first shelter in the United States opened its doors to homeless animals. Called the Women’s Humane Society, it was created in Pennsylvania in 1869 by Caroline Earle White and a group of 30 women in her social circle. At the time, the few animal protection organizations that existed were all managed by men.
“Animals have certain rights, as inalienable as those of man, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Caroline wrote. And she applied this tenet not only to dogs and cats, but to carriage horses in the cities, to animals on farms and to wildlife.
Her work was a distinct departure from the standard practice of the time, which was to simply round up strays and dispose of them by whatever means was most efficient: drowning, clubbing, shooting, poison gas and other horrible methods. Sadly, her ethic didn’t prevail and animal sheltering entered a dark chapter that lasted until the emergence of the no-kill movement in the 1980s.
Caroline and her colleagues opened the door to people of every gender, ethnicity and culture. And today perhaps it’s time for us to take our cue from the work of those courageous women. Together, we can change the fate of millions of pets in our country. And with each kind gesture, each decision to help instead of turning away, we can once again take animal protection within communities to a whole new level of kindness and caring.
For more about kindness cards and other resources you can use to join with people in your neighborhood to help homeless pets, go to bestfriends.org/actionteam.