pet connection

The closure of the Bay Bridge here in San Francisco has made our city streets impassable and probably prevented a fairly large number of the Humane Society of the United States’ natural constituency as well as their foes from turning up tonight.

I’ll be liveblogging the town hall meeting, so just a couple of reminders: This is live, so there will be typos. Only things in quotations marks are direct quotes; everything else is a paraphrase. I’ll update now and then, so if you come across this post while the event is still in progress, just hit “refresh” to see new material.

Here we go. :)

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It’s Sunday morning, the final day of Best Friends Animal Society’s No More Homeless Pets conference in Las Vegas. I’m sitting in the second part of Bonney Brown of Nevada Humane’s “Building a no-kill community” session.

I didn’t see part one yesterday, but I’ve seen Bonney do this program before, both at Maddie’s Fund’s day-long seminar at HSUS’ Animal Care Expo last spring, and at the No Kill Conference in Washington DC in May. She’s a dynamic speaker, but it’s her experience bringing her community — not her shelter, but Washoe County, Nevada (where Reno is located) — to no-kill.

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If Calgary was in the US, it would be the 11th largest city in the US. But over 94 percent of all their cats and dogs who enter the system come out alive — without any tax dollar funding at all. How have they done it? Animal control director Bill Bruce joined with Jane Hoffman of the New York Mayor’s Alliance for Animals to examine how these two huge cities have handled their animal related problems.

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Scott Goodstein, who ran the social media platforms for the Obama campaign, is telling the audience here at the No More Homeless Pets conference that he thinks the lessons learned in that and other political campaigns apply to animal welfare, too.

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Day two at the No More Homeless Pets conference in Las Vegas, and “talking in the hallway” syndrome has continued to put me late into the sessions. This morning, it was a fascinating discussion with Best Friends Animal Society co-founder Gregory Castle. Some of what we talked about will be in an upcoming article I’m doing for Bark Magazine, but we also talked about feral/community cats,  which I’m starting to see as the “hot” issue at this conference — we’re at a real watershed moment in the animal weflare community as regards these cats, who account for such a huge percentage of the animals who die in America’s shelters.

So, picking up the session “Plan? I don’t need no stinkin’ plan!” a bit late…

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