Published 2018/09/19
From Ann Graves, SAS Director:
Because we are an open admission shelter and the City’s only municipal animal control agency animals come to SAS for many reasons. While we are grateful we to be the safety net for those animals who need us most, we also know that being in the shelter is an incredibly stressful time. Whatever their background or length of stay, the staff and volunteers at SAS care for them and determine whether they can be adopted. As an artificial and stressful environment the shelter can exacerbate or even create behavior that might make an animal seem challenging or unadoptable. Previously many of these animals were euthanized. A grant from the Seattle Animal Shelter Foundation allowed SAS to bring in a behaviorist to evaluate animals and work one on one with them. In addition, the behaviorist works with shelter staff and volunteers so that everyone handling animals has the skills to help make their shelter experience less traumatic and help guide animals to their forever homes.
This vital program has already saved lives and it is time to scale it up by creating a sustainable program including a full-time behaviorist position. This will expand the training of staff and volunteers and the capacity to work with every dog that needs it with consistency from the day they arrive at SAS. With this program SAS will continue its long history of being a progressive municipal agency. Like SAS’s lifesaving programs that have come before, we can also look forward to our successes leading to it being emulated elsewhere as shelters across the country recognize this is as vital as providing medical care.