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Orange County Animal Services Sheltering Practices and Philosophies 57 care and control programs, the organization is focusing on helping shelters face a new challenge: keeping pets and their people together through behavior helplines, in-shelter training and socialization programs, and other forms of intervention designed to curb preventable relinquishments. But as The HSUS graduated the third class of sheltering professionals from its Pets for Life National Training Center at the Dumb Friends League in Denver, Colorado, in October 2000, animal sheltering experts back at HSUS headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland, were preparing to embark on a different mission: a tour through the economically depressed areas of Virginia to find out what shelters in that state needed most, The journey was revealing, the divide wide: Unlike their northern Virginia neighbors, one of which just retrofitted its old facility into astate-of-the-art shelter, some of the shelters in the less populated areas of the state lack even the basic necessities: litter pans, for example, or heat for the frigid winters of the Blue Ridge Mountains. "When we went down there, our idea was to hook up struggling animal control officers with mentors to help them deal with cleaning issues, euthanasia issues, anything they might have a question about," says Kate Pullen, director of animal sheltering issues for The HSUS, "But when we got there it was pretty clear haw far same of these groups were from being able to work with a mentor or finding that useful, We expected it to be bad, but we had just na idea exactly how poor and underfunded these places were ... and how much knowledge and support they lacked." A mentor couldn't help with sanitizing the crumbling floors or create more space in the cement buildings that are often less than 500 square feet, Nor could she supplement the salary of a part-time animal control officer expected to cover a 400-square-mile area on top of his other municipal responsibilities-which in same cases include both code enforcement and local landfill management, Most of the shelters Pullen and her staff visited rarely took in cats and usually offered adoptions by appointment only. Yet it was clear that, for the most part, what the people working in these environments lacked was not the will but the way; in one dilapidated facility in need of equipment as basic as gloves and traps, the shelter's sole caretaker had decorated the entrance with a banner proclaiming October as Adopt-a-Dag Month, For Pullen, the hopeful image was the mast striking example of the difficulty of doing humane work in a community that lacks the resources to address even the most pressing human-related problems, "The poor conditions I saw in my travels were compensated for, for the most part, by seeing the compassion and seeing what these guys were t ,tying to do in spite of the lack of funding and lack of community support," she says, Traveling with Teresa Dockery, past president of the Virginia Federation of Humane Societies, Pullen also saw many county shelters where animals were euthanized outside in makeshift carbon monoxide chambers, More than a year