Agenda - 04-01-2004-1 - Laserfiche WebLink

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15 Gina Burns: Hi, my name is Gina Burns.. I think I spoke with you a few months ago and have been volunteering at the shelter during that time pretty consistently. I wanted to ask if possible, how many of you have actually visited the shelter and spent some time there. Great, that's really good, So you guys are familiar with what the day-to-day operations are. Some days they are filled with animals and some days they are not filled with animals. This is nobody's fault except our citizens. How many animals come in and how many animals don't leave for one reason or another because they are sick, they are injured, they have been abused. Whatever the reason, they are unadoptable because they are vicious.. Those are our citizens that are responsible for that. As all of this comes to fruition and new plans are made, I would love to see something implemented that starts to get back to the community. One, volunteerism is really helping that. The programs that Amy does at the schools goes all the way down to the elementary school level and these kids are actually educating their parents about spaying and neutering, what things are needed at the shelter, what goes on at the shelter, and fostering, It is also important to educate the adults and to make people recognize what happens to their animals when they drop them off and say well I'm leaving town, here's my cat or here's my dog or here are my three cats. I hope that some of that is incorporated into the new program. I also really want to stress the benefits of public/private partnership. There is so much to be gained from that working together.. Nothing is a perfect world and it won't continue to be a perfect world but I think that the cooperation between the two organizations that really need to make this work needs to be between a public and private partnership because the volunteers are critical to working with APS, Thank you, Thank you. Who else would like to share comments with us? Janet Glutz: Hi, my name is .Janet Glutz. I'm a nurse practitioner at iJNC Hospitals and I know quite a bit about disease management. I had a nice little speech here but I'm going to forget for now. Hospitals rely on volunteers too, but they don't rely on them for services.. You need trained practitioners to stop the progression of disease and prevention, You can't use the hospital, the structure as an excuse to spread disease. It won't work. You have to be accountable. You have to not have the fatalistic attitude that I have seen at the shelter that blames everybody else for disease progression.. I had a dog that I got there that was there two whole months and was never vaccinated and was dying of Parvo when I brought him home. I told them, and I expected them to shut down putting out dogs. Instead they had an adopt-a-thon within three days of when I brought my dog out of there. They are not accountable and it upsets me to no end that everybody blames the circumstances. You just have to get trained people in there and then use the volunteers the way they are supposed to be used to give love to the animals. You have got to vaccinate every animal no matter what.. If they are going to be put down the next day, may be they won't be. It costs $4. That's how we can save money. Thank you.