3:51pm
What makes my SPCA a great choice for the makeover
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I had to think a good while about what to write here.
Bear with me, I don’t do much writing so this may be long and amble about some.
Why should our shelter deserve a makeover more than any of the other 19 in the running is the question I have been ruminating on ever since the final group was named and we were in it. It all starts with needs, desires and beliefs – which all of the shelters involved in this competition clearly have. The need for something to change, to be upgraded or fixed, to have more space, to replace things too bad to fix anymore; to sum it all up, the need for help. Then comes the desire and belief end of it – the desire to see this done for our own shelter and the belief that we are worthy and deserving of this being strong enough to infect each of our communities help us reach the first step in that goal. I bet all of the shelters involved found the extent of community caring and participation heartwarming, I know we did.
Once we reached this point I looked at what I could find about each of the other shelters to see what they were about as much as I could online. I wanted to know what we were up against and get a feel for the needs of the other shelters. It seems to be quite a variety from small to larger shelters, some in older buildings than ours (opened in 1963), some in newer buildings, some which are very specific in what animals their goals are to help and others that help more of a variety. Hard to make any sort of comparisons from what I could see online.
All that I can do then is look at what I think makes us special and also what needs I see we have here. Keep in mind I am biased in several ways – of course I think our shelter should win, and I work in our Educational and Rescue Farm here and help out in our Wildlife Rehabilitation Department. Firstly, from what I could tell, we help a much wider variety of animals in need than any of the shelters in the running. If it is brought to us to help and we can find a way to house it and help it, we will. We have housed everything (beyond cats, dogs and “pocket pets”) from fish, alligators and monkeys to chickadees hawks and coyotes to exotic birds, horses and all manner of farm animals – even once, briefly, an elephant or two. To me this means we are helping more than one section of a community, we are doing our best to help all of it. What has happened to us doing all this is that we have run out of space in many areas. Since our area has seen the positive effects of early age spay/neuter programs that we helped spearhead years ago, the number of dogs and cats brought in to us has decreased over the years so that we can now treat animals that just 5 or 10 years ago would have probably been euthanized. Now we can help other communities with their own dog overpopulation problems by releasing the burden placed on their small shelters with litter after litter of unwanted puppies and still too many dogs. Cats are still numerous, but now we can treat many more of those who are sick or injured. What we need is more medical treatment and isolation space to help even more of these animals. As we have seen an increase in exotic pets, be they birds, reptiles or anything else not as well understood as dogs and cats, our need to house them better has also increased. We almost always have a few birds in our office area, and you never know what you’ll see in the ladies bathroom! Our wildlife rehabilitation department, one of the largest in New York State, started out in a tiny room that is now our cat isolation room, outgrew that faster than you could blink and a series of 4 rooms was created in a part of our garage – not the best answer, but the most we could do at the time. Since that time, the number of wild animals we see has gone up to over 3,000 a year and the space they have is again very inadequate. When I look at our barn, even though it is adequate to house most of what comes in, it has managed to stay up much longer than expected when some friends of our maintenance man built it back in 1976. It still looks good because it had a cosmetic facelift about 18 years ago to make it look more like a barn from the front, new fronts were put on stalls and pens and we try to keep it clean, but about 5 or 6 winters ago we had a partial roof collapse that we were able to shore back up and during the years since then, we have battled leaks in various parts of the roof and walls. The lights don’t work well in the cold weather and most of them need to be replaced as the fixtures are bad and wear the bulbs out quickly. We are lucky enough to have our own rescue livestock trailer, but that was also built back in 1977 and needs to be replaced soon. Our fencing around the turnout areas is old and needs help. Our parking lots at the shelter are in need of help and are too small for the amount of traffic we get. Our building needs some of its HVAC systems replaced, as they are as old as the building itself, are not efficient and always seem to have issues. We have had to change the inside of our building many times over the years and each time we take a hallway to make a room, a storage closet gets turned into an office, sections of our auditorium are used to make more rooms, and then we run out of storage space so we put storage rooms in the back of the barn and rent storage space elsewhere for records we have to keep but don’t always need to access as much. Even with adding various offices and rooms over the years we are still cramped to do our jobs effectively, and none of the office areas were ever designed for using computers – they just didn’t exist for general use when our last real remodel of office space happened! Our Humane Education Department has twice as many staff as chairs to sit in and they are all crammed into an office small enough they wouldn’t fit there at once – oh, yeah, they also house some medical treatment cats at times. Even our Executive Director now shares her office with our Development Director. Sometimes the problems we have are because other, more pressing needs came up and that is where the money had to go. Whenever that happens it always seems that things end up costing about twice what you were originally quoted they would. Then things you wanted to do get put on the back burner again. We had some outdoor play areas for dogs, but the fences and gates ended up sagging on some of them and we had to take them down when a couple of dogs squeezed their way out. Most of our back pasture area for the farm was turned into a large dog area a few years ago with agility equipment added, but the fence around part of it is rather low (3 ½ feet) so any dog that likes to jump can easily get out and it the entrance is right in front of our manure pile. It would be great to have some outdoor play areas that were fenced in with better fencing and were more accessible. It would be great to have a lot of things!
We are the second oldest SPCA in the USA and have prided ourselves on evolving to meet the needs and wants of the community as they change. We started out in 1867 to protect the many draft animals pulling barges on the Erie Canal and wagons in the city of Buffalo and cattle being shipped to stockyards – there weren’t any animal cruelty laws back then. Our history is so long and varied that I won’t even try to go into it here. Let me just say it is very easy to get locked into one narrow point of view as an animal shelter/SPCA so we always try to look at what other shelters are doing out there and see where we can be more creative. Over many years we have learned to adjust our focus when the world around us changes to try and do the best job possible with the resources we have available at the time. Now we do such a variety of things to help the people and animals of our area and our forward looking programs are starting to help animals and people in communities outside our own.
I guess it boils down to this in my thoughts: Are the people at ZooToo looking to help the shelter in the worst physical shape? If so, then there are probably other shelters that should win this contest even though there are physical aspects of ours that really need help. Are the people at ZooToo looking to help the shelter that can use this makeover to then help their community and maybe a bunch of others in the biggest way? If that is what they are looking for, then I think that we are a great choice!
