The Best Friends Podcast

Rural communities across the country struggle to access essential services such as healthcare, let alone easily accessible and affordable veterinary care for their pets. Few communities are as rural and resource-strapped as the Navajo Nation. The Navajo Nation is a big area. It spans three different states, is larger than West Virginia, and is also the largest reservation population-wise. The issu...

In an unprecedented year, 2020 brought about a lot of change and many new opportunities for lifesaving innovation. Many communities across the country implemented lifesaving programs such as managed intake or return-to-field programs for community cats. Some launched their first-ever foster program. These are programs that engage the community to be part of the solution. Programs that have proven...

The journey for El Paso, Texas, towards becoming a no-kill community is a familiar one - mostly. In 2013, only one in five pets that entered the shelter made it out alive. A public outcry led elected officials to support a plan to reform the city's animal services department. The municipality brought new leadership on board, and the mandate was clear; get El Paso to a 90% save rate. Changes were m...

This week’s episode begins with a simple question. How do you feel? We hear the term “new normal” an awful lot right now as the world is continuing to ease COVID-related restrictions and reopen. Yet, at the same time, we learn more about the constantly evolving situation with the delta variant of the virus. So while we are longing for normalcy, it seems we have a ways to go before we can settle in...

When Best Friends planted the stake in the ground and announced the no-kill 2025 goal in 2016, we realized that to achieve the goal, we needed to know much more about what was happening to animals in shelters across the country. But, unfortunately, the data available at that time was very minimal. So much so that no one even knew how many animal shelters there are in the United States. As the annu...

Did you know that nearly half of the animal shelters in the United States are now no-kill? That is just one of many encouraging discoveries in the Best Friends 2020 National Dataset. Each year, Best Friends undertakes this massive data collection and compilation effort to measure lifesaving progress towards the no-kill 2025 goal. It is the most comprehensive, accurate dataset tracking sheltered do...

One of the most at-risk populations in animal shelters is large dogs. In communities big and small, urban and rural, big dogs struggle to make it out alive most often due to behavioral issues. Whether they came into the shelter with those behaviors or not, time in a shelter environment is stressful. Stress can lead to undesirable behaviors; undesirable behaviors mean longer stays in the shelter, a...

Every time someone chooses to adopt an animal, we have the opportunity to positively change that person's life and save the life of an animal. So why do we still put up so many barriers that make adopting an animal so unreasonably difficult? The reasons to deny a pet adoption are as vast as they are inane. Sometimes it's because of age (of the adopter and/or the pet). Others are rejected because t...

Each year, thousands of people hit the road and converge at the Best Friends National Conference. It's a highlight of the year, which is why the cancelation of last year's event due to COVID-19 was such a disappointment. This year the conference is back but will, for the first time, be held virtually. A virtual Best Friends National Conference has benefits. For example, no travel means more people...

The pandemic forced a lot of changes across the industry. The lockdowns, for example, required shelters to find ways to provide services while being closed. The massive support from the public who offered foster homes took much of the burden from the shelter system, but there was still a need to take in animals. Many shelters decided to try implementing a managed intake program. The objective of m...

When a resident of Sacramento, California, calls the 3-1-1 customer service hotline to report kittens in need, they don't route that call to a uniformed animal services officer. Instead, a member of a new volunteer-powered field response team is assigned the case.  These dedicated volunteers (who were already performing T-N-R across the city on their own) are empowered to make decisions based...

The Brown County Humane Society, an open-admission shelter, has been a shining example of no-kill success for a long time. They first reached the 90% save rate benchmark in 2008. At that time, there were still many naysayers who didn’t even believe no-kill was possible at all, let alone in a community like Brown County. Since that time, the organization has continued to increase its save rate - st...

Check out part one of our interview with Ed Jamison here . In 2017, Ed Jamison left his position as Chief Animal Control Officer in Cleveland, Ohio, to take on the director position at Dallas Animal Services (DAS) in Texas. With an annual intake of more than 32,000 animals that year, he accepted what many would call a formidable challenge laid out by city officials to create a safer community for...

In 2017, Ed Jamison left his position as Chief Animal Control Officer in Cleveland, Ohio, to take on the director position at Dallas Animal Services (DAS) in Texas. With an annual intake of more than 32,000 animals that year, he accepted what many would call a formidable challenge laid out by city officials to create a safer community for people and pets. In 2018, they launched the Dallas90 campai...

Whether you call it burnout, compassion fatigue, or something else, the constant demands in the animal services field can be at times overwhelming. There are so many animals in need, but only one of you, right?! The feelings that come with those beliefs are can be incredibly challenging and sometimes can drive people away from the field or to self-destructive acts. Due to the importance of the wor...

It’s National Animal Care and Control Appreciation Week! This week we honor these front-line heroes by sharing a story of how officers in Sacramento, California, are doing their part to save lives - of both the two and four-legged kind. The chief of animal services for the Front Street Animal Shelter, Jace Huggins, tells us about a partnership with their local public health department.  To al...

Kitten season has arrived, which means shelters and rescue organizations across the country are starting to feel the crunch. As fluffy and adorable as they may be, this barrage of vulnerable animals stretches even the most well-resourced organizations thin. Today we hear from the director of animal services in Long Beach, California, Staycee Dains. Their partnership with local rescue organization...

This week we transform The Best Friends Podcast into our version of one of the world’s most beloved game shows! Players representing four Network partner organizations put their knowledge to the test with questions such as: What is the only state where every individual shelter has reached the 90% save rate benchmark?  How many eyelids do dogs have?  According to a Best Friends study from...

When a community implements lifesaving programs, and the shelter, rescue organizations, and the public all come together as one, it's a beautiful thing! But the road to achieving no-kill can often feel anything but beautiful. Societal change is challenging. It often requires agitation but in a movement driven by kindness, how do you find the right balance while lives hang in the balance every day?...

Launched in 2012, The NKLA (No-Kill Los Angeles) Coalition set out to do what many believed to be unattainable. Bring the combined save rate for Los Angeles Animal Services (LAAS) across the 90% threshold for a full calendar year. With a 2020 save rate of 90.49%, it’s now official: Los Angeles is a no-kill community. L.A. is now the most populous, most racially and economically diverse, and larges...

The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May reignited the Black Lives Matter movement and catalyzed a long-overdue, nationwide conversation about racism, social justice, biases, and privilege. Animal sheltering and animal welfare have long suffered from a lack of diversity, and we know that has negatively impacted both the people and pets in the communities we serve. Change starts from with...

Right now, hundreds of people representing dozens of shelters and rescue organizations are working tirelessly to help those who need assistance due to the winter storm that devastated Texas. It was the first time in history that some parts of Texas were under a winter storm warning. Without the infrastructure and resources to handle ice, snow, and bitterly cold temperatures, millions of people los...

Julie Castle, the CEO of Best Friends Animal Society, was the first-ever guest on The Best Friends Podcast, and we were excited to have her back for episode number 52! It's not even been a year since we last spoke, but we had plenty of things to discuss in what has been a very tumultuous year for our field and the country overall.  Even though the last 11 months have been overwhelming, Julie...

The United States Census Bureau classifies 3% of the land in the country as urban, and they say that 80% of the total population lives in that area, which means tens of millions of pet owners spread out across a vast, rural area of the country. Rural America is as diverse as it is big. It's multicultural. The people and communities span the socioeconomic spectrum, and just as we see in urban commu...

It's the 50th episode of The Best Friends Podcast! To celebrate the milestone, we sat down with one of the co-founders of Best Friends, Francis Battista. His contributions to the organization are vast, from his discovery in the 1980s of the land for sale, which now is the sanctuary in Southern Utah, to helping develop much of the outreach work that's integral to reaching the Best Friends goal of N...