Welcome to Animal Posse, the podcast dedicated to the people and rescues making a difference in the lives of animals. Today, let's welcome Kelsey Knight. She is the director of the Washington Parish Animal Shelter. hi Kelsey. How are you? I am good. I am excited to talk with you today about the Washington Parish Animal Shelter. That's something that a lot of people don't know what goes in into working at a shelter. A lot of people know the rescue side, but they don't know anything about the shelter side. To start, can you describe your journey to becoming the director of the Washington Parish Animal Shelter?

As a young kid, I always wanted to work with animals. I think some of us are just born with that calling. And I can definitely say that. So when I got out of high school, I started grooming dogs. So I was a dog stylist, and I realized as I was working that I had this knack for working with dogs that were super fearful of being groomed. So I let that become my specialty. And I had, clients that just followed me wherever I went because no one else could do their dogs. And then I started doing cats and bathing and trying to cut a cat while it's fully awake and aware of what's going on. Not many people want to do that, but I was like, I can do it. I have the patience. So I. Started doing cats and I got really burnt out very quickly. I did grooming for six years, and by the end of those six years I was just exhausted. I didn't have the energy to go into work. I was pushing clients back and pushing them back because by that point I had nothing but, fearful dogs and cats. And so every day it was just a struggle with every single client I had. And I started getting tagged in a Facebook post, and I'm not really on Facebook a lot, so I was like, let me see what's going on. And they had a position for a shelter manager and I had volunteered at shelters. I had groomed dogs at shelters and rescue. So I was like, I think I wanna do this. I immediately had it in my head of I know where I want my parish to go. I know what I want to do with this. So I went in and I interviewed and I bawled like a baby in the interview. I just cried my eyes out and I was like, this is my dream job. I've always wanted to work with animals. I've always wanted to save lives and give everything I have to them. And this is the best opportunity in the world. There's no greater job than being like a shelter manager. And I somehow got the job. So in 2019, I walked into a empty building. It had nothing in it except like a couch. It didn't even have desks or chairs or anything. And within I think two weeks we had our first three dogs at the shelter, which were just drops off. Someone had seen or found out that there was gonna be a shelter there, so they came and dropped off some dogs and I was like, okay. Their names were Paul Lola and Trunk, and they really. Taught me a lot on how to work with dogs in the shelter. And, you had, one of them had been bitten by a snake. So I immediately had to figure out how do I talk to vets? How do I, deal with this and live with this? And now it's been almost six years at the shelter.

Wow. That's amazing. That's a interesting story going from the grooming to doing that. That's wonderful.

So, so the shelter started in 2019. That was the in inception of the Washington Parish shelter.

Yeah, the doors opened August 8th, 2019.

Oh, fantastic. Okay. So you were there from the beginning then. Okay, cool.

Yeah. Yeah. I was the first employee and I'm still there.

Yeah. That's awesome. What does a typical day look like for you?

It really, I'll say it depends on the day of the week. It depends on. A whole lot of stuff. We are absolutely believers that, if it's a full moon, it's gonna be crazy because every time there's a full moon, everything's crazy. But mostly a normal day, let's say the, we're not doing intakes. We don't have like crazy adoptions or anything. It's a lot of paperwork, a lot of on the phone. I have spent an entire eight hour shift on the phone and then I go home and I'm like, I can't talk. Don't ask me how my day was. I'm so tired of talking. Lots of data collection. That's a big part of my job is the smallest thing. I'm like, okay, how can I use this fact to learn more about my parish and learn more about the animals and learn more about my adoption pool so that I can do better and make my dogs better make us. A bigger asset to the parish and then we have, sometimes we have crazy days.

Right. Yeah, I can imagine. What are the biggest challenges that face your shelter right now?

Having a parish that is overwhelmed with our animal population, both with canines and felines. We have so many kittens and puppies and dogs and cats that we don't have empty homes right now. A lot of even my adopters come in and they're like, oh yeah I have two dogs at home. How does this dog act with other dogs? Or I have two cats, so how does this dog react to cats? It's very rare to get. A new adopter that does not already have pets in the home. So we see a lot of times, especially when we're out in the field doing like adoption events at Tractor Supply or other places that people walk by and they're like, I would adopt, but I have three dogs I would adopt, but I have five animals I would adopt, but I am already at capacity for what I can care for in my home. And so that's our biggest struggle right now. If we had more adoptions, we could get more dogs in that needed help and really move our animals much quicker. So then you fall back on what about transports? During Covid we had transports out the wazoo. Everything was getting shipped everywhere. Even dogs with like behavior problems or health issues. We were able to get those dogs out to New York, New Jersey, Washington. And what happened was we overwhelmed them. We sent so many animals up north that now they're overburdened with our population. I'm still getting calls from people being like, yeah, I adopted this dog in, 21 from you guys. I'm like, oh, you just called me from Minnesota. What is my dog doing in Minnesota? So we really don't have, those options to send out massive amounts of animals. And so everything has fallen back into what we can get out in the parish. So that's number one. Bottom line, if we had more open homes, empty homes, we could get more adoptions, which in turn allows us to take in more animals.

And what types of animals do you typically see coming into the shelter?

So we are not animal control at the shelter. So we don't have any legal authority. We can't go out and seize animals. We can't go out and, write citations or do anything like that. So mostly what we see are stray and owner surrender. So an owner surrender, obviously, they chose to care for that animal. Have that animal, we put them on our intake list, we get that animal in on the opposite side, you have your stray surrender where maybe a stray dog has come into the yard or maybe like it's a business or something, and they're like, there's no owner, no one's claiming it. It needs to come into the shelter.. Now we do take in almost all of the emergency cases that come. Through like our phone log or our messages. So we get a lot of dogs that are severely injured hit by a car, different stuff like that just because we're super medically based at the shelter. So we're actually able to care for those animals and treat them.

Okay. And I know y'all are in a rural area. Do you ever take anything other than cats or dogs dogs, like any kind of livestock or anything?

So we don't have the capacity for livestock. We've helped assist in some situations with horses and goats and stuff, but we don't have the space or the fencing to actually house animals. We have gotten some birds of prey that we sent out, so we've gotten a falcon before. Owls, you get your little baby squirrel calls and raccoons and possums and stuff like that, but we cannot keep them at the shelter. So even if we're holding them short term, we have to send them out to a sanctuary or a rescue.

And how has the shelter adapted to changes in animal welfare practices over the years?

I will say in 2019, I didn't know anything. I was so green, like I had no idea about anything. But one thing about me personally is. All I do is research. All I do is educate myself. So anytime someone was like, oh, we're gonna have a course about this, or we're gonna have a class about this, or we're gonna be talking about this, I'm like let me in on that Zoom call. Let me drive over here and see what's going on. And so then once you start meeting the other directors of the shelters and you start meeting, you know these genius minds, you're able to, call them up and say, Hey, I'm confused about this, or I just got this situation in. And then you meet vets who are like, yeah, gimme a call if you're ever, confused about something or if you need help. And then you step up and now all of a sudden you're talking to the directors of, shelter med at LSU, Learning, everything about my job is learning data collection. What can I do better? Where can I do better? So when we started, we were basic medical protocol, basic training, basic welfare. We had no idea. And now when a dog comes into our shelter within 24 hours, that dog has almost been fully medically treated for everything. It's been wormed, vaccinated, heartworm tested, it's given like flea and tick prevention. We've looked that dog over completely. Our vets are already aware that Hey, when you come in, this dog has my belly button hernia or this dog is a criptorchid. Or all of those things. And then we reach out to the trainers that we work with and we're like, Hey, this dog is super shy. Would you be willing to come up and work with this dog for, one or two times a week? We have a trainer that comes. Twice a week to the shelter, to dog test our dogs. Then we have an incredible man who like twice a week comes and walks every dog in our facility, just takes them out on a walk and walks them to get out energy. Like we're, we put our all into these animals at the shelter.

Do you ever collaborate with animal welfare organizations or other community groups?

Oh, absolutely. So Washington Humane Society has been one of our biggest partners from the inception of the shelter. We rely on them so much. They are like the friends of Washington Parish Animal Shelter. They helped us get our start with spay neuter clinic. They were the ones who found the funding to get us the anesthesia machines and the tables and the stuff that we have now. If there's ever a situation where we're we need help, getting this. Oxygen thing or whatever, like they're the ones that we call when we need help with that side of it. But they support us in multiple ways, like especially sharing our Facebook posts. Anytime we make a Facebook post, they're, it's an immediate oh, I know they're gonna share it, it's gonna get to their audience, which is not the same audience that we have at our shelter. We've worked with bigger groups like Bissell best friends. Greater good. We've, worked with them. We're part of Bissell's Fix the Future Program. So they actually pay our vets to come in and spay and neuter animals for our public, pay them in full to do all of that work. But then Washington Humane Society, they get grants for all of the cats. So right now, in March we're doing over, I think actually we might be at a hundred Cats this month, and they have paid for every single one of those cats to be spayed or neutered.

That's great. So we don't have any.

Yeah, we don't have anybody paying for cats this month. And then, with Greater Good, we've worked with their food program to distribute food out to low income people in our public so that they can have food when they're in a bind. Yeah. It's all about public relations, who we can talk to, who we can work together, what our shelter can do, what you can do for our shelter.

Now, can you talk a little bit more about your spay neuter program that you have?

Absolutely. That is my baby. It's my brain child. So last year in 2024, we spayed and neutered 961 Felines and canines, which is huge for a shelter our size. That's just an outstanding number. And it started in 2020. I really had no idea. I just knew spay neuter is the foundation of cleaning up population. That's where you have to start everything. So we had a vet come in and she was like, this is what you need. You need this, and this. And literally listed out all the items we would need to have a spay neuter clinic start. And so we started with her and it was really just shelter animals. We weren't doing anything for the public at that time. Just because of liability. We weren't really a well versed team yet. We were still, hitting our toes every once in a while. And then in 2021 we got a little bit bigger. So instead of doing five dogs to clinic, we were doing 15 dogs to clinic. And then in 2022, all of a sudden we're doing. 30 annals every single week. And then in 2024, at one time we had five different vets working at our shelter on rotation. And we were sometimes doing two or three clinics a week. And it really, it got to be overwhelming. So as 2025, we have slacked off a little bit. We're still trying to do between three and four clinics a month, and we're doing 30 to 40 animals. Actually this Saturday we're doing a massive event. We are doing 60 animals this Saturday. So we've all been prepared for a 12 hour shift this Saturday at the shelter.

Do those events fill up pretty quickly

Absolutely. So we actually have seen, which is incredible, a lower number of cat calls. We have seen a lessening of people needing to get cats in. Now, when we make a post, obviously we get a lot of calls, but we're still seeing, we're still having to like, reach out to people and be like, Hey, do you have cats? Do you have cats? You need done, does your neighbor have cats that need done because we need cat spots. And so that in itself is just. Such, such a cool data point to have. Because I remember two years ago where every other call was a cat call. It was a cat, dog, cat, dog. And now maybe we're getting one, two cat calls a week and that's it.

Yeah. That's amazing. And usually

it's to get into our spay neuter clinic.

Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah.

It's been a shock. But between our clinic and the Washington Humane Society, crossroads Clinic, we're probably doing almost 300 cats a month. Between the two of us.

Yeah. I know out here by us, there's times where we gotta try and book a month or two ahead to try and get cats done. 'cause they're just, slammed. That's amazing that y'all can get that many done.

And look, if we, if you have cats and you need cats in, we have money for TNR Cats right now. But our normal price for cats is only $25. That is what it costs for you to get a cat into our clinic and have it altered vaccinated. It now we do a mandatory ear tip that is mandatory for us, and pretty soon we're gonna start actually tattooing our ear tips. Instead of creating a secondary incision on the abdomen, we're just gonna add tattoo ink to the already tipped ear and. So that's, I think that's gonna stop a lot of owned cats from coming to us just because, I know they don't want their little cat to have a green line on the tip of its ear. But we're really doing this for, TNR cats while we do book owned cats. It's really for these ferals that are out in the community populating.

Right, how many animals can your shelter accommodate as far as cats and dogs?

So we have three cat cages, but we do not at this time take cats from the public. If we did just open our doors and say, Hey, if you have a cat you don't want bring it here. We would be inundated. It would just be nonstop. We would have a hundred cats on the first day. So the cats that we do get are all from other municipalities, whether it be fire department, police department say they go out on a call, there's a cat in a situation that is unsafe, they'll call us. We take that feline from them, but we don't take owned or stray cats from the general public. So we have three cat houses that we can safely house cats. Long term, we have 12 dog runs, so really if it's 12 adult dogs, that's really all we can house. But obviously like a litter of puppies, you can put them together in the same run or maybe you can put two dogs together if they're from the same household. But right now we have 26 animals at the shelter, so we're super full.

And now you limit intakes by appointment only, is that correct?

So we have an intake list. So what happens is when people call us and they have an owned or a stray dog, the first thing we ask is send pictures. Because when we, we get a lot of lost dogs too. So the first thing we do is take a look at that picture doesn't match anything that's lost. If it doesn't match anything that's lost, then we send it out to our rescue partners that we have a little group for, and we'll send it out to them because there's always a possibility that they can pull that dog in faster than we can. Then they go on our intake list and as we get adoptions and dogs out, we immediately call the next person in. A lot of times we get a big holdup because we'll have someone that has, 12, 14, sometimes 28 dogs at one time. And so we have to, get all of those animals in from that one area before we can move on to the next person in our list.

Do you have a foster system in place or do you rely more on the rescues foster systems?

So we really don't have fosters in Washington Parish. And most of the fosters that are in the parish are pretty much their own rescues. They're not pulling from our shelter, they're not pulling they're pulling straight off the street. We have posted certain dogs for foster and not received anything. Back from them. And then I know with like our Humane Society, they haven't been able to really get fosters either to come forward for certain dogs. So we have some fosters, but most of the fosters that we have are like very specific kind of animals. Like only small dogs, only puppies only, certain dogs of if they have like a health issue or something, they're not just pulling straight out of the shelter because we're full. So that's not really an option that we have right now. We are prepared for fosters. If you foster through us, food is given, medical is given, we'll give a kennel to take the animal home so that you have a kennel at home if you need to put the animal in the kennel. We just don't have people reaching out, to offer fostering.

I know shelters get a bad rap. What are some of the misconceptions people have about shelters or shelter animals?

The biggest misconception is that, we're just killing everything. It comes in, we kill it, we get something else in, we kill it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There are very few shelters in 2025 that are doing that. Do they exist? Absolutely. They don't exist in Washington Parish.

That's wonderful.

We are an entirely no kill parish. And I say that with quotations because every shelter, because of public safety, has to euthanize dogs. We have to, if a dog comes into the shelter and it is a danger to itself or others. We cannot allow that animal back out on the street to harm someone. Not every dog that comes into the shelter is perfect or flawless or can be fixed. We're getting dogs and that have killed other dogs like literally have damned something so bad that it is no longer living. We obviously can't allow that to go back out into our population. We have dogs that come in that have severely bitten people and once they're passed that stray hold and it is up to a judge most of the time. But if we get the order that dog is not allowed back in the public we, we can't let that dog back out into the wilds. The other reason that we would euthanize is for health. If we have a dog that's come in and it's been hit by a car and it's pelvis is shattered, it's, kidney has blown. We would be doing a disservice to hold that animal in the hopes that someone else has the finances to help that animal. And we just don't do that, obviously. If something comes in and it's injured, we're gonna do everything we can. But there's also a certain line and we talk to our vets, I'll call my vet and I'll get on FaceTime or send pictures and be like, this is what I have, this is what's going on. What do you think? And if they turn around and they say, you can't help that dog. Okay, we cannot help this dog so we won't allow suffering. We are absolutely that. It is qua quality of life over quantity of life. And so that's our biggest misconception. I would say the other one is that, we don't care about the animals in the shelter. That we just, take them in and it's we'll hold 'em and then, throw 'em back out. That's not true at all. Our dogs are babies. I remember the dogs that I've had throughout the years. People come into the shelter and they're like, yeah, I adopted this dog from you three years ago. And I'm like, yeah, I remember that dog. I love that dog. The dog looked like this. And it had this marking because these, there, there's a reason we work with animals, and it's because we love them. We love them so much that we wanna do everything we can to save them and protect them and make sure that they're given the best life possible in the shelter. Some of the dogs are treated better in the shelter than they could be treated. In a home. Because we are giving them enrichment every single day. Right. They're getting yard time every single day. They're getting walked. I know a lot of people, even myself, I don't walk my dogs. I'm like, you go out in the yard and play. I'm not taking you for a walk. Ours are getting walked around. They're getting jobs to do even while at the shelter. And we have three actual shelter cats, which are our babies. They're inside, outside Free Roamers. We have Bob who is literally our logo cat. He's on our shirts. He's on our rugs, he's on our logo. Love him. He's a Bob Tail and on our logo, he was actually dumped at the shelter three years before the shelter existed, where it was. Oh wow. And the guys next door, 'cause we have the road crew next door, they just fed him and took care of him. Yeah, so he is almost nine years old now and the shelter is literally his home. He doesn't know anything else but the shelter. Always been there. Then we have Thomas, which was probably like a panleuk kitten and she survived, but she has the neurological issues, so she walks in circles constantly. That's my baby. I love her. I adore her. She follows me everywhere I go. And then we have Willow who has an autoimmune disease, so she drools everywhere. To the point where she literally, if she shakes her head, drool just flies everywhere and she gets sick like every other day. That's our babies. We love them.

I know the feeling.

What is the adoption process like?

So we have a very easy adoption price price process. So you walk in our shelter, we'll take you to the back. You can look at all of the dogs at any time. If you see a dog that you want and you want, some time with it, we have an adoption room where you can go in there, hang out with the dog as long as you want to. If at the end you're like, yeah, absolutely, I wanna take this dog home. As long as that dog is altered, you can adopt. Same day we have a contract to fill out and our normal adoption price is a hundred dollars. But that covers, vaccines, spay and neuter, worm, everything. And usually we'll even give heartworm and flee intake prevention for the next month. So you're getting a lot for that a hundred dollars. But we do specials all the time. A few weeks ago we had a black dog special where all adoption fees were waived if you adopted a black dog because we had seven black dogs in the shelter and they weren't moving. So we were like, okay, let's get 'em into some homes.

Yeah. It's a shame that the black dogs and black cats are the ones to least or least likely to get adopted.

I heard something and now I can't remember where I heard it from, but, and it was one of my teachers. But she said that the animals in the shelter are the animals in your community. So if our shelter is full of pit bull breeds, that means that's what people in our community are wanting because they wouldn't be in our shelter if they weren't, if there wasn't triple the amount in the general population. So even though we had all of those black dogs, maybe it was the price that was the factor because all of those black dogs got adopted.

Oh, that's great. That's great.

Yeah. We don't have any of them. Boots was the last one to be adopted, and she got adopted last week. So every single one of those black dogs, so it's. It is hard and a lot of times, I'll get a big giant pit bull in the shelter and I'll go, alright bud, you're gonna be with us for a while. But a while is not forever. And even if they're with us for two or three months, they're still gonna get adopted. There's some special home out there, but it also gives us time to work on that animal. So if the animal comes in and it's, not fractious, but let's just say it's a very hyper animal who doesn't know how to walk on the leash, and that's why the owner brought it into the shelter was because it was jumping all over them. That gives us the time to put in that work so that dog doesn't jump on them anymore. And now we have a dog that's behaviorally sound.

Do you offer any kind of support to adopters after they take the animal home?

Yes and no. So if it is a puppy and it is under the age where it has gotten all of its vaccines, we continue vaccinating until that puppy is fully vaccinated. If they come in and they're like, Hey, we need some warmer, or we need this, we'll continue that. We used to have partners that we worked with like there was a grooming salon that offered a free bath. If you adopted through us we do give out like trainer cards. We work with K Pro K nine, and, everybody leaves with a card and it's Hey, if you have any problems, call them. They're who we partner with, they're gonna be able to walk you through everything. But not really anymore. There's not a lot to give afterwards once they leave the shelter. We wish that were different, but we just, don't have aftercare resources.

And what about in terms of a hurricane coming or a disaster, do you evacuate your animals or do you have a place for them to go?

Yeah, so actually by the state we have to have evacuation plan sent to them. I think it's every March, but I usually try to send mine in January so I don't have to worry about it. But yeah if, we're really not at risk for a fire because of where the shelter is, where surrounded by pea gravel, we have, parking lots, roads, the whole nine yards. So really fire is off the table. Our building has been through a million and a half hurricanes. She's still standing. So unless the roof came off, we probably wouldn't evacuate. Our really only concern is if a tornado comes through, but Washington Parish government has. Been so incredible to this shelter. And that is such a rare thing to say when you talk about, municipalities and their shelters usually they're just like, oh it's underfunded. They don't care about it. Washington Parish government absolutely cares about our shelter. We have an incredible generator. I don't even know how big it is, but it is massive and it can run the shelter for three days if the power is cut off, which is just absolutely incredible. We have cots, we have tarps, we have kennels. We have everything we would need in an emergency to move those dogs. And we have partners that if something happened inside the shelter, if we had a fire inside the shelter and we had to move everybody out, we have places where they can go.

And how is the shelter funded? 'cause you touched on that a little bit.

Yeah, so we do not have dedicated funding. So we, our parish, our people do not pay a specific tax that comes to the shelter. We also don't have animal control, so we don't have any funding from like tickets or fines or fees. We are based off of a percentage of money that is given to our health units. So they have a budget and we, it's like we're taking some money from them and that's what we live off of. So a 90% of what we do off of donations and the partners that we work with. So if you look at it broken down. What we get for, from the health unit, for our, yearly fund that pays for the employees. And then we have a little bit left over for supplies. And that's pretty much our budget for the year.

So are supplies something that is needed? Do you get donations from individuals as well as these rescue groups that you work with?

So I will say we don't have a large volunteer pool. We don't have a large foster pool. But when it comes to our public giving donations to the shelter, buying things off of our Amazon wishlist, they are incredible. They're unstoppable. I feel like we have to make a thank you post like every other day for someone donating something to the shelter they're donating. Food. We have two different types of food at the shelter that we feed. So at our dogs are fed, Purina, any kind of Purina. And then we have a prison program at Rayburn Correctional where we send dogs for six months to get obedient trained. They feed pedigree over there. So a lot of times we'll need food for our shelter or we'll need food for that program. And so we'll make a post and being like, Hey, we need food for the prison. And then we'll get, 10 bags within a week. So yeah our public's really good when it comes to donations.

How can people volunteer at the shelter and what types of volunteer opportunities are available?

So we are open Monday through Friday from eight to four. We have a Saturday clinic, maybe once a month. But most of the time everyone that works at the shelter right now is mothers with children. And most of our children are young like 10 and younger. So we try and take our weekends when we can, but you can just come in like we're open eight to four, so you can walk in and be like, Hey, I'm here. I wanna volunteer. And there's always something to do. Most of the time it has to do with cleaning because that is the thing that takes up the most time. But it's also the thing that gets pushed back the most because it's really hard to we have right now, 5, 6, 7, 8, we have eight taxis in the shelter that are just sitting in the middle room, in the front room because. We were cleaning today, we were doing paperwork, we were doing everything else. And I was like, I just don't have time to break these down and clean them. So a lot of it has to do with that. But right now we have like 14 huskies at the shelter. Wow. And we are desperately, yeah. Yeah. We had a hoarding case, so it was actually 22, and we've been able to move some into rescue, but we still have 14 at the shelter, not including our other dogs that were already there. And we had six of those. So, we are desperate right now for someone to come and bathe these poor huskies because they're so dirty and they like, have mats all over them because of all the loose hair. And that's definitely a need we have right now. We also have some fencing and stuff, not fencing, but like shaders that we're trying to put up at the shelter that we just have not had the time to put up. So I have all the materials and the zip ties just sitting there and I'm like, I don't know when I'm gonna get to it.

Yeah I like that you're allowing people to just go in and help whenever they need to. 'cause I know a lot of other places are a lot more structured and they're like, oh, we don't want the help if you can't commit to it. But a lot of times people can't commit. But some help is better than no help.

Absolutely. If, so, what we see a lot is someone like will come in and they have like court ordered service hours. And because of the way we're structured, a lot of people can get those service hours done in one day. And it's okay, you've come in, I know I'm probably never gonna see you again, so I'm gonna use you all day and then I'll, I'll never see you again. But thank you so much for the help. But yeah, it's not easy to volunteer at shelters. It's almost a job like you're volunteering to do labor. We don't have paperwork tasks, we don't have filing tasks like that's taken care of. We need help with the animals. We need help cleaning. We need help like wrapping first, like first spay, neuter clinic. We have Ms. Carolyn who is absolutely incredible. She comes two or three days before our spay neuter clinic and we'll wrap like 40 to 50 spay neuter packs for us. And that's her entire day is just sitting at a desk dealing with surgical tools and wrapping them. And that's all she does for an entire day. It's so incredible. Like every time she comes in, I'm like I adore you. Thank you. Because that's one of my employees. And our shelter, we only have four employees. We're actually down an employee right now, so we're only at three. And then because of our spay neuter clinic this Saturday, we've all had to stagger days off. Or else we would be like 20 hours over time. So this almost this entire week, we've only had two employees at the shelter dealing with this massive amount of animals and everything that we need to clean and everything that we need to do. And you just can't do it in eight hours. Eight hours is not long enough. And if you wanna go home and sleep, it's okay, go home, go sleep, go find something to eat, and just be prepared to sweat your butt off the next day.

Yeah, I love that you're so passionate about working at the shelter. That's great. And so what would you say is the most rewarding part of your job?

A few years ago, I would've said when the dogs get adopted, I understand sheltering way more now. And honestly, I will say the most rewarding part of sheltering is understanding that I am doing something. I am saving lives. There's a lot of sleepless nights, there's a lot of heartbreak and heartache. A lot of people will say you have to make yourself cold. They say that in nursing too, is you just have to shut yourself off, but we're human and you can only shut yourself off for so long before you just break down. And every morning I go into the shelter and some mornings I'm like, I just don't wanna be here today. And then other mornings I'm like, I'm so grateful to be here. But the most rewarding part for me is at the end of the day when I'm going home, I'll ask myself, is there anything that I could have done more for my animals today? Sometimes that answer is yes. Sometimes it is. Sometimes I could have spent extra time, but when that answer is no, when I am going home and I know that I have done everything that I could possibly do for my animals that day, there is nothing more rewarding to me than being able to say that.

What are your hopes for the future of animal welfare in your community?

So in the parish, I'll definitely say that, we all get on the same page. We have a educational base with our public that we're all in kind of agreement with the way that animals should be taken care of, the way they should be treated, how shelters work, how animal control should work, what the laws are. That's every shelter director's biggest goal is that everybody's on the same page. When we go out on a call or when a dog comes into the shelter, everybody kind of underst understands like basic care and basic the basic needs of an animal. That's such a big thing. We have hosted educational classes in the past on dogs and cats and TNR to be able to get our public in and be like, Hey. You guys got a new puppy, you wanna vaccinate this puppy? Let me tell you all about vaccinating and worming and what we can do and how we can help you make this puppy super healthy for the rest of its life. And, oh, you have a dog that's out on a runner. Let me show you how to make this dog's life the best, even though it's an outside dog. Let me show you how we can make this better for this dog and why this dog needs this to keep this dog sane while it's outside on a runner. Because if someone is doing something wrong, it's my job to educate them to do something right, because they're not being malicious if they don't know better. So we have to have kindness with the people that don't know better. Because before I got into the shelter, I didn't know better. I have learned, and I can't stand on a pedestal and say, oh, I'm the smartest person in the world, because I wasn't. I had to be educated on it. So we have to educate everybody. I will say on a state level, I wish that animal ordinances were universal and obviously that's not a perfect system and that probably will never happen. But that there is more structure to animal shelters. Not all animal shelters will be built identically. But that we should all be able to access the same care and resources so that we don't have little podunk shelters that don't have any resources or don't have anything. We've definitely seen that with, the Bogalusa shelter recently that got shut down, they just didn't have the resources. There was one employee there who was working seven days a week, and that in itself is just, you can't do that. You can't run on that. And that's my hope is that everybody can have the same resources, all the dogs can have the same amount of food and vet, access to vet care and stuff like that.

Yeah. Absolutely I totally agree with you on that. Especially rural shelters, are often overlooked and they don't have the funding that they should have.

Yeah. And they don't have, they don't have the education too. I know a lot of, I, I won't call out anything specifically but a lot of the education for animal control in Louisiana is very expensive. Very expensive to be able to go to some of these courses and get basic education. And if they don't have access to that, how are they supposed to know better?

Absolutely. I didn't know that there wasn't any kind of resource for them where they could just go learn the things without taking these workshops.

Yeah. Unless they're willing to go on their own personal time and go to another shelter and learn from them, or stay on the phone or, just find stuff out on the internet. There's no easy access to basic animal sheltering education. You have to know somebody to find something out. Or you have to pay an arm and a leg and go, four or five hours away. A lot of the big conventions that we have went to and have not went to like the Best Friends National Conference last year or a few months ago, it was in California. We wanted to go, that's not an option. We don't have the funding for a California conference. But the year before it was in Florida and we can drive to Florida. So we were like, okay, let's go to this conference. We learned so much. It was absolutely a great, wonderful time. But we can drive there. So it's less cost comparative to going to California where you're gonna have three different flights that you have to take just going and, that's just too expensive. So, yeah, a lot of the education for animal control and animal sheltering is behind a paywall.

So where can our listers learn more about your shelter and get involved?

I will say the first thing is just come in. There's no reason to ever think that you can't come to the shelter if the shelter, if you ever come to the shelter and the shelter's closed, it's a, either a holiday or the entire staff has had to go do something. Being a small staff, if someone takes off. Then, the whole shelter kind of has to close because we don't have anybody there. So I know Wednesday we had some body come to the shelter and that's when we were picking up the hoarding situation with 22 dogs. It was me and one other employee. So when we left to go get these 22 dogs, because we both had to go do that, we couldn't do it by ourselves. We had to close the shelter. Our shelter has a phone number. It's (985) 205-2023. We have a tin roof in the middle of nowhere. So if you call our shelter and you get the voicemail, please leave a voicemail or send a text message. We'll get back to you as soon as we possibly can. But sometimes if the shelter phone is not in the front window. It will not ring for us. So make sure you leave a voicemail or send us a text message. You can also get in touch with us through Facebook Messenger. We all have that on our phones now, so if something comes through, we can see it. We probably won't respond until business hours, but we'll definitely be able to, receive that message.

And what message would you like to leave our listeners with?

If you want to be involved, don't be afraid to get involved if you can't get physically involved. Share posts on Facebook. When you see animals on the side of the road, or you see someone sharing something, mark down that location, send that location to us with a description of the animal. If you don't have social media, you can't physically get involved. You're stuck at home all day. Maybe think about fostering. There's so many ways to assist, and if your passion is animals, you can help even in the smallest ways.

I definitely agree with that. I've enjoyed the conversation a lot. It's very inspiring to know that you started basically from nothing and got to where you are now. It really is amazing.

Thank you.

I've seen a bunch of your dogs last year. At Pet Fest at Lafreniere Park and there were some, well. Cared for animals. And

thank you.

So I just wanna know, are y'all gonna be at Pet Fest again this year?

We are not because of our short staff, we had to decline this year. We were really sad about it and definitely sad because we declined before we got in the Huskies. So we're definitely like regretting that decision. But right now we just don't have, we don't have the staff and we don't have the volunteers to be able to do such a big event like that.

And the Huskies, do you have those huskies online on your Facebook page?

They're not posted yet. We're going through them. Some of them are vaccinated and spayed, neutered, some of them are not. But they, we were supposed to get pictures today, but we did not get pictures of them because we were cleaning. But yes, as soon as we post them, we're gonna be able to say which ones are ready to go immediately and which ones have to wait to be spayed or neutered. Nothing is ever adopted out of our shelter, unspayed and un neutered. That just does not happen with us.

Yeah, that's a very important thing too, 'cause we don't need a whole bunch of extra huskies running around.

Yeah. And I do wanna say, just in case any other shelter directors listen to this that is not a dis on any shelter that has to adopt out because they cannot hold animals. Some shelters have no choice but to adopt out unaltered animals with a contract. It is what it is. And I'm not judging it, is our availability to be able to spay and neuter everything. So we are going to spay and neuter everything. We can do it, so we are gonna do it, but it is rare. It's not all the time that you can do that.

Thank you so much for speaking with us and I learned a lot. It's a lot of things about the shelter that I did not know. It almost sounds like you're a rescue instead of a shelter.

We run like one. But at the end of the day, we are still there for public safety. Not being animal control has aided a lot and us being able to do the things that we do we are working on getting animal control for the parish. Our parish needs animal control. It does not have it right now. And that's something we're working towards. And obviously once we become animal control, things may change. But we're hoping that, we can still do what we're doing and maybe expand the shelter, get more runs, get more employees, have a bigger volunteer base that's willing to, do physical stuff in the shelter. And if they're willing to do that and come out and, I don't see us changing too much. I just see us expanding in the future.

Yeah. The more animals you can help, definitely. The better.

Absolutely.

All right, thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you guys so much for having me.

And that's all the time we have for today's episode. If you are in animal rescue, or if you know someone that has a story that should be told, please contact us. We would love to have you or them on the show Thanks for listening, and please join us next week as we continue to explore the world of animal rescue.