Welcome to Animal Posse, the podcast dedicated to the people and rescues making a difference in the lives of animals. Hi Finn, Thank you for coming on the show. I am looking forward to learning all about mutual rescue.

Excellent. It's really nice to meet you, by the way

To start, if you could please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about mutual rescue.

Okay, well my name is Finnegan Dowling and I am the shelter program and engagement manager for mutual rescue. A little bit about me. I've been in animal sheltering since 1992. We were adopting out pteradactyls at that point, and well I left a couple of times. I've pretty much stayed close to the field. What Mutual Rescue is it's an organization that works to get people more involved with their local community shelters. Not just because we believe that helps the pets, but because that we believe that when pets and people engaged together, people's lives are changed forever. And so we believe when you help animals, you help people too. Would we do a number of different things to demonstrate. Just how powerful the effect of mutual rescue is. We have, I think about 33 short films on our website that tell stories of rescue pets. Changing the lives of the people who adopted them and helping them grow and heal through different situations. And our films are really well done. A bunch of them have won awards. We have two that will be traveling with international film festivals this year, which is very exciting. And then on the shelter side of things, we do a couple of things. We work with shelters to help them start new programs to better engage with their communities, like Day Foster Field Trip. And, we also work to make it to make shelters more accessible to the community. So we do a lot of getting basically white labeled resources translated into Spanish by a native speaker in Guadalajara. We have an amazing translator. And then any shelter that needs. Resources in Spanish on pet health, pet behavior can go ahead and download those and put their logos on them. On the other side, what we do is we work with corporations that want to partner with local shelters and a lot of. Corporations automatically default to an organization like HSUS or A-S-P-C-A or best Friends that does great work. But unfortunately those dollars really don't reach the local shelters that need them the most. So what we do is we work with corporations that want to do a national partnership, would want the money to go to local shelters, and we put together groups of local shelters in the corporations. Geographic footprint. And then do you know, marketing campaigns, partnerships in which the monies from the corporations then immediately goes to those shelters involved in those partnerships. And in that way, instead of everybody fighting over the same small amount of philanthropy that goes. Towards animal welfare. We're trying to grow the pie and then get that money immediately to where the work is being done. Which is to the local shelters and communities around America.

That's amazing. And those are great programs too. I would definitely wanna learn more about your language accessibility program as well. As the day foster programs. But before we get into that, since you have been in animal sheltering for so long, what was your. Spark that got you into animal welfare to begin with?

I really wish I had some great story about how I grew up completely dedicated to animals and like came to this with a laser focus. But I will be honest with you, that is just like, like when people fall in love with their pets, that's just not the way it happened. Right. I went to a great college in Washington State, evergreen State College, and I was, I went to school when I was younger. I was 16 or 17, and my school was very involved in the community and they had a rule that the first year you had to volunteer so many hours in order to pass the year. And me being a little bit younger and a little bit stupider decided that I would completely ignore this until the last two weeks of the school year. And then all of a sudden I had like some ridiculous amount of hours that I had to do or else I would not pass the school year. And the only place that would take me being 17. Having to do something absurd, like a hundred hours or something in a month was the local community, the municipal animal shelter, which at the time was like 20 kennels or something. And so I was like, cool. And I went in and I was in college to get a degree in long form journalism. And I did actually, I do actually have a degree in journalism and I don't know what it was, but I found. So much purpose and so much healing and so much positivity there. And that it just became, even after I finished those hours, I stayed working there. I wound up getting a summer job there. And over the time that I lived in that town in Washington on and off for eight or nine years, I worked for that shelter. I interned there in the marketing department. Even though I was getting a degree in journalism, it was, I had to do an internship of some sort. And so they had me writing all of their materials and then yeah, it just went from there. And, I just wound up never leaving, I was an animal control officer and then I went on to work in shelters in Colorado, California, Florida, and Nicaragua. And it just, even with my degree in long form journalism, it's just always been my passion.

Yeah, that's a pretty cool story. So since you do have that degree in journalism, do you use that to write articles for animal welfare?

I have in the past, yes. I used to, I've written for the Bark, I've written for Huffington Post. And a couple of other, oh, I forget, there's a couple of places that my writing has been published. I've written a lot for the mutual rescue blog, and then before I came to Mutual Rescue, I was actually,, the marketing manager, or the marketing, for Humane Society of Silicon Valley. And I wrote a ton of stuff there and we wound up winning some awards for it, like just for some goofy. Sort of marketing posts that I did. So I've always stayed close to writing in the work that I do. But even though I love writing, my, my big passion right now is not just the animals, but shelter people. Frontline workers are my tribe and they inspire me every day. So while I love doing the writing parts of my job, I really love working with the shelter workers a lot. 'cause I feel most at home doing that.

With the language accessibility program with mutual rescue, tell us how that got started and why is that beneficial?

I will start with why that's beneficial and we'll talk about, and full disclaimer, my name is Finnegan Dowling. I am obviously not Latino. My family's actually Boston Irish. But it came about for a bunch of reasons. Number one, when I was younger, I went and worked in a shelter in Nicaragua for a couple years and that was a very eyeopening experience to me of how many cultural miscommunications there are and how we tend to really view things in the US through. Without thinking of other people's traditions, other people's cultures, and what I saw in Nicaragua. Was a culture of people who really loved their pets, doing the absolute best they could with limited resources. And that was really eye-opening to me because I had a lot of preconceptions having, coming from American sheltering, which I hate to say it, but does have a really big problem with being prejudiced against migrant communities and communities that speak other languages. It's not even that we're prejudice towards them, it's that we completely ignore. And I don't believe that is on purpose. I believe that is a lot of times a lack of resources and a lack of knowledge. But why is this important? Is because, A, we're not adopting out as many pets we as we could be from a sheltering perspective. I'll get to the human perspective in a second. B. We're taking in animals. We don't need to be taking in. We're not engaging our full community for foster, for adoption. One of the things I teach is I teach marketing workshops and how to write for difficult animals or how to write for social media for long stay pets. And I always hear from when I'm teaching, well, we put out so many pleases and the community isn't, and nobody in the community is listening. And my question is always. Did you really ask everybody? Because I live in Texas, population of my state is 28% Spanish speaking at the in home, which means that two out of three more, almost three out of 10 people prefer to get, are more comfortable processing information in Spanish and we are not providing for those people, but then we're villainizing that population. For years, sheltering has completely ignored the people in their community that speak other languages and then at the same time villainize them for not taking advantage of the programs or not following the rules. When in reality we've never made any attempt in a lot of cases to even try to engage them or try to show them the resources and programs and everything that are available. So that's a huge problem on a sheltering side. Everybody knows that we're full right now. Like what could you do with almost 30% more of your community helping you out? Like from a sheltering side, that's huge on the human side. Let's just talk about the differing experiences that a Spanish speaker would have. Versus an English speaking person at a shelter and in a lot of shelters, and there are some shelters that are not like this. There are a lot of shelters that do really well at having bilingual staff that do really well at working to find ways to communicate. But let's say that most shelters, you have a cat. Let's call this cat Tom. Okay? Here's Tom, the cat. Tom isn't using his litter box. So in most shelters now, we work a lot on diversion, meaning can we help you to keep that pet? So Jane Smith comes in with Tom and she speaks English and she says, Tom doesn't, Tom isn't using the litter box and I have to give him up. And in most shelters, because we are really focusing on diversion now, we'll say. Can we help you with that? Before you surrender him, can we give you some behavioral materials that might help you solve the problems? A lot of times litter box issues can be an easy fix, that sort of thing. And we're able to de deter a lot of. Surrenders that way by helping people solve really basic problems. Ms. Smith takes her, takes Tom, and she goes home and she feels empowered and she feels like that shelter really values her as a pet owner and values the bond between her and Tom. So now let's have another family go in and let's have them be Spanish speakers and they have Tom and we can give them any name. I won't even try to give them a name. But anyway, so this family goes in and they speak Spanish. First of all, they bring, go in and place Tom on the table, and immediately, if there's not a bilingual staff person at the front desk, they have to find somebody to go up. What's going? So first of all, this family now feels like. They're not really welcome at this shelter and anything to begin with. Not even that they're not welcome, but it's just not set up for them. It's not designed for them. That sort of thing, that experience of being like, whoa, there's nothing here for me. But then they do get somebody and they communicate, well, Tom's not using the litter box. Well, we don't have any materials to help you and nobody, we don't really have enough Spanish speakers to talk you through. Possible litter box issues, and we don't have any handouts for you to keep Tom, so we're just gonna take Tom, what is the difference between the experience of those two people? What are we telling that community when we really need all of our community to feel welcome and to feel that the shelter has resources for them and the shelter values their bond with their pet? What do we say when we do that? And it's not the shelter's fault because like I said, many of them don't have the resources. But to be able to do that or. I don't know, maybe, they have leadership that is not seeing the full picture, but it's just not happening. And so our big thing is what if we just came up with all of these resources, put them out there. Any shelter can take them, put their own logo on them and use them. So maybe when that family comes in with Tom and he's having litter box issues, they can not only keep Tom from coming into the shelter, but they can also show that family, Hey, we value. That bond between Tom and your family, just as much as we valued Mrs. Smith's bond with her cat, and we really, we're, and we're gonna empower you to help Tom and keep him in your home. It's a big thing.

How many instructional videos do you have that would be accessible in Spanish?

Right now we don't have any videos. We have 50 handouts that are translated into Spanish. They're all written at all of the information is solid. It's all positive reinforcement. Training and basic health and vet care on different subjects like litter box issues for adoptions, introducing a new dog to your home. Some health things, fleas, spay and neuter. We have all of those handouts available, and it's one click to download each handout and two clicks for any shelter to add their own logo at the top, and then they can just go ahead and start using them and giving them out. What we're working on right now with our translator who's amazing. He is Danielle Luna of Luna Languages in Guadalajara, Mexico, and he is also a Spanish teacher. With about nine years of experience teaching people all over the world, and he is putting together, we have two that are in post-production and three that and more coming. And we're doing a series of short videos that will also live on the same web webpage as the handouts. And those videos will teach animal shelter workers. Really basic Spanish. We're not trying to teach anybody to be fluent, we, but just things like vocabulary words that you'll hear in the shelter. How to greet a Spanish speaker, how to figure out what's going on. Just some basic words so that at least when that family comes in, you can show them that you are making that effort and that you're trying to communicate with them and also. These lessons the ones that we have done, they're fun. They're three to five minutes long, so it's just something that shelters workers can watch in between appointments when they get a slow minute at the desk. Ha. There's never a slow minute at the desk. I know that. But, just something that's really fun and easy. And so we have, I think actually, I think we're up to three now. They're in veteran post-production, and it will be a whole series of videos that will take people first through how to pronounce the vowels, how to pronounce things, and then into words, and then just into basic interactions. So, and those will also live on our website as well.

For small rescues or foster based rescues, do you have any resources for them to say recruit new volunteers in Spanish

speaking volunteers?

Correct?

I do not. However, that is an excellent idea. I have presented on language and cultural accessibility with the incredible Jackie Hernandez. Of she works for Nebraska Humane, but she's also the head of an organization called so which is Soar. I can never remember. Solidarity of Latin American shelter workers and basically solidarity of shelter workers now for the Latin American community. And she has some great examples. That I could send you from Nebraska Humane of how they have gone about recruiting bilingual volunteers. So know, well, we don't have those resources because we try to keep things pretty general and with things like that, we have gotten requests for a white label form. But the problem is that everybody's requirements for foster and volunteer are very different. But you can literally. Write something up and get it translated for $25 a page. And it seems like with those shelters, you would actually be looking for more of a bilingual shelter worker who would be able to read in English in both Spanish. So I think putting those please out in English. That you need bilingual workers would actually help. As long as you specify you are looking for a bilingual worker, because it sounds like what you're looking for, what you're asking about is help for these rescues to help them have somebody that can actually speak to Spanish speakers on site.

Correct, correct. Or if you have a foster, and let's say you find a Spanish speaking only Foster and you only speak English, just a way to communicate with them. Now another tool. Could you use like, like a AI tool to speak with them?

You could, but you do have to be a little bit careful about it. And I will tell you because there's a lot of terms that we use. In English about our pets that just do not translate into Spanish. And for that, so for that like, for basic information, yes. But I'll give you a fun example is that when we started doing the handouts, one of the ones we did was was, on dealing with juvenile dogs in rough play with juvenile, like how to keep your juvenile dog from being jumpy and mouthy. And we used the term wrestling with your dog. And of course Daniel, our translator, he was like, what? He calls me up and he goes, what is wrestling with the dog? Because he's Mexican, he is born and bred in Mexico. And I'm like, excuse me? He's like, what do you mean by wrestling with the dog? So I explained it to him and I forget what term he used, but he was like, oh, okay, it's this. And so then I went to AI and I put in wrestling with the dog and asked it to translate it to Spanish, and it gave me in Spanish doing lucha libre with your dog, which is a hysterical chat, GPT prompt, but does not make any sense. So you've gotta be a little bit careful with something like that, with using chat GPT for stuff like that, like behavioral or really specific stuff. But it can function pretty well for that as well. The other option I would tell, I would really encourage small foster based rescues and smaller shelters to do is to consider reaching out to local colleges or community colleges and recruiting volunteer translators. Recruiting people saying, Hey, we're looking for volunteer bilingual translators that can be available, that if I need to talk to my Spanish speaking foster parent they can jump on a three-way call and translate with me. It's a really easy volunteer job for maybe somebody who's in college and can't always come out to help but wants to help, can do. And so maybe try looking, re recruiting for a bilingual person who's willing to be a translation volunteer via phone.

That's good advice. Are there any plans to expand to other languages?

Yes. Yes. In fact one of the, we offer all of the blanks in English as well, just so that people shelters know what they're handing out in English. I think it was Good Shepherd Humane Society in Arkansas. I was talking to, I believe he's the director over there, I forget his name, but he also works with, I believe it's the Rural Rescue Network and where they are at, they have a very large population of people who speak the language. Karen, which is a language that is spoken on the border of, I wanna say Thailand and Myanmar. But they have, that area has a large meat processing plant and that employs a lot of migrants who only speak Karen. And so Good Shepherd Humane is translating our originals into Karen for their population. And when they do that, they've graciously offered to let us have those translations. So we will also have them in Karen. That was not the next language we planned to expand into, but it's opportunistic and we'll take it. And we know Minnesota has a large population of and Illinois. Both have large populations of Karen speakers as well. But we are our plans for our next official language that we will expand into will probably be Vietnamese or Chinese, where we will look demographically at where to go next of where the greatest need is next. Yes, we definitely have plans that this will not just be Spanish. Spanish is just the first one we're rolling out. As far as we know, we're the first shelter to do this and so as our first organization to do this, so we're still working out the kinks with Spanish.

Great. That's awesome. And it's good to know that you're expanding to the other languages as well. I was actually gonna ask about Vietnamese, 'cause we have a large Vietnamese population here where I am in Louisiana.

Yes. Yeah, we have a large Vietnamese population here too, in Corpus Christi and where mutual rescue is based out of, which is we're a national initiative of Humane Society, Silicon Valley. And that in that area, it, there is a, an awful lot of Vietnamese speakers. So actually Vietnamese was going to be our next language.

So now onto your day, foster programs for shelters. Can you give us an overview of that?

So, just to give an explanation on what Day Foster is, we call it Doggy Day Out. Different shelters all have their own names for their own programs. We call it Doggy Day Out. And what Doggy Day Out is where you can go to an animal shelter for a day. You can go to an animal shelter and basically take a dog. An adoptable pet out for a foster field trip. You can go for a walk in the park. You can go get a pup cup together. You can go have lunch on a pet friendly patio. You can just. Meander through the city. You can basically just give the dog a break from the shelter and also give it a chance to be seen by more people than just visit the shelter. And research has shown that dogs that go out on day, foster field trips are five times more likely to get adopted. And dogs that if the people keep the dog for a sleepover. They're 14 times more likely to be adopted. And the, this program particularly is a magic bullet for getting large dogs, blocky head dogs that generally just do not show well in a shelter setting. This project or this program is a magic bullet for getting these dogs adopted. Because people can see how they behave in the real world and can see like, oh, when they're not being completely crazy in their kennel. They're also great for making better adoptions because as shelter workers, we only know what we see. We might have, when a dog, an animal comes into our shelter, we might have some background from the prior owner, but really what we're judging the animal on is the behavior we're seeing in the shelter. So the more you can get animals outside of the shelter and see how they behave in normal situations. The better you can match, make adoptions, the better understanding you have of their temperament. And the public loves it as well. People really love it. And we thought this program was so important back in, I think, 2017, that every shelter should have it that we did, we're very big on, on easy to use, download resources, put your logo on it and go. And so we created the Doggy Day Out toolkit, which is, you can download it and it's about 40 pages long. Don't get scared. It's not homework, but what it is it's a manual for the shelter on how to start the program. There's a manual for participants in the program. There's template documents that you can use, and it's all in a word file, so you can just take whatever you need. Change the text as you need to, again, add your own logos to it. And it's like a program in a box. And it's been really good for helping smaller shelters get a program up from zero. 'cause look, you've already got the manuals, you've got a very, the template for different forms that you can work off of. So there you go. I present on this program a lot, and I've worked with VCA charities a couple times to co-facilitate three-day workshops for groups of shelters on starting these programs. And they have spread all across the country, and they're absolutely magical, like I said, and the public loves them, and when shelters start them, they start to see people that never would've come into the shelter before. Come in 'cause people wanna help and if you give them an easy low lift way to help, they will show up in droves.

You said you do see a lot of adoptions for the big dogs coming from this doggy day out program. Is it usually the people that are doing the short term foster and doing the sleepovers? Or is it also just beneficial for the dog's wellbeing in general? So that. The next time they interact with somebody, they might interact better.

It's I don't have data, like solid data on the amount of how many of the participants actually wound up taking, adopting the dogs. I believe there is national data from the Dr. Lisa Gunter study that she did. Which is absolutely excellent, which was the one that showed that five times increase and that 14 times increase for sleepovers. I've seen some I know it varies regionally. Like to go back to my friend Jackie at Nebraska, I believe she said that she saw a lot of adoptions come directly from participants. But what you see a lot more is what I like to call like partner marketing and word of mouth, which is that somebody takes a day out a dog out for the day. And the other, the thing, one of the things that Dr. Lisa Gunther's study showed was that like the median age of people that participated in this were in their, like in thirties, so pretty tech savvy group of people that are on social media. So people take a dog out for the day and they take photos and they put it on their social media. And now that dog's that reach. Beyond just people who follow the shelters page. And also it has the effect of acting as a personal recommendation, which is the strongest form of recommendation there is. We can write that Bucky is a good dog on our website till the dog, till the cows come home. But if your best friend comes up and says, Hey, I took this dog Bucky out yesterday and he's a great dog, you're gonna believe that a lot more. So a lot of that we see too, is that the people that take these dogs out, even if they don't adopt them, they wind up becoming advocates for them, and that helps them get adopted. And that advocacy can look as simple as. Just posting about their dog on their social media or that advocacy can look like. I've seen people pay the adoption fees for their dog, the dog they took out, or bring, gifts or whatever that will be sent with the dog that he is adopted out. But we do see that conversion to advocacy for that pet. And I think it's Kristen Hassan who has said, seen is saved. And when you get these dogs outta the shelter and you get them seen. You have people advocating for them, it works.

What are some of the most common misconceptions people have about taking a shelter dog on a day out?

The public is like all in for this. So most of the misconceptions that I've seen have come from shelters and they've tend to come from high barrier shelters. The public's misconception, just to answer that really quickly, is that it's like rent a dog that you can call up and say like, Hey, I wanna take a six month old French bulldog out for six. Yeah, that's not gonna happen. You're gonna get the dogs that are in the shelter. And most of the shelters are really prioritizing the dogs that are going to be large dogs. But I think that are gonna be the long stay dogs and those tend to be larger, but I think the public's misconceptions would really be, the dog will be sad when it comes back. And I hear that from the shelters too. Cortisol studies showed that, no, that's not the way that works. Dr. El Gunter, who's incredible, if you have the chance to look at any of her research. Amazing. She did a study on the cortisol levels and what she found is that the cortisol levels, the stress levels of the dog go down when they go out, obviously they're out there having a good time and then when they come back in, they just re return to the same level they were at before. So the dog is not getting more stressed from coming back at all. It's just really reacting to in the same amount of stress to being in a shelter, but it's functioning the way that a weekend functions for humans. Meaning that if you leave work on Friday and you're stressed and then you get relaxed over the weekend and you go back to work on Monday and you're stressed, does that mean that you would go give up that weekend to not have to go back to work and be stressed? No, you're not making the dog sad by taking it out and bringing it back. That's not the way that works. That's literally the dog is just going back to the exact same way it was in the shelter. But maybe now it's a little bit more tired and has had a great day and it's been seen by the public. The big conception misconceptions I get from shelters, people are gonna steal the dogs. No, they're not. I'm sure it can happen. But if you wanna get, if you're looking to do something nefarious with a dog, you are not gonna go to an animal shelter. Show them your id, sign a bunch of legal forms, have them walk you out to your car with the dog and see your license plate. To do something nefarious to a dog. You can go on Facebook, you can go on Craigslist and get a dog with no questions asked. So no people are not going to steal the dogs or do bad things to them. People are also think, what if the dog gets lost? What if the dog gets into a fight? Obviously, there are guardrails around this program. The first thing that I tell everybody when they start a program is no dog parks. You will never be taking a dog to a dog park and that all of your participants need to know that this is. Not a dog park activity. This is not a go play with other dogs activity or meet strange dogs. This is for that dog to get some one-on-one attention and a stress break, and it needs to always be on leash and an adult always has to be in charge of that leash. The only exception to that is if you're bringing the dog to your home with no other pets and you're letting the dog play in your fenced backyard for a couple hours, which is great, or even let you know, then you can take the dog off leash. But no and if shelters are really worried about it, I just tell 'em to go buy a pack of air tags and air tag the dogs when they go out. I have air tags in all my luggage. But yeah, the misconceptions are that this program's a lot more dangerous than it is. It's really not that people are gonna steal the dogs. They're not going to, that the dogs are going to be heartbroken and miserable when they come back. Nope. Data shows the answer to that is a big old, solid. No, it's pretty much all positive.

That's cool. Now, are there any ways to implement a similar program for cats?, Of course, I know you couldn't go take a cat out on a walk, but. For shelters that do have like a large cat population, is there any kind of way you could do like a weekend program for cats that would be beneficial?

I don't have the behavioral data on that, but like I am a firm believer of, and in any kind of short term foster, I am a firm believer in any opportunity you have an animal to get, you have to get an animal out of the shelter and see how it behaves in real life. Be it for a weekend, that is an opportunity. I also believe that we are not jailers. It is not our purpose to take these animals into shelter or rescue and hold them hostage, and they have to stay there. These animals have done nothing wrong. They have the right to go experience normal life, and it is not our place to defer that. So if you have somebody that says, I would like to take Ms. Kitty home for the weekend. Then yes, I believe that a program that's a beneficial program would I put some guardrails around it, just knowing cats? Yeah, definitely. Obviously you're not gonna take 'em out on a walk, and maybe if you were gonna bring home an older cat for the weekend, you would say, Hey, she needs to stay in your bedroom with the door closed and and the litter box in the bathroom. Just 'cause we know a lot of times when cats are in new places, it's a lot less overwhelming for them to be in a smaller area first. So if you were doing a short-term foster, I would just say maybe that would be the guardrails you would put around it, is that you just say, Hey, we're just gonna ask that you keep 'em in an enclosed area until they start to seem a little bit more comfortable,

yeah, I think that could work. I do cat rescue, so knowing cat behavior, you always will see these cats that you're like, oh yeah, you can bring them into your house, and they're gonna be totally comfortable. And then you have these other ones that are like, no, it's gonna take them a while to warm up. You have to have them in their like little safe, small place. But yeah, I think like a weekend thing. I never thought about doing like a weekend thing, but I think that could even be beneficial for people. Just to experience kittens, fostering kittens for a weekend rather than fostering 'em. Oh, definitely. The whole time from, them reaching an age and size that they can be spayed, neutered, and then go up for adoption.

Oh, and not only that, but imagine how many more fosters you would have. If your fosters knew that they could go away for the weekend and there would be somebody that could take their pet, their foster for the weekend, and so they wouldn't have to cancel their trip or not, or choose between fostering and or taking a trip. Or they just knew like, Hey, these kittens are driving me nuts and I just need a break for 24 hours. If they knew that was an option. And I wish I had this study in front of me, but there was a great study and one of the big from, I wanna say Maddie's fund, and one of the biggest fears that people had about fostering was not knowing how long they would have the animal. And so if you have short-term foster, you can become a lot more flexible with your long-term fosters. You can tell them like, Hey, we've got Becky, she only does weekends, if. You wanna foster, but you know that you'd like to have your weekends free, then we can still use you as a foster. That's great. So it opens the pool of fosters up a lot bigger and I do think it could work for an adult cat. But just like with doggy day out, you don't send every dog on a doggy day out. Obviously there are some dogs that it's just not gonna work for. Right? Be it because they're very reactive. And it would be the same thing with cats. Like you would not send that shy cat on a weekend foster, but kittens or like the big Tom who just got neutered, who's got cheeks out to the walls, who just like rolls over on his stomach every time anyone looks at him. Like, yeah, send him out to a weekend Foster. Great.

And even if they didn't get adopted by the people that are doing the temporary fostering, it gets 'em more socialized And get 'em more exposure.

and the more you can give your foster homes flexibility, the more foster homes you'll have, the more you will give. And also even just having a short term foster for a cat that's returned that happens in rescue. People adopt a kitten and then they realize, I don't know, maybe their kids are too rough for it, or something like that, and they need to return it. And you don't have a foster home available. You call a weekend foster person, and that at least buys you some time or a short term foster to make a longer term plan for that animal I am a firm believer in short term foster and also a lot of people. That start at short-term fosters, I think that's something like up to 37% will convert to longer term fostering. So it's a great gateway drug for people to get into to get their feet wet with fostering until they get comfortable enough to take on long-term fosters.

Another thing too, with a doggy day out and doing say the weekend is it ever an issue where people might flake out, bring the dog. Home, say like on a Friday the shelter could be closed on a Saturday, but then they like totally flake out and they're like, I can't do this. I need to bring the dog back. Is that ever a problem?

Yeah, I mean I definitely, I believe it is. Where we are not a shelter. We're a national initiative and I work with a lot of shelters and I have heard of that program. And again, that's a guardrail you have to have in place. And one of the things we always tell people to do is to have one dedicated cell phone number. Most shelters already have an emergency line either for the, just for the ACOs or for the regular foster base in case something either longer term foster base in case there's an emergency. Or just having a burner cell phone that you use for it that somebody is carrying if there are dogs out for the weekend so that person has a number to call, where there will always be a person on the other end that can take the dog and bring it back into the shelter. Be it a manager or something like that.

And for listeners who might be interested in a doggy day out either for their. Group or to even contact their shelter, to tell their shelter about this program. How would they go ahead to get 'em to get started with this?

But if you are just a person in an area and you wanna take a dog out and see if there's shelters around you mutual Rescue has a doggy day out directory that goes by state of shelters that we know have programs and that have been asked to be added to the directory. And there's over a hundred in shelters in that directory. Just because your shelter is not listed in that directory does not mean that they do not have a program. I do know of some programs that have asked not to be listed because the demand for this program is so high that they book up far in advance, and so they don't want any more advertisement for it. But so first of all, my first suggestion would be check the directory. It's mutual rescue.org, and then just click on the doggy day out button. The other thing you can do if you want your shelter to have one, is just go ask them. I never encourage people to badge your shelter workers about things. But you can always send an email and suggest, Hey, I heard about this program. Do you guys have any plans on doing this or anything like that? And if you do and you want to, you can send them a link. Mutual Rescue has, on their, on that Doggy Day Out there is page, there is a page Doggy Day Out for shelters and you can send them that page where they can download the Doggy Day Out toolkit and look it over. Basically, I would tell, just tell 'em, ask their shelter. And not every shelter can or will have doggie day out, either because of staffing or resource issues, even though there's a lot of ways to make this program work, even with very small staffing. I know shelters that have two staff members that run this program. It's a very easy program to utilize volunteers to run. But either because of resources, because of population, or because of like odd municipality laws which are really weird all over the country. But, a lot of shelters do have it. I can tell you there, there's programs in Alaska and Wyoming and when, if you can go to Alaska and take a dog out, you probably can take one out near you,

Uhhuh. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing the information on these two programs, the language accessibility and the doggy day out. I know personally, I'm gonna go take a look at the flyers that you have. And share some of those on my social media to try to reach some of the Spanish speaking population. And I'm also considering trying to do a a weekend foster for cats and see how that goes.

I definitely would. I would try piloting it maybe with kittens. When I was. Younger, I briefly worked in the child, in at a group home for foster children. And respite fostering was a really, was an integral part of that foster system for people which were weekend fosters that would give the regular fosters a break if they needed to go outta town or one week fosters, and so respite, call it short term foster, call it Weekend Warriors. You can come up with a lot of fun names for it. What is the one that I think Animal Foundation has? Like the gruel Gobblers. But yeah, definitely I think it's a great idea for cats and honestly, once we get through getting the language accessibility thing turned in, it's definitely something I would a project I would wanna consider working on doing a toolkit for looking to research about.

Both of them are really great programs and I didn't know about either one of 'em. Now before we end the call, is there anything else that you would like to add?

No just, I'm very grateful to be on today. Thank you so much. If you have any suggestions for more cat focused handouts that are needed, please let me know. We are working on what to do if you find kittens and on caring for neonatal handouts. In Spanish because we had a request for that. Actually, there's a couple of groups in LA that do cat foster and the majority of their foster base is Spanish speaking so we know that, there is a culture of animal welfare and. Families really deeply love their pets and wanna help and why not engage them,

I could definitely collaborate with you on stuff for cats. I teach a bottle feeding and foster class, and I would love to be able to reach more people because there's not enough. Cat fosters or bottle feeders as there is. So the more people that we could get involved, the better.

Exactly. All right, well, thank you so much for having me.

All right, well, thank you. I appreciate it. We hope you join us next week. If you know somebody that loves animals as much as I do, please send 'em our way. We would love to talk to 'em. If you are enjoying our show, please consider leaving us a donation. A hundred percent goes to our animals

Paws in the night Claws in the fight Whiskers twitch and tails take flight They’re calling in Stories to spin From the wild to the heart within Broken wings and hopeful springs We’re the voices for these things animal posse hear the call. We stand together. Big and small Rescue tales We’ve got it all Animal posse Saving them all The vet’s got tips The rescuer’s grit The foster homes where love won’t quit From a pup in the rain to a bird in pain Every soul’s worth the strain Animal posse Hear the call We stand together Big and small Rescue tales We’ve got it all Animal posse Saving them all Every caller tells a tale, every howl a whispered wail, we rise up. We never fail. This is the bond The holy grail Animal posse Hear the call We stand together Big and small Rescue tales We’ve got it all Animal posse Saving them all Every caller tells a tale Every howl a whispered wail We rise up We never fail This is the bond The holy grail. Song by Suno.ai