Help Homeless Animals Find Their Way Home
Ten Ways to Help Shelter Animals and Animal Welfare Organizations
A nationwide economic crunch delivered the hardest blow to those incapable of speaking for themselves: homeless cats and dogs. Here's how you can help.
Animal welfare organizations are feeling the pinch as they struggle to keep their doors open at a time of decreasing donations, increasing pet abandonment, and rising vet and food bills.
Your local animal shelter or pound is a great place for you to get involved in helping homeless animals.
You may think you’re too softhearted to be in that environment. You might think it will depress you, or make you want to take them home.
Be stronger than that. Go there and do it, because by doing so, you’ll improve the lives of frightened, lonely animals, and make yourself feel terrific for helping them.
Ten Ways to Improve the Lives of Homeless Animals
- Volunteer to walk dogs. There’s nothing that will make you feel better than making a lonely dog’s tail wag. Dogs that sit in kennels or pens all day look forward to their walks like nothing else in their day.
- Bring old linens, sheets, quilts or blankets to your shelter. Donate your newspapers that you’d probably put in the recycling bin on a regular basis.
- Volunteer a service. Do you have fundraising or grant writing skills? Can you help paint or power wash? Do you have pet grooming, plumbing, electrical, or roofing repair skills? Are you a graphic artist, or a web designer? Are you connected to people or organizations that may be able to help the shelter in a political or economic way? Use your imagination.
- Volunteer on a spring or fall weekend by helping to clean the shelter, wash windows, tow garbage, garden and landscape, or do window boxes for the shelter. Small chores can do a great deal to revitalize a shelter or pound.
- Become an animal socializer. Spend time on weekends sitting with shy and frightened animals that need a friend. Most will warm up to kindness and a gentle voice. This kind of attention does much for the animals' self-esteem and can help them become adoptable animals.
- Volunteer to man an information or goods table at a shopping center, festival, or adoption day with the shelter. Many hands on deck are often needed on days like that. Talking to the public, leafleting, or helping to transport animals is invaluable to the organization.
- If you have any time during the day, offer to transport animals to the vet’s office.
- Make something for the animals. Ask at the shelter what’s needed. Kitty and dog beds, or even carrier mats, can be made rather inexpensively with flannel and materials from a crafts store.
- Once a year, donate a grooming session from a local groomer’s for a dog or cat at the shelter.
- If you have writing skills, write letters to the local paper in support of the shelter. Write a stock corporate solicitation letter for local businesses that the shelter’s board members can customize. Write a special fundraising plea for the website, or a newsletter. Describe your volunteer time or a favorite animal, so that others can picture themselves doing the same.
Whatever you do, know that it will make you feel great about yourself and do wonders for homeless animals and the organizations that are saving them.
The copyright of the article Help Homeless Animals Find Their Way Home in Dogs is owned by Jane Hanley. Permission to republish Help Homeless Animals Find Their Way Home in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
A rescued kitten has a broken leg set
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