Earlier this month, Operation Kindness, an animal welfare nonprofit based in Carrollton, opened a new local hub that will serve DAS, helping with veterinary services and capacity issues. Meredith Jones, chief community initiatives officer for Operation Kindness, said the organization launched community initiatives in July 2022 with the goal of taking the service it provides and expanding it into surrounding communities.
“It was kind of a fact-finding mission when my team first started,” she said. Members visited shelter after shelter to determine the services most needed in North Texas. They found two main areas of need: accessible, affordable vaccinations and veterinary services at local shelters.
“There are a lot of shelters that don’t have vets or, like Dallas Animal Services, they’re supposed to have six when they’re fully staffed but they have two,” Jones said.
The organization also had an immediate connection to the city because its CEO, Ed Jamison, is a former director of DAS. “We just kind of continued to work and the more we got into their shelter, the more we really realized that how DAS is doing is really kind of representative of how animal welfare in Dallas is going,” she said. “We’ve seen kind of trends over the year where if DAS is struggling, we’re seeing a lot of owned pets, and community cats and rescues are struggling. So, we felt like if we could help Dallas Animal Services increase their life-saving rate, we would be able to really make a significant impact on the Dallas community as a whole.”
DAS strives for a live release rate of 90%. That means 90% of the animals that come into the shelter have favorable outcomes (like getting adopted) and aren’t euthanized. "It's a vitally important resource for shelters to clear space for those additional animals that are coming in," Paul Roman, DAS' interim director, said. The recent severe weather in Dallas-Fort Worth brought more animals to the shelter."It's a vitally important resource for shelters to clear space for those additional animals that are coming in." – Paul Roman, Dallas Animal Services
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A major advantage of the partnership, DAS Assistant Director Mary Martin said, is that the hub is right around the corner from the Dallas shelter. "We can walk up there in less than five minutes," Martin said. "So, being able to move animals quickly up there is phenomenally important to us."
The hub's efforts will focus on four main programs. First, there’s the organization's animal transport program, which takes dogs from high-need local shelters like DAS and sends them to other shelters. Jones said the organization anticipates being able to transport 40–50 animals every two or three weeks, pulling primarily from DAS.
Operation Kindness will also be offering medical services for rescue groups that are pulling animals from the Dallas shelter. “That care is really cost-prohibitive, so they’d [animal rescues] really like to pull more from DAS, but they just don’t have the funds," Jones said. “So, we will try to offer services as inexpensive as possible to really help these rescues.”
Additionally, the organization will have a pet food pantry at the hub and will host cat surgery days.
Jones said the South in general, but especially Texas, has always struggled with packed animal shelters. “But we’re seeing even more of that because now we’re seeing some outside factors that are really starting to negatively affect capacity and shelters’ ability to adopt out animals, one of those being the nationwide vet shortage,” she said. “We have a lot of shelters, big shelters that don’t have vets on staff.”
In part, as Laura Molgaard, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota, told The Guardian, this is because there was an increase in pet ownership starting in the ’80s that wasn’t matched with an influx of veterinary schools or students.
This has made for quite the struggle for animal shelters nationwide over the years, and can lead to bad outcomes for the animals.
Jones said, “You just have all of these animals and so many of them are just really incredible animals that are just sitting there or worse being euthanized because of this logjam that the vet shortage is creating.”
But DAS should have more hands on deck with the new hub, which opened June 7 at 1771 Terre Colony Court.
Martin encourages the community to help all they can by fostering or adopting pets from the shelter. "One adoption saves at least two lives because it makes space," she said.
