DANVILLE-BOYLE COUNTY HUMANE SOCIETY INC

DBCHS adheres to practices and policies recommended by leading animal welfare organizations and animal care experts. This ensures we are caring for each animal in a species-specific manner and increasing our live outcomes, which is the number of animals leaving the shelter through adoption or rescue.
Preventing shelter intake is the best way to increase live outcomes.

In addition to decreasing euthanasia rates, lower shelter intake leads to shorter lengths of stay (how long an animal spends at the shelter). How do we avoid shelter intake? By implementing safety net programs.

Safety net programs treat healthy animals where they are.

For example, thanks to the community cat program, healthy outdoor cats are not impounded. Instead, they are spayed/neutered, vaccinated, and returned to their outdoor home. It stabilizes the cat population, reduces the spread of disease, and decreases nuisance complaints. Last year DBCHS provided spay/neuter surgery and vaccinations for hundreds of outdoor cats.

Happy Paws, our volunteer-driven, low-cost, high-quality clinic, also strives to curb overpopulation by making spay/neuter surgery affordable for low-income pet owners. The Happy Paws team altered 665 cats and 299 dogs during fiscal year 2020-2021 - that’s a total of 16,700 surgeries since they were established in 2007!

Home To Home™ is a unique, direct-to-adopter program for people looking to rehome their animals. We help pets find a loving new home while they’re still in their current home! In the program’s first five months, more than 60 pets were successfully rehomed without shelter intake.

Twenty-five adult dogs were adopted through our Mutts with Manners prison training program at North Point Training Center. This all-volunteer run program gives some of our more difficult-to-place dogs a paw up on getting adopted.

DBCHS recently completed a strategic planning process to assess our community’s needs and prepare for our future. Nearly 200 people provided input by completing surveys or participating in interviews, and we are so grateful! As a result, we have committed to prioritizing our efforts around three main areas:
-Improving the health of animals in our community;
-Engaging the public to work with us on issues of animal welfare and policymaking;
-Providing more resources to support pet owners.
We have recently hired part-time staff to help with the Community Cat Program, and are relaunching our volunteer program to more fully engage the community.

By focusing on helping healthy animals avoid coming to the shelter, the Boyle County fiscal court and animal control staff, volunteers, local veterinarians, area businesses, and our generous donors made a difference in the lives of nearly 1,500 pets over the last 12 months!