ACTION PROGRAMS FOR ANIMALS

Our goal is to lead our community to become the first in New Mexico to reach a No Kill status, which means that we are saving more than 90% of the cats and dogs which end up at our municipal shelter. We set yearly goals of direclty impacting the shelter's kill rate by increasing our rescue numbers and/or targeting the most at-risk populations (such as big dogs, shy/timid animals, and cats/kittens). We rescue our animals primarily from the municipal shelter. We also participate in other collaborative activities with organizations also working in areas of the No Kill Equation, which is the plan a community needs to comprehensively incorporate in order to reach the No Kill goal.

Our strategy is to fill in gaps in the necessary No Kill programs and services in our community. We work primarily in the area of pulling animals from the shelter which are at risk of being put down for whatever reason and also any animals they give to us to help make room for incoming animals. We often take the animals not accepted by breed-specific rescues and ones which represent the highest pet populations in our community, such as pit bull mixes, chihuhua mixes, and kittens which do not stand a good chance of survival in the sheltering environment. We are able to do this work via a growing foster network and steady, high adoption numbers We are essentially giving the shelter animals the second chance they need to find a forever home the next time around.

We grow our capabilities each year by growing the network of people in our community who stand behind the No Kill goal and are learning that we cannot reach the goal with a few supporters. For example, when we started in 2009, we had five board members and a handful of volunteers. Today ,we have a larger, more diverse board and more than 100 volunteers/foster homes who help us save more lives. It will take hundreds of people to lend a hand in any area they can. We also are growing our presence in the community by opening our first adoption and education facility at 800 W. Picacho in Las Cruces, NM, in May 2014. This location also houses our pet food bank program, which strives to keep people from feeling they have to give up their dogs to the shelter in times of economic strife/need.

Though our organization was founded in 2009, we primarily ran the pet food bank for the first couple of years. When we started getting more support for our No Kill philosophies and approaches, we were able to, in May 2012, start our direct rescue work via our Dona Ana Pets Alive! campaign. Since that time, we have rescued more than 4000 animals from our municipal shelter. Now that we have a facility which the public can visit almost daily, and we are out on the weekends at offsite locations doing adoptions, we will be able to progress to save thousands of animals a year, which will help our community reach the overall No Kill goal--our shared mission!