Menu
Pet Support Services
Pet owners can access pet support services, including housing, medical and behavioral support, as well as food and supplies, to help keep the human-animal family together.
Pet support services provide help for caregivers facing hardships with the goal of keeping families together, even in tough times. Support may include, but is not limited to: telephone response and advice, medical support for owned pets, food and supplies, fence building and pet shelter provision, behavior support, vaccines and microchips, free and low-cost spay and neuter, crisis and emergency boarding, owned pet fostering, and pet deposits and advocacy for apartment dwellers.
When Jade was going through a tough time and could not afford a pet deposit for her four Chihuahuas, Daisy, Coco, Tiny, and Benjie, she thought she had no other option than to surrender them to the shelter. When she arrived at Pima Animal Care Center with the pups, she found out about a program that would assist with funding her pet deposits and the pups did not have to be taken into the shelter! She was set up with free spay/neuter services, and Jade and her pups were able to stay together!
Before you implement Pet Support Services programming, use the following as a guide.
This can better prepare your organization to prioritize and focus on building and shifting programming and services that will best support your community members’ needs. Use the Community Partnership FUN! Brainstorming Worksheet to outline these needs and who/if anyone can help in the community.
Examples of this include free or low cost veterinary care, pet food pantry, safe haven care for pet guardians in short term crisis, rental pet fee assistance, fencing or containment assistance, grooming, etc..Use the Ideal Animal Welfare Ecosystem as a guide. This is a list of resources that ideally exist in your community for pet caretakers to access.
See VCAS Alternatives to Surrender. You may choose to add an online pet support survey to your resource list.
Ensure they all have access to your community resource list and basic medical and behavior information sheets.
Choose a database or data tracking tool that allows your team to document all the resources and services provided to each individual and/or family, this includes outcome tracking.
Train staff and volunteers to work with families to provide resources and answer calls.
Shift intake staff into pet support roles. Intake will still take place, but with more pet support services being provided, less animals will need to enter the system.
The Community Partnership Worksheet can be used to assess which animal services resources the community needs and who provides them in your community. It can be used to compare against what your agency/organization offers and how you can pivot to fill gaps.
One of the biggest challenges in increasing accessibility to pet support services is making sure community members are aware of all the resources they have access to in their communities. A successful pet support services program would see an increase in connecting families to local social service agencies.
Another challenge is tracking outcomes after the human-animal family has left the shelter, but with proper documentation and follow up phone calls, a successful pet support services program can see an increase in families staying together long-term.
Since many families may just need temporary support, such as housing, veterinary care, and supplies, a successful pet support services program can see an increase in intake diversion and less animals surrendered into the shelter system.
Interested in learning about the cat side of things? Check out the resources below.
Animal behavior and training are fundamental areas of knowledge that should be integrated into all aspects of sheltering. Accurate education in body language of dogs and cats can increase the ability for all of us to make more accurate observations, practice low-stress handling techniques, and increase fluency in the most effective and humane methods for changing animals’ behavior.
Learn how you can integrate behavior into the everyday>>
A crucial part of the HASS initiative is the collaborative effort to keep families together. When a community member has a behavior concern about an animal, our goal is to ensure the well-being and safety of the family (people and pets) and the community, and to reduce the possibility of the animal being surrendered to a shelter.
Learn how you can get started with community-based behavior support>>
Find graphics, storytelling ideas, and ways you can support implementing Pet Support Services as marketing staff.
Grab the HASS Pet Support Services Marketing Toolkit>>
Increase funding to support your mission of supporting more people and pets.
Virtual care can enable shelter clinics to create an effective triage process and better support more pets and people.
Grab the Transforming a Shelter Clinic into a Foster Clinic Virtual Care Guide>>
Learn to have clear and effective communication between medical staff and foster caregivers and to help foster caregivers to feel like VIPs.
Grab the Transforming a Shelter Clinic into a Foster Clinic>>
Stay up to date on everything going on with Human Animal Support Services in the punniest newsletter in animal welfare, Collaborate and Learn.
"*" indicates required fields