If you’re like me, your name lands on a lot of animal welfare group’s mailing lists. When culling through their stock solicitations, it occurred to me that not only are they strikingly similar in appearance, but tend to focus on the same pitiful stories about abused and abandoned animals over and over. This sort of sensational fundraising may tug at your heart strings, but it often fails to provide a big picture view of how your donation improves animal welfare. After all, if you’re donating money, you probably want to see it have lasting impact.

The most significant problem in animal welfare is pet over-population, sometimes resulting in neglect and abandonment, but more often than anything, over-flow into area shelters, thereby fueling euthanasia rates. Perhaps there aren’t enough homes for the amount of animals being born. If you take into consideration that one female Lab has a litter of approximately 10 puppies, you have just filled an entire cul-de-sac of homes with a pet. Consider also that their life span is approximately 10 years and you have essentially eliminated that group of pet owners for roughly a ten year span.

Perhaps there is more to the story, however. Perhaps there is a lack of understanding of the problem and the solutions needed to address it. Spay/neuter efforts have come a long way and, along with sustainable humane education, surely hold the key to dramatically reducing shelter populations, thereby eliminating unnecessary euthanasia. But even aside from sheltering and spay/neuter, there are opportunities to proactively care for animals by providing resources to both pets and pet owners alike.

Baltimore Humane Society is focused not only on the health and welfare of the pets that come into our care, but with the pets living in our community. In addition to providing animal sheltering and low cost spay/neuter, we’re actively working in high-risk communities that lack resources in an effort to address the very demographic that often contributes significantly to pet overpopulation and whose pets simply need basic care. We kicked off our community outreach in October of 2009 with a Pit Bull specific wellness clinic in the Cherry Hill neighborhood of Baltimore City. We took it a step further by dedicating funds from an event with Rescue Ink to start a Pit Bull specific spay/neuter fund. Plans are in the works for similiar innovative efforts during 2010 intended to help people and their pets before they inundate area shelters with unwanted pets.

Baltimore Humane Society is committed to community outreach as a means to proactively address companion animal over-population, thereby addressing its symptoms in the process. Your support allows us to build and expand programs that reach the most at-risk pets and pet owners while continuing to offer low cost spay/neuter and animal sheltering services. With your help, Baltimore Humane Society is taking the solution to those who need it most. In the big picture, isn’t that something worth giving to?

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