At a meeting with some of our closest shelter colleagues last week, we talked about, once again, the pit bull dilemma. We all want to get to zero euthanasia of adoptable animals in our city but there are just...

We just got our 2011 Christmas present. One hundred and two survivors of a horrific puppy mill in western Arkansas arrived at our shelter and medical center to begin their new lives of hope. Boston terriers, dachshunds, Pomeranians, Westies, beagles, and others who have never known the feel of human...

It's happened again. And just a little more than a few weeks before Christmas. A new non-profit organization called the Humane Society for Shelter Pets (HSSP) was formed by the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF).

The latter is run...

"Any pits?" I asked our shelter director, Maureen, when she got back from the Baltimore shelter with the transfer animals and was parking our rescue truck in front of the shelter.

She smiled sheepishly at me.

"Oh, no. A bunch of lab mixes and a mixed shepherd or...

Hamlin was a dog nobody wanted. One of a litter of four unplanned and unexpected puppies, he was born in a backyard in West Virginia to a mother of no specific breed. We decided he's a "mixed hound," but that's...

Our relationships with the animals we keep are highly personal. They provide us with unconditional love, and we take on a personal responsibility for making sure that they are well cared for. But when the bond between an animal and his guardian is broken, as when an animal is lost,...

One More Chance, a self-proclaimed animal "rescue," was operated out of a former hog farm in Ohio. Most of their dogs were kept in crates and plastic airline kennels stacked on top of each other in dark hog stalls. They almost never got let out of their crates. Some lived...

The animal rescue shelter I run includes a veterinary hospital for shelter animals and pets of people who can't afford private veterinarians. Almost all the low-income people who use the hospital take excellent care of their pets, though money is often tight. But every once in a while, like any...

Here we go again. And this time it wasn't on purpose, unless you consider that we know it's a strong possibility every time we take in new puppies. We've got parvovirus again. The signs go up in the lobby, the low-cost vaccine clinics for the public get cancelled, and the...

In late July, I drove our rescue truck 300 miles to West Virginia to help two shelters with overwhelming problems. One shelter in the northeast mountains of the state had an achingly high euthanasia rate. The other, a little closer to the Maryland border, had just lost the use of...