New! Maddie’s Fund has a great page for shelters about improving pit bull adoption rates at shelters. Check it out here: http://www.maddiesfund.org/Resource_Library/Solving_the_Pit_Bull_Problem.html
An excerpt:
Yes, you can save all your healthy and treatable cats and dogs – including pit bulls. Even if your kennel runs are full of them.
Just ask the members of the Berkeley Alliance for Homeless Animals Coalition (BAHAC), which last year received a Maddie’s® Lifesaving Award in the amount of $474,200 for saving all the community’s healthy and treatable dogs and cats.
They didn’t get there because they had it easy, and they certainly didn’t get there because they have no pit bulls coming into the shelters. “Between 70 and 80 percent of our dogs on a given day are pit bulls or pit bull mixes,” said Kate O’Connor, director of BAHAC member organization Berkeley Animal Care Services, the animal control agency for the City of Berkeley, California.
Same thing at the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society, the other shelter that is part of the Alliance. “People remark on the number of pit bulls we have,” said program director Sara Kersey. “Our organization is committed to taking in what’s out there in our community, and what’s out there is pit bulls.”
So how exactly are they saving them all, and are their methods something other communities could adopt?
