She Magazine

Giving them shelter

Published:
By Jessica Stephen

It’s emotionally draining running an animal shelter.

Certainly, it’s rewarding, too.

“I’m saving lives every day,” said Kristen Perry, executive director of the Lakeland Animal Shelter facility in Walworth County.

Each year, the Delavan shelter sees nearly 2,500 animals. Situations are similar in Racine and Kenosha counties, where shelters might see up to 4,500 dogs, cats and other creatures over the course of a year.

“If we weren’t providing the services that we’re providing, who knows if (these animals) would be able to be saved or not,” Perry said.

And, therein, lies the trouble.

With so many animals and so few homes, shelter workers often face tough decisions. Who stays? Who goes? How do they go? If animals can’t be adopted, is it better to put them down or let them live a lifetime in a cage?

As animal shelter directors, those are questions that Perry and her counterparts Amanda Angove in Kenosha County and Jennifer Tilton in Racine County face each day.

And there are no easy answers.

They use objective standards, like an animal’s temperament and overall health, to help them weigh potential adoptability. Then, they rely on their faith that they are doing the best they can with the resources available to get them through the close calls.

“It’s a tough job,” said Angove, who runs Safe Harbor Humane Society in Kenosha. “It’s a very emotional job, and the burnout factor is really high. But, at the end of the day, you get to go home knowing you did something really good. We can all be proud of what we do.”

Some days, that’s knowing that a rescue dog like Squirt, an abused pit bull mix found in a Tupperware container in a Racine County car wash, has found a good home.

Some days, it’s reminding yourself that, while low-cost vaccination and spay/neuter clinics might not pull in much money for the shelter, those services can make all the difference in maintaining an animal’s health and lowering the number of animals that might land in shelters in the future.

Other days, it simply comes down to picturing what the world might be like without them.

“It’s a scary prospect. Without having a facility like ours, there would be an overabundance of dogs and cats running everywhere,” Angove said. “It’s hard to even imagine what a mess it would be.”

It’s a shadow future that worries Tilton, whose shelter recently had to make the difficult decision to no longer accept animal control cases; starting this year, it will be up to municipalities in the area to decide what to do with strays or bite cases.

Frankly, Tilton wasn’t sure what they’re going to do. And that bothers her.

“You have tough decisions to make. ... It’s hard to leave everything here and go home. I guess I really don’t know how,” admitted Tilton, who oversees Countryside Humane Society in Mount Pleasant and, like Angove and Perry, routinely takes shelter animals home.

It’s not an easy balance. And, some days, it’s not a balance these women can even find.

But, as Perry said, “I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life.”

Amanda Angove

When Amanda Angove let her mind wander from her work at a Racine County freight company, she inevitably imagined running an animal shelter.

“I always thought it was one of those retirement dreams,” Angove said.

Then, just a few years into her working life and still a marketing student in college, Angove saw an opening for executive director at Safe Harbor Humane Society in Kenosha.

“It just happened. I saw an opportunity and I went for it,” said Angove, 27, of Pleasant Prairie, who took the job nearly two years ago.

It’s not an entirely unexpected career path.

Angove’s mother never realized her own dream of becoming a veterinarian; she worked customer service for a glue company, while her husband worked as a bookbinder. But her parents were able to raise Angove and her younger brother on a farm in Washington County, north of Milwaukee

“We had a goat; his name was Bucky,” Angove remembered. “We had chickens. We had Canada geese at one point — Bonnie and Clyde. They had Huey, Dewey and Louie when they had babies. We always had two dogs and two cats in the house. My mom used to yell at me for rescuing rabbits.”

When she was 11 or 12, Angove volunteered at the Washington County Humane Society. And, although she might not have realized it, her future was cast.

“It’s fulfilling,” Angove said as she cuddled Porky, a round-bellied Teacup Chihuahua who dozed comfortably in her lap.

Nearly 4,000 animals come each year to the shelter, which contracts with local municipalities as the holding facility for animal control. Safe Harbor sees mostly dogs and cats, but it’s not unusual to find rabbits, rats, mice, gerbils, hamsters, birds, guinea pigs, even the occasional iguana at the shelter.

Many of the dogs are pets whose owners got in over their heads or simply couldn’t care for them anymore. Most of the cats are strays.

“Anything that needs help can walk in our door and we will not say no,” Angove said.

There is no average stay or time limit for Safe Harbor animals. But workers do everything they can to help animals get adopted, even stage cages to help visitors sympathize with Boomer, a pitbull mix who spent nine months in the shelter before finding a home.

Shelter workers felt so bad for Boomer that they hung pictures and put a wing chair in his cage to make it look like he’d really settled in. The hope was to inspire sympathy for the sweet and gentle dog, whose breed often gets a bad rap.

“It worked,” Angove said.

Staff members, including Angove, also take animals home to help them socialize; the home visits also help staff evaluate animals’ temperaments, which boosts their chances of finding a compatible home.

Shelter staff also post videos and pictures online and take dogs to local stores, like Petco, where they mingle with customers to not only educate the community about the shelter but also nuzzle prospective pet owners.

It makes the tough days, when difficult decisions about life and death must be made, easier to take. And, for Angove, it really has been a dream job.

“I still have to pinch myself sometimes,” she said.

Kristen Perry

When Kristen Perry walked into the Lakeland Animal Welfare Society shelter in Delavan, she expected to be there only six or eight months.

The plan was to set up some hands-on time with animals before starting veterinary school.

Fifteen years later, she has built her life and career around the shelter, which serves about 2,500 animals each year.

“Everything that I had hoped to be able to accomplish through veterinary medicine, I found I was able to do at my different positions at the shelter and more so,” said Perry, 37, executive director of the Walworth County shelter.

Perry still laughs about how she basically tripped into what has become her world.

For as long as she could remember, Perry planned to be a veterinarian. She had a genuine interest in math and science, and she loved animals.

“At the time, growing up 30 years ago, in order to pursue a career with animals the only option that was out there was veterinary medicine.” Still, Perry said, “It wasn’t just something I decided in third grade and stuck with because I didn’t have any other direction.”

After all, organic chemistry is too tough to take on without some real passion.

By 1996, Perry was married and done with her undergraduate studies. She settled in Walworth County, close to her husband’s job as director of a 180-acre camp but not too far from Madison, where Perry would, of course, go to vet school.

On the way back from returning their U-Haul, Perry spotted a sign seeking an animal caregiver.

“That was the first time I had ever set foot in a shelter or humane society,” she remembered. “I was surprised at how many animals were there and how many were looking for homes. And that was sad.”

She started off feeding and cleaning the animals.

Within months, Perry said, “I couldn’t imagine taking time off from the shelter to go to veterinary school.”

Instead, she was a caregiver, then trained with a local vet to become the shelter’s medical director. She was the shelter manager for eight years before she became the executive director.

And, in that way that life has of reshaping dreams into realities we didn’t even know we wanted, Perry found she could pursue her interest in vet science without getting her degree.

“Somehow, 15 years and four kids later, I just didn’t manage to fit it in. In a perfect world, I could have done that, and I would love to have been able to come back and apply that at the shelter,” Perry said. But, she added, “I truly found that my passion for working with animals has been satisfied by working at the shelter. Saving lives every day is exactly what I wanted to be able to do.”

Jennifer Tilton

That Jennifer Tilton has harmoniously housed as many as 32 dogs in her home at once is a fact that amazes even her.

And not just because the dogs were all pit bulls.

For Tilton, the more amazing fact was that 32 dogs of any kind needed temporary shelter at her Union Grove home. That’s because keeping them at her house meant there was no room at Countryside Humane Society, where Tilton, 35, has worked her way up from stay-at-home mom volunteer to agency director over the last 10 years.

It’s not unusual for shelter staff to foster animals.

“I have taken a lot of animals home, as have the staff,” she said. “Most everybody here has a houseful.”

For Tilton, it’s usually a houseful of pit bull terriers, who often inspire fear because of their muscular builds and reputations as fighters. If that stuns you, consider that Tilton has four children — two teenagers, 16 and 17, and 6-year-old twin boys.

In fact, at one point in 2010, her twins mixed and mingled with a set of nine pit bull puppies, who were among the 32 pits temporarily staying at her home, including her own dogs — all pit bulls — and a rescue named Squirt, who was found in a Tupperware container at a Racine County car wash.

“We were full here (at the shelter). And we couldn’t keep the mom and babies at the shelter anyway because of the diseases they could catch here,” Tilton explained.

So, she took the dogs into her home, finding room for kennels in her basement and the backyard of her nearly one-acre property. The puppies stayed with their mother in a plastic wading pool, the easiest way Tilton could think of to corral them.

“My boys would climb in there. The mother would lick them just like she would lick her puppies,” she said.

Tilton never worried that her children might be hurt.

“It’s all how they’re brought up, and that’s a proven fact at my house. We have them in the house with all my kids,” said Tilton, who had never dealt with the breed before coming to Countryside.

Her education began around 2001, when Tilton grew tired of the stay-at-home mom routine of waiting for her two oldest children to come home from school. Tilton volunteered at her children’s school, but she decided there was room in her schedule for more community work.

She started at the front desk at Countryside. Later, she worked in the spay and neuter room, did adoption screenings and helped coordinate fundraisers. She even kept up with her volunteer work while the twins — born premature and weighing only four pounds — were gaining precious ounces in the hospital.

Part of what kept Tilton coming back was the sense of fulfillment.

“I feel like I’m doing some good for the community, for the animals. Without us, they wouldn’t have any place to take them. They’d be on the streets,” she said.

But Tilton also felt she could not turn her back on the abused dogs, so often pit bulls, that she watched come through the shelter. From Squirt, who was probably used as a dog-fighting bait dog, to Brutus, whose owner duct-taped him to a table and used scissors to cut off his ears.

Today, her office is a reflection of her unexpected advocacy — pictures of her children on her filing cabinet and posters of pits on her walls. And Tilton readily talks about how pit bulls, including one of her own, are increasingly being used as certified therapy dogs.

“They really are wonderful animals,” she said.