Meet Dr. Ellen Jefferson. She’s the down-to-earth executive director of Austin Pets Alive!. Dr. Jefferson joined Austin Pets Alive in 2008 and has helped Austin become a 97 percent No Kill City today.
Dr. Jefferson has a long history with saving animals in Austin. “When I moved to Austin back in 1998, I started volunteering at the shelter which was at Town Lake Animal Center. It was kind of overwhelming because 85 percent of the animals that were being brought in were being killed. I didn’t feel like I could really help much in the shelter so I started a ‘spay neuter clinic’ thinking that if we decreased the number of animals coming into the shelter maybe fewer would die. After about nine years of that, there was a push nationally for saving the animals in the shelter. So that’s when I turned my focus to just trying to get them out [of the shelter.] APA! was an organization that had been around since 1999. They were trying to make Austin a No Kill City. By 2001 they had made a lot of progress, but didn’t actually get there. It went dormant from 2001-2008 and that’s when I approached them and said, ‘Why don’t we join forces and re-invigorate this movement that we can be a No Kill City?’”
The motivated executive director has now been working with Austin Pets Alive! for eight years and has brought nothing but success to the non-profit. “I think APA is successful because everything we do relies on people. In fact, our tag line is ‘helping people help pets.’ That’s really important because people are the answer. Every animal that ends up at the shelter is there because a person did something in its life to get it there. Either they brought it to the shelter or abandoned it on the streets. If we can just counteract that with enough people and enough actions on the positive side of giving them homes, then we can solve the problem. I think that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re bringing people in and they’re part of the solution and they’re able to make a difference and save lives.”
Austin Pets Alive! stands out from other animal shelters because of their focus on animals that won’t make it without APA!’s help. “There’s probably only a couple of shelters that operate the way we do,” said Jefferson. “We focus on the animals that are definitely going to die if we don’t help them. So we’re kind of a rescue of last resort rather than us going and choosing which ones we want to work with or we think we can find homes for easily. We’re choosing the ones that are left over after adopters come through the city shelters, after rescue groups, after other shelters, so it’s a different business model. It forces us to come up with strategies to save their lives that didn’t exist before we started doing this work. In the normal traditional shelter these animals might be saved a couple at a time, but not in the volume that we’re trying to help. All of our programs are really geared towards those less fortunate animals. People are surprised to come in and see that we don’t have many puppies here. We don’t really have a lot of puppies here because puppies get saved through other groups and adopters get them very quickly. We’re working with large breed dogs, some of them are hyper and have never been on a leash before, so it’s not the easiest. You have to go through some training to be able to handle the dogs. Same with cats; we have cats that are a little grumpy. We don’t want to just send in a little kid to go pet all the cats because they may be scratched. So visiting our shelter is a little bit different experience, but doing this work is super rewarding.”
Dr. Jefferson stresses the importance of adopting and the commitment that comes with it. “I think the most important thing is to recognize that this a commitment and it’s going to be, depending on the age of the pet, a 15-to 20-year commitment. It’s important that your pet is part of your life, part of your family, and that’s what we really try to promote because pets are not disposable. We want people to take that seriously when they’re adopting and recognize that there’s some cost associated with it. You need to find a pet sitter when you go out of town, you need to go to the vet, those kinds of things. For the most part, we are really interested in finding a good bond, so find the right match between the person and the pet so they’re both successful. It’s kind of like dating, we want to make sure that everybody’s happy at the end.”
The number one thing to remember when adopting is that you’re saving a life. Dr. Jefferson explains, “If we don’t have enough adopters then we can’t just keep them all in the shelter for the rest of their lives. So they have to go to adopter’s homes and the adopters are a critical piece of no kill because they’re the ones that are providing that lifetime commitment to them. It’s hard to know where a puppy comes from, especially if you’re not intimately aware of how a breeder keeps the mother dog and puppies. Then things can get really bad. There are not very strict laws about puppy mills and they can be kept in really horrible circumstances. So it’s important that people know where they’re getting a pet from. Then the other piece about adopting is, everybody that I’ve talked to that adopts a pet says they feel like their pet knows that they were saved and they’re so grateful and they reward their owner.”
Austin Pets Alive! has an outstanding number of volunteers that give back every month. “We’re very blessed to have a large group of volunteers coming into APA!. We have about maybe 200 a month that apply and go through the orientation process. We have all sorts of places where people can volunteer that can be as high as management for the organization or just coming in and helping out with some basic chores like doing laundry. To work with the animals there is additional training required but we couldn’t do the work we do without them. We’re so grateful for all of it and we need a constant flow of people because not everybody’s going to come every day to volunteer.”
At her home, Dr. Jefferson has three cats and three dogs of her own and a bird. “Then I have two foster dogs. I love fostering because it’s a great way to have pets around you, but not have to have them be all yours. It’s also life saving because the animals that come to foster homes don’t typically have a cage at the shelter.” In her spare time, Dr. Jefferson enjoys working on her house, gardening with succulents, walking her dogs, and working on vintage cars. “There’s not a lot of time left over.”
To learn more about Austin Pets Alive!, visit their website and follow them on Facebook and Twitter. You can even join APA! at Barkitecture on November 12 at Jo’s Coffee.
Photography by John Pesina
