Your work as an animal shelter employee or volunteer puts you on the frontlines every day promoting the health and safety of cats. When residents in your community bring cats to you, they trust you to make the right decisions for their care, and you are the expert they turn to when they have a question, problem, or concern. This gives you a great opportunity to teach residents about humane care for cats by sharing the benefits of Trap-Neuter-Return. You can also influence your shelter to initiate humane policies that protect cats, support Trap-Neuter-Return, and encourage its participation in TNR. Every day, shelters are changing their policies to reflect the best interest of cats and the community. Yours can too!
Alley Cat Allies can help you transform and improve your shelter, implement humane policies, and save more cats. We have information, resources, and targeted toolkits just for you.
Resources
- Transforming Shelters to Save More Cats: A Blueprint for Change – Want to change your shelter to save more cats, but not sure where to start? Our guide outlines the blueprints for adopting innovative, effective, life-saving programs step-by-step, including examples of shelters who have made positive change.
- Reducing Shelter Admissions and Saving Lives with a Cat Help Desk – Starting a Cat Help Desk saves cats’ lives by keeping cats out of shelters in the first place. The Cat Help Desk is where the public can contact and get the information they need to make the right decisions on behalf of cats. This guide walks you through setting up your own Cat Help Desk and handling common questions.
- Saving Cats and Kittens with a Foster Care Program – Foster care programs will enable shelters to dramatically improve live release rates for cats that means more lives saved! This guide will help you get your foster program off the ground quickly and avoid common pitfalls and difficulties. It even includes easy-to-use worksheets!
- “What about Complaints?” Managing Communications When Your Shelter Adopts a SNR or TNR Policy – This guide provides real-life advice and information from animal services directors who have implemented Shelter-Neuter-Return (SNR) or Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs. It will help you address questions about your program or help you make decisions about launching a new program.
- How to Support Trap-Neuter-Return in Your Community without Doing It All – Want to embrace Trap-Neuter-Return but your organization is short on resources? This guide helps you support Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) in the community without taking on the role of creating and operating the entire program.
- Talking to Your Community About Cats – A guide to support shelter staff and municipal leaders in effectively communicating with members of the community about cats.
Take Action!
- Join Our Feral Friends Network® – Share your expertise! We want you in our Feral Friends Network. Help even more cats by offering advice & other assistance and get a lot of great benefits from Alley Cat Allies.
- Plan to Scan® – Microchips save lives. More and more cats are getting microchipped, and that’s great news! Microchip implantation is quick, simple, inexpensive, essentially painless, and virtually stress-free for animals.
- Wait Until 8®: Shelter & Community Partnership to Save Kittens’ Lives! – Shelters and the community coming together to help save as many lives as possible. Any shelter and community can do this, and we’re here to help!
- Add your shelter event to our events calendar – Promote your shelter’s events–like adoption promotions and spay/neuter clinics–using our online, interactive calendar.
Learn About Our Work
- Animal Shelters – We work with shelters to implement life-saving programs for cats.
- Trap-Neuter-Return We’re the leading experts on Trap-Neuter-Return, the humane and effective approach to outdoor cat populations.
- Community Change We’ve worked with communities across the country and around the world adopt humane policies that protect cats.