Hi, so we are here again at the Seattle Animal Shelter with Tracy Bahrakis who is the animal care manager. She oversees the animal sheltering part of the operations. Which includes animal control, licensing and things like that, and the animals that are actually here in the shelter. Her job is to oversee the team that provides care for those animals.
She has worked at Seattle Animal Shelter for nine and a half years.
Some of the biggest challenges that the shelter faces is that, more and more, they’re seeing pets with medical and behavior challenges. So, right now they have three diabetic cats in the shelter, they’ve been with them for quite a while and it’s more challenging to find adopters for those animals. On the dog side, they have pets with behavior challenges. And they have a behavior team that does a fantastic job and they’re creating a bigger behavior program by finding special adopters for those special pets.
The shelter is doing well with fostering, but they can always use more foster parents.
Adoptions are going really well. Intake numbers are lower than they have been. People are better able to keep their pets in the home and then when they come here they are able to adopt out more than 94%, generally speaking.
So if somebody wanted to support the Seattle Animal Shelter, what would they do?
There are a whole bunch of ways you can support the animal shelter. You can go online and go to seattleanimalshelter.org, follow the volunteer tab and that will allow you to put in an application to become a volunteer. We have a plethora of jobs for volunteers. There’s animal cuddling, there’s dog walking, there is laundry and dishes.
There’s administrative work and then you can also go to the Seattle Animal Shelter Foundation website. They’re a non-profit that supports the shelter. You can volunteer with them, you can donate to them and everything that goes to them filters into the shelter.
