Augusta Animal Services

TOMORROW IS THE BIG DAY!!

All adult dogs will have their adoption fees waived on Save-a-Pet Monday between noon and 7 PM 🎉🎊❤️🎈

Come see us, and take home a new forever friend!

If you are interested in adopting a friendly feline we will be participating in this adoption event!

Augusta!!! Let’s get hyped!!!

Tomorrow is another big day 🎉 🎊 🎈

It’s Save a Pet Monday!! We’ll be open from 12-7, and all pit bulls and pit bull mixes have their adoption fees WAIVED.

ADOPTION EVENT TOMORROW (Saturday, August 10th) from 10-12 at Hollywood Feed (630 Crane Creek Drive, Suite 108, Augusta GA). Our shelter pets are hoping to meet their forever family. All are UTD on shots, spayed/neutered, microchipped and adult dogs are HW tested. ADOPTION FEE SPECIAL $20. The projected line up will be posted around 8pm. Stay tuned and please share.

Save-a-Pet Monday is HAPPENING NOW!!

Come see us at AAS for free pit bull and pit bull mix adoptions, plus a lot of fun! 🤩 🎊 🎉

Are you excited yet?? Tomorrow is the big day! 😁 🎉 🎊

Save-a-Pet Monday starts when we open at noon! There’s so much to look forward to 🐾

*All pit bulls and pit bull mixes are FREE
*All adopters get a FREE pet bed (as supplies last)
*We will be open extended hours from 12-7
*Tours available if you just want to see what the shelter is like for yourself
*Animal Control Officer will be on site to answer any questions you may have about local ordinances or animal control matters
*DNA rescue representative will be on site to answer any questions you may have about fostering pets or helping with the transport program

Come on by!! We can’t wait to see you ❤️

Are y’all ready for this?? It’s time!!! I’m about to reveal our special discount for Save a Pet Monday on August 5th.

🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁

ALL PIT BULLS AND PIT BULL MIXES HAVE ADOPTION FEES WAIVED!!!

Yes, you read that right! Waived! $0!

This coming Monday, you will have the opportunity to take home one of the CSRA’s most disadvantaged dogs home for free. Their continuing costs (food, vet bills, etc) obviously won’t be free, so make sure you’re up for owning a dog, but this is our special way of thanking the loving people who take home these misunderstood, overpopulated, and underloved good boys and girls.

The pit bulls and pit bull mixes available have all been fully processed for adoption, to include: spay/neuter, rabies shot, temperament test, dewormed, microchip, and current on vaccinations…so it’s hard to overstate just how amazing an opportunity this is.

We’ll be waiting for you Monday! The shelter is opened extended hours of 12-7 so you have plenty of opportunity to take home your forever pittie.

Hey Augusta!!! Our Save-a-Pet Mondays start AUGUST 5th! Are you getting excited yet?

We will have so many special things happening, including:

-exciting weekly discount, revealed on Friday August 2nd
-choose a free pet toy from our donation closet with your adoption
-free pet bed with your adoption (as supplies last)
-shelter open for adoptions until 7 PM
-DNA rescue representative will be on site to answer any questions you have about fostering pets or helping with the transport program
-animal control officer will be on site to answer any questions you have about county ordinances or other animal control matters
-tour our shelter to see for yourself what it’s like and what kind of animals we get

We are so excited to see you and to get this started! 🥰❤️

Mojo is an informal word for a quality that attracts people to you and makes you successful and full of energy.
Well, our teenage pup certainly lives up to his name.
He is happy, loving and full of sweetness.
Mojo loves to fetch. He is great on the leash.

Shelter Story 7/20: Big Things Coming!

We do a lot of different things here at Augusta Animal Services. Some of us excel at something and some of us excel at something else, but one thing unites every one of us: we want to see more pets adopted! All of our adoptable dogs and cats have their own story to tell, and every one deserves a loving forever home. We hope, with new outreaches to the community we’ll have happy tails to share and celebrate!

We’re very excited to introduce Save-a-Pet Mondays, the first of our new initiatives. Starting on August 5th!

What are they? Save-a-Pet Mondays are a new program where, every Monday, the shelter’s ONLY job will be sending animals to their new forever homes. All of our energy will be dedicated to that.

For this one day a week, we will close intake of healthy stray animals at our shelter location, and no owner surrenders will be scheduled. Animal Control Officers will still be in the field addressing calls, but our kennel staff will be all hands on deck for adoptions! Normal stray intake through the shelter will resume on Tuesday.

What does Save-a-Pet Mondays mean for YOU?

Save money: each Monday, a different EXCITING discount or adoption special will be offered! What will they be? Watch this space! The week’s special for adoption Monday will be unveiled on our Facebook and TikTok accounts each Friday before.

Have fun: everyone who adopts a dog or cat on Save-a-Pet Mondays gets to choose a free new toy from our donation closet to take home with you!

Get comfortable: as supplies last, everyone who adopts a dog or cat on Save-a-Pet Mondays will get a brand new dog or cat bed! Please keep in mind that the pet beds were donated, so when they are gone they are gone.

Hang out with us: On Save-a-Pet Mondays, our whole job is getting pets adopted and greeting the community. If you want to see what the shelter is like firsthand, ask us a question you’ve had, get clarification on a rumor you’ve heard, meet the staff, see what kind of animals we get, or just say hi…please come in. We’re more than happy to talk.

An animal control officer will be on site at the shelter to answer any questions you may have about county ordinances, or just chat with you about how animal control works if you’d like.

A representative from DNA rescue will also be on site at the shelter and happy to answer any questions you may have about fostering pets or helping out with the transport program.

Come on YOUR time: The shelter will be open until seven on Save-a-Pet Mondays!

Please come see us! We are super excited to get this started, and we’re SUPER excited to reveal our weekly special promotion to you on Friday!

To Kill or Not to Kill- That’s Not Really the Question

Rachel Smith
Animal Protection Officer II, Chair of the Animal Welfare Investigations Project Advisory Board, Member of the International Society for Animal Forensic Sciences
July 16, 2024

I recently read an article titled The Myth About No-Kill Shelters and the author, Jessica Kooistra, so perfectly wrote, “Why does an animal shelter resort to euthanasia? It could be space, it could be an outbreak of disease, it could be the animal in their care is beyond help, and it could even be that they offer this service to the general public who can’t afford to make an appointment at the local vet.

“Vilifying an organization, that only exists because of the negligence of its general public, and is forced to make hard decisions to remain available to said public, is one of the most disturbing things about working in animal welfare.

“On one hand the public demands the shelter exists, on the other they demand it is run the way they believe to be correct. A shelter should be available to take in absolutely all unwanted animals in the community, while simultaneously finding them all a happy ending. These unrealistic expectations have found their way onto social media platforms where voices grow loud, and pressure is put on the organization which attempts to appease this loud public. Often to unhealthy levels.

“Rescue organizations who proudly boast to be ‘no-kill’ only exist because they can choose which animals to take in, and how many. The ones they turn away often end up at the local pound anyway. So, are they truly ‘no-kill’?”

It felt as if these few paragraphs were ripped straight out of my heart and slapped so articulately on paper in a way that I couldn’t have spoken better myself. While reflecting on this, an ominous, major event was brewing in the small town of Danville, Virginia.

The Best Friends Animal Society (BFAS), known for being the leader and largest proponent of the “no-kill” movement, spearheaded and targeted the Danville Area Humane Society (DAHS) and its director, Paulette Dean, because of their high euthanasia rates. What initially started out as an innocent offer to help transfer some DAHS cats to an unknown location in New York quickly dissolved into a nightmare ‘Danville Deserves Better’ campaign after Dean declined BFAS’s offer. BFAS’s plan was to infiltrate, infect, and infest DAHS to reduce their function as an open-admission shelter to a limited-admission shelter in order to boost their live release rate to more closely adhere to Best Friends’ completely arbitrary golden save rate number of 90%.

According to Dean, a Best Friends representatives targeted and threatened her by saying, “Make no mistake. We will not forget and we will do what we need to do,” and, “Paulette Dean needs to remember that Best Friends has more money to fight her than she has to fight Best Friends.” Because of this campaign, the reputation of DAHS, Dean, and her employees faced online and in-person threats so much so that the shelter had to temporarily shut down out of safety concerns to the staff. In all fairness, one of Best Friends' representatives later released a statement saying, “…there is no place for threats or violence in the animal welfare movement and such behaviors have never been tolerated.” But the dye has been cast, a line has been crossed, and the true mission of Best Friends has been revealed that they will go to any length to infiltrate, infect, and infest these organizations and communities to implant a hidden agenda to further their goal.

When it comes to the no-kill movement, we need to get a few facts straight: there is no such thing as a kill shelter or a no-kill shelter; there is only open-admission and limited-admission with the latter applying to Best Friends. In an editorial written by Bobby Allen Roach, Star-Tribune editor, he quotes Dean regarding Best Friends’ unwanted intrusion into DAHS’s operations saying, “The only way a shelter can be ‘no-kill’ is to turn away animals. If people would thoughtfully investigate what that means, we believe they would realize that leads to very sad and even cruel consequences for animals. There is no magical place for animals to go if a shelter turns them away.”

Speaking from nearly a decade of experience in animal welfare, I can attest Dean’s statement to be true. Open-admission shelters are vital organizations within a community that serve the public and their animals. From free/low cost vaccinations/microchips/spay/neuter to investigating animal cruelty, from handing out community engagement resources to fostering survivors of domestic violence, open-admission shelters provide a wide array of resources to the public and their animals. But most importantly open-admission shelters accept all animals regardless of circumstance, condition, or volume and all free of charge- something that Best Friends cannot say they do.

Were Best Friends to become open-admission they would quickly experience the same massive overflow that all open-admission shelters are struggling with today. When Best Friends or other limited-admission shelters turn away the sick, the injured, the abandoned, and the homeless because they don’t want their numbers to be negatively affected, the fact remains that those animals still need a place to go. And as Dean pointed out, there is no magical place and they don’t just magically disappear. The refusal of Best Friends and limited-admission shelters to admit these animals who need a place to go often results in cruel consequences. They are dumped in the very same parking lot of that facility or tied out in the woods or left in a park without shelter and without medical care. If they’re lucky enough to be found, those animals then are admitted to facilities that are truly there to help- that’s right: the open-admission shelters.

The second misleading fact that needs to be straightened out: Best Friends euthanizes animals too. Best Friends’ harmful ‘Save them all’ slogan is a gigantic contradiction. It is impossible to save every animal because there will always be animals that must be euthanized due to an incurable disease, are injured beyond saving or can’t receive effective pain management, are too aggressive to be released to the public or socialize with other animals, or are too behaviorally unsound for rehabilitation or training. It is also a fact that the 90% save rate benchmark is an arbitrary number made up by, pushed, and reinforced by Best Friends with no historical statistical backing as a measure of “success.” While the majority of us professionally involved in animal welfare are aware of these facts, the vast majority of the general public is not so when they think of a ‘no-kill’ shelter, they literally think that any animal that goes through those doors is completely safe from euthanasia. This vilifies the role of open-admission shelters and their staff and Best Friends knows it. Despite hearing the same sentiment time and time and time again by open-admission shelters around the country that their no-kill language push is detrimental, Best Friends refuses to change their language and is happy to allow the persecution of open-admission shelters and their staff facing these euthanasia decisions.

This never-ending circle of infiltrate, indoctrinate, and control the nation’s open-admission shelters and the public is leaving longstanding damage to the animal welfare and sheltering world. To gaslight the general public with a constant onslaught of misinformation and skew save rate data is beyond reproach and unethical. They coined the famous ‘Save them all’ statement which has wreaked irreparable harm on the very organizations that exist to accept the animals that they do not and will not.

This holier-than-thou agenda is driven by the one thing that Best Friends holds most dear and it isn’t the lives or well-being of animals: it’s numbers. As Dean puts it so well, “The animals aren’t numbers; they are living creatures who don’t deserve to suffer and die a lingering death because we closed our shelter doors.” And until Best Friends takes a good, long, hard reflective look in the mirror and realizes that numbers aren’t the most important aspect to animal welfare, we cannot unite to perfect a more humane world.

DAHS’s mission statement reads, “Our purpose is to promote the welfare and humane treatment of all animals: Mammals, fowl, reptiles, and fish; to prevent cruelty and promote kindness, respect, and reverence for all forms of life; and to this end, provide for the rescue and temporary maintenance of lost, strayed, abandoned animals; find responsible, loving homes for as many as possible; investigate acts of cruelty, abandonment, and neglect; strive to decrease pet overpopulation through spay/neuter programs; disseminate the principles of humaneness through educational programs and through these efforts contribute to the creation of a truly humane society.” That is both the letter and spirit of humane animal welfare.

So the question isn’t to kill (euthanize) or not to kill (euthanize) but instead the question is: when do we value the life and most humane outcome for each being over the number they represent?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/kill-kill-thats-really-question-rachel-smith-8wyuc/

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