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AUGUST 2009 NEWSLETTER
ADOPTION DAY is the second Saturday of every month from noon to 4 p.m.
BHS GENERAL MEETINGS
are held the 4th Friday of every month, 6:30 p.m. at the building (except this one, will be August 21)
SHOT CLINICS
are held each Wednesday night from 7-8 p.m.
BHS BOARD:
Su Puckett, president: Kathy Benjamin, vice-president; Carolynn Moore, secretary; Bob Puckett, treasurer: other board members include Sharon Angle, Terry Floyd, Sherri Isaacson, Eileen Jackson and Janet Manns.
Invisible Fence of Southeast Idaho
is raffling off a fence system and will donate the proceeds to BHS. To buy a ticket, check with them on the corner of Whitman and S. Main, look for the link on our website, or come to our building. Thanks, Ken and Daphne Eline!
We have a huge thank you
to say to Jan Anderson, who died in July 2008 and who bequeathed $20,000 to Bannock Humane Society to be used to further our goal of spaying and neutering, so that dogs and cats won’t be born into sad lives and premature death. Jan lived in Pocatello for 31 years and retired as Dean of Students at ISU in 1998.
We want to give another set of huge thank
you’s to Petco and Walmart, both for monetary donations but also for their ongoing pet food donations. The Petco food is used to help people who access the local food bank, where they can pick up coupons to come get food at BHS. Walmart has donated food from broken bags for years, which is packaged up by BHS volunteer Janet Manns and other employees. The food is available every Wednesday night from 7-8 p.m. and the need for it is obvious from the long lines. We especially need extra donations of bags of cat food, if you’d like to help with this effort.
Smith’s Food King
gets another thanks. Manager Kelly Kawamura recently presented us with a check for $900, which came from customer support of the Pet Club. To sign up for the Pet Club, simply ask while you’re shopping at Smith’s.
The Pet Faire
on June 13 was lots of fun, but it unfortunately generated only about half of the income it did in years past. We think there were several reasons for that: the threatening weather, many other community events being held that day, and the economy being so depressed. Because the yard sale involves so very much work, we’ve decided as a board not to have a yard sale, at least not next year. We are looking at other possible fundraisers to take its place, and will announce those as decisions are made. If you have any ideas for fundraising, please let us know. We won’t be taking in yard sale items to store anymore so we don’t want anyone bringing stuff in and wanted to get the word out way in advance. Personally, the yard sale always motivated me to get busy cleaning out closets and the basement, so those areas may remain overstuffed longer than they should!
We fairly regularly receive calls from people worried about starving horses or other animals in distress.
Bannock Humane Society volunteers cannot respond to these situations except through referrals. We’re an all-volunteer group and simply don’t have the personnel to do it.
In a nutshell, here’s what to do. If you believe an animal is being abused within city limits, call the Pocatello Animal Shelter or the Chubbuck Animal Shelter. If it’s outside city limits, call the sheriff’s department. The same principle applies to horse situations. The sheriff’s department can get hold of the PAWS group, which does handle large animal issues.
Sometimes, though, it’s a situation you can safely help with on your own. If you find a dog who seems to be both friendly and lost, check to see if he has tags. If he has a license, you can call the shelter and find out where he lives and take him home yourself, if you want. If he doesn’t have tags and you can hold on to him for a little while, call the shelter and let them know when and where you found him, and what kind of dog he is. Often people will call there first to check. And the Idaho State Journal will run a "found" ad for free. Once I picked up a dog I thought was lost. He was resting on a neighbor’s front lawn, so I brought him home and gave him water and called the shelter with his tag number to find out where he lived. Well, he lived at the house where I’d "found" him. Lucky for me his people had a sense of humor!
If you lose a pet, report it to the shelter and put up lost pet posters around town, as well as an ad in the paper. Don’t give up – I once had a cat who disappeared for four months and then showed up on the doorstep acting like she'd been gone four minutes.
We’re planning on a cat room addition
which will be attached behind our current building with an exit to the future patio. We feel it is needed because the rooms where we currently display cats on Adoption Days are so small, especially after we get the cats in the cages and the foster parents in there, that there isn’t room for people to come in and look at the cats. The cats often get very stressed and don’t show well, resulting in fewer adoptions than we’d like. The new room will be just for cats, with a few comfortable chairs for potential adopters to sit and snuggle and bond with the cats. The room may also be used for meetings when we're not showing cats. We’d also like to build a patio behind the building, made from bricks engraved in the memory of pets. We’re not there yet, and aren’t taking orders for them, although people seem enthusiastic about the idea. The addition will be paid for from our investment fund and not out of our operating budget, and hopefully supplemented with some donated materials. If you’d like to help with the addition, let us know.
According to Bob Angle, who was the general contractor when the building was originally built, our current building has allowed us to do over 1000 spay/neuters per year. "We’ve literally hit the wall in terms of space," he said. "We want to continue to expand our program but we can’t do that when people have standing room only and the animals are stressed." He said the current building cost $120,000, and assuming a reasonable life expectancy of 25 years, that comes out to about $5 per spay and neuter. "If we can expand our program by 400 animal per year with the anticipated $40,000 investment in the new room, then that’s still about $5 per animal," he said. This doesn’t even take into account the additional space for meetings and the higher quality space for cat adoptions during Show and Tell.
Ask any cat lover.
Their furry feline friends slap them in the face at 5 a.m. to get them up to put out the kitty food. They may or may not tolerate being picked up, depending on their mood. They change their food preferences frequently, sending us scrambling to the grocery store to try to find something they’ll eat this week. Why do we do it? As Kim Campbell Thornton said in a recent MSNBC.com article, "Our relationship is based on us giving and them taking, kind of like a bad boyfriend." Kim says psychotherapist Lois Abrams says there’s a part of us that likes to be controlled. Our cats manipulate us by meows, purrs and cute little chirps, as well as body language like tail twitches and paw gestures. True, they do, but they’re just so cute that it somehow doesn’t feel like manipulation. And when we get the cat’s approval for our efforts, we feel very lucky indeed!
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The Scrolling Pet List is now on the home page, check it out!
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Companion dog training classes are open to anyone who has adopted a dog from the Bannock Humane Society or Pocatello Animal Shelter. All dogs must be current on their shots and we will take dogs of any age.
Classes are held on Thursday Nights at 6:00 p.m. for Beginning Dog Training and 7:00 for Intermediate Dog Training at the Bannock Humane Society Building.
Classes run for 7 weeks, with limited class sizes available.
The 2010 time and fee schedule will be available soon...stay tuned!
Classes Offered:
Beginning Dog Training: 6:00 P.M. to 7:00 P.M.
Intermediate Dog Training: 7:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M.
*An additional donation to the Humane Society is appreciated. Instructors will let you know what is needed at the time. For Example; Dog Food, Cat Food, Dishes, Tarps, Monetary Donations, etc.
For more information please call:
Teressa: 775-3726
Terry: 232-0074
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Petfinder.com Credit Cards
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Petfinder.com is excited to announce a new relationship they've developed with One of a Card Visa.
The unique One of a Card Visa credit card allows you to customize your credit card with your favorite photo. It's fun and easy to personalize your card with their simple, step-by-step online tools. Plus, you can choose from a variety of great rate/reward options. The only hard part will be deciding which of your pets' photos to use!
Imagine how excited you will be to put your newly adopted "Fluffy's" picture on your own One of a Card Visa. In addition to being a fun way to create and carry a personalized credit card, a donation of $10, at no cost to you, will be made to the Petfinder.com Foundation for each approved application. If you're interested, visit http://www.oneofacard.com/petfinder1 to apply for your own personalized credit card and help a homeless pet at the same time.
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