As we are still figuring everything out, we thought we might have an idea page that posted ideas we are toying around with for the future of Mav’s Rescue Friends and allowed comments so that people could add ideas over time that they think would make an organization like Mav’s Rescue Friends better. These are all still just ideas at this point so please comment on our ideas or add any of your own, and please let us know of any organizations you think we should try to work with.
This will be a continual work in progress but over time if we are able to get word of mouth and figure out how to make this process work we hope to do the ideas below at a minimum and come up with many others.
Spaying and Neutering:
One of the most disturbing things we have learned in our research on saving animals is that each day over 50,000 puppies and kittens are born while only 11,0o0 humans are born. This simply is horrible math. As much as people do to rescue dogs and cats from shelters, it will never be enough until we crack the code on spaying and neutering. We need to figure out ways to incent people to do it. We are currently spending a lot of time thinking about it but some ideas we have read might be to require the purchase of a license to not spay or neuter or to incent people people to take in their pets for spaying and neutering by paying them a small amount of money . Both of these options would cost money but we are doing research to figure out if this would be cheaper for the government than all the funding for shelters.
Scaling Direct Involvement:
This is the most complicated idea we are trying to play around with. It seems clear that many rescuers want to be involved on a direct basis with dogs to which they find themseleves attached. In other words, some would rather save one dog than donate $1,000 to an organization and not be part of the process. We can see this is the online donations made to save individual animals as well as things like Pilots n’ Paws, where people fly dogs across the country to help them find homes. People want to be involved individually so ideas have to support that.
One way we think we could do this on the site is to post cases for help and allow people to donate to them directly and save the pets as they choose. From best we can tell, there are lots of places where people put postings and it is a random network of links to find them, so a centralized help area could make an impact.
Fostering:
The biggest issue we see in fostering from our limited experience is that rescues are often not focused enough on the throughput of the dogs. Frequently, a rescue will focus so much on pulling an animal to safety but not spend anywhere near as much time on making sure a posting goes up immediately with a lot of pictures, a video, and information. The lack of information on dogs available for adoption is staggering. Many people spend more time putting listings up for used cars. There are often only one or two pictures and an initial paragraph summary. By spending more time on postings, giving more information, and then constantly updating that information dogs can find their homes faster. It saves time for the rescue because their will be fewer calls for information, and it allows individuals to foster more animals per year as homes are found faster.
Microlending:
Another idea we have been thinking about a lot and trying to figure out how to make work is a charitable, micro-lending-like site like Kiva for families whose pets are in need of critical care. At this point, we do not know how it would or could work and what the need is, but if there were a way to provide the money to families that could then pay off the loans with zero interest over say five years then many more pets could be helped out over time. We are not sure how we would go about this or if people would be required or just asked to pay back all or some of the money but it is an idea we are thinking about.
THE GOAL IS TO TRY TO HELP AS MANY DOGS AND FAMILIES AS POSSIBLE! So, we are counting on everyone to give us much better ideas than the ones we already have.
“Did you ever notice when you blow in a dog’s face he gets mad at you? But when you take him in a car he sticks his head out the window.”~Steve Bluestone