The Best Friends Podcast

Feeling a little blue? The Pitt County Animal Shelter just might have the cure... if you're game enough to let it all hang out!

And it’s National Volunteer Week! We visited with a volunteer in Philly who hasn’t let a pandemic slow down her support for her local shelter. And a conversation with Gina Knepp, former director of the City of Sacramento Animal Shelter and now the Director of Shelter Outreach with Michelson Found Animals, who says trust is what matters the most when working with volunteers.

Guests this week:

• Michele Whaley & the Pitt County Animal Shelter Dance Crew
• Rachel Lawbaugh, Volunteer for ACCT Philly
• Gina Knepp, Michelson Found Animals Foundation

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As governments scrambled to react to the COVID-19 pandemic, one word dominated conversations related to stay at home orders. Essential. Is the service or business, critical to the health and welfare of the community? Where do animal services fit into that picture?

While there’s little debate that animal control is necessary as a component of public safety, other elements of what we do were being judged on their merits. Spay and neuter surgeries were handled differently across the country both by government officials and people in our field. How essential are they?

We talked with leaders in three states about how they managed their clinic work during this time. And we talked with Aimee St. Arnaud, Director of National Veterinary Outreach for Best Friends Animal Society, about the larger picture of veterinary services during the pandemic, and what challenges lie ahead.

Necessity is the mother of invention” is a mantra that Best Friends CEO Julie Castle deeply believes in. It’s a mantra that established her position in animal welfare decades ago, and it’s a mantra that ignites her leadership of an industry that was suddenly dismantled and reassembled overnight. COVID-19 has meant the end of animal sheltering as American society has known it since the 19^th century. As an industry, we’ve experienced steady incremental progress over the last two centuries; in the last few weeks, we’ve experienced a complete paradigm shift.

Julie is not alone in her leadership at this pivotal moment, and she’s the first to both celebrate and be humbled by that fact. On this episode of the Best Friends Podcast, Julie talks about what she believes is the future of animal care and sheltering, the critical yet forgotten power of neighbors, and why she thinks that “the best of us is showing right now.

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Right now we are getting hit with some of the worst wildfires and hurricanes in recorded history. There’s civil unrest nationwide, the economy is on the brink, and of course, the pandemic has turned our lives upside down.

We must be prepared to respond to emergencies - meteorological or otherwise - so that we can help pets and the people who love them.

Louisiana has been battered by storms over the last few weeks. To learn more about the situation we check in with Acadiana Animal Aid, an organization playing its usual leadership role in the Gulf Coast region. And Sharon Hawa, the Senior Manager of Emergency Response for Best Friends, gives some perspective on the state of the world along with some tips on how you can be prepared for whatever comes your way.

Caring for and protecting companion animals involves strong emotions. Understanding how we feel and harnessing our feelings for productive solutions, recognizing and respecting how others feel so that we can bring them along is equally as important as we navigate lifesaving change across the nation.

Emotions impact every facet of the human experience. Decades of research shows that as we improve our emotional intelligence (EI), we can boost our decision-making, attention, memory, creativity, and relationships.

One of the producers of the Best Friends podcast, Aimee Charlton, chatted with Dr. Marc Brackett, the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and explored his work in emotion skills and his new book, Permission to Feel.

Just like the Best Friends goal of ending the killing of dogs and cats in our nation’s animal shelters by the year 2025, Dr. Brackett has the audacious goal of starting an emotional revolution. He is leading an initiative to shift the mindset of the nation around the value and importance of emotions.