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Obviously they would not be necessarily eligible to receive our veterinary college grants, but like I said, the best amount of our grant-giving is usually investing in organizations working together, as opposed to supporting standalone entities.

They are a different kind of environment than companion animal pets in the sense that they are usually institutionalized. In other words there’s dense housing. Animals sometimes come down with contagious conditions. They certainly have to be protected from not getting some sort of communicable disease from other members of the population.

They in many cases come into the shelter with medical disorders or behavior challenges. They have to be corrected before the animals are placed in loving homes. And we think that that is best handled by somebody that understands the unique qualities of institutional housing. And we call that Shelter Medicine.

And we’re very, very excited about that because that’s part of building the no-kill nation, is to have the medical expertise in place and institutional settings so that animals that are ill and injured with behavior disorders can get the expertise that’s necessary to be cured, and have a lifetime ahead with a loving caregiver.

And we’re paying for the production of disease control manuals. So that not only are the students getting the benefits of this, and not only is the information on our website being distributed widely throughout the world, but now we have manuals that are made available to all the shelters throughout the United States so they can take advantage of best practices.

You know, more than 60% of Americans have companion animals, and when we ask people who have pets what do they think about their relationship, they talked about them being family members.

One of the organizations, Oakland Animals Services, last year adopted out 133 dogs and cats that entitled them to $66,000 in compensation from Maddie’s Fund.

If we can really brag about the animals, if we can get the public’s attention and we can focus all the rescues and shelters in really saving every life every day, the homes are available out there. We just need to save three million dogs and cats to have an adoption guarantee for the country a no-kill nation. And that only means one more pet per agency per day, and we will be there.

And we started by guaranteeing the animals in San Francisco would have a home. We started with an adoption pact which involved the Animal Control Agency and the San Francisco SPCA, helping out with other rescue groups to basically say if Animal Control can’t save the animals, then the rescue – in this case the San Francisco SPCA – will step forward and take that animal so that we can find the animal a home.

It was a collaborative effort. It worked phenomenally successful. We moved from killing 65,000 dogs and cats a year back in the ’60s to less than 2,000 dogs and cats per year being killed citywide. And that all happened because the community got engaged, the community got involved, and we created the first no-kill platform.

We think that this can empower contributors who can donate money to the organizations that are doing well, and to basically acknowledge and compliment them for the fine job being done. And for the organizations that are not doing well, help those organizations with additional resources to basically do a better job.

It also enables boards of directors when they’re hiring the leadership, the management team for the organizations, to have some sort of a standard to know okay, in these communities they’re doing very, very well. They’re comparable to what we’re doing. Maybe this is the kind of leadership that we have a need for, for our jurisdiction. And it allows investigative reporters also to look into the flaws and the shortcomings of some organizations when comparing to comparable agencies.

You know, if we were in real estate and if we were talking about comparables, people really get it.

You know, when we ask people who have pets how strong is the bond, if you were abandoned on an island and you had the choice of having a human partner or a pet, which would you choose? The majority of the American public who have companion pets say that they would rather have a four-legged friend because they are more nurturing, they’re more loving, they’re more unconditional in their devotion. They do almost anything to please, and they bring out some of the best spirits in the human nature.

Seventeen million people out there this year are going to be getting a new dog or cat in their homes. They haven’t decided where they’re going to get those dogs and cats.

And during a recessionary time when the challenges are the greatest, you know, when animals are coming in from people who are without jobs or without homes, they’re not only meeting their goals, they’re exceeding their goals. And this is true with every one of our funded projects. Even with the recession, which is the worst in the country that we’ve ever faced. Even in these most troubling of troubled times they’re adopting out more animals and killing far fewer, and basically exceeding their goals because they’ve mobilized their community to basically get behind their life-saving work.

And the American people, when given a chance, when they understand the stories, when they basically have the opportunity to get involved, they’re the ones that basically help in our life-saving mission and basically accomplish the job of guaranteeing these dogs and cats homes.

So it’s not just for the organizations that’s getting our money, but the stories that they tell and the programs that they offer, and the successes that they benefit from are being able to be shared worldwide because of the benefit of the internet.

Actually the amount of information that’s out there is phenomenal, but it usually has to be fine tuned to the kind of problem that people are looking to solve, and therefore, search engines are probably the most helpful way of doing that.