Rescuing Abandoned Animals and Caring for Pets

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Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Humane Society

Anne Reed is the president of the Wisconsin Humane Society

On April 18, 2019, the Wisconsin Humane Society announced it was breaking ground after a successful two-year $ 5.9 million capital campaign for a new Racine facility. It opened in Spring of this year with a 16,000 square foot campus dedicated to rescuing abandoned animals and finding them new homes. The Racine facility will also continue and expand its mission of educating the community about the care of pets and the benefits of adopting and owning a pet. The building will host classes, youth programs, and volunteers. In addition to the new building, the organization has also made recent headlines with its rescue of more than 100 cats from an unsanitary house in Racine. President Anne Reed sat down to discuss the mission of the organization, the response from the community since they took over the Racine Humane Society, and what they’d like to accomplish in this new space.

How did you become involved in the Wisconsin Humane Society?

When I came to the society, we were not yet operating in Racine. The Wisconsin Humane Society was founded in Milwaukee in 1879 and had been the prominent organization there for a long time. There was a second organization in Racine which was called Countryside Humane Society. I came to the Wisconsin Humane Society in 2010. I had been a lawyer before that and always had a thought that maybe there was a way to have a second career where I could give back to the community. When the leadership role of the Humane Society came up, I applied for it. That was 2010 and in 2013, Countryside Humane Society became part of our organization. That is how the Wisconsin Humane Society and I came to Racine

What motivates the  Wisconsin Humane Society?

We exist to make a difference for animals and the people who love them, wherever they are and whatever kind of difference they need. For animals who have become temporarily homeless, the difference they may need is to either get reunited with their old home or to find new homes, so that’s  a big part of what we do.

What impact has the society had on the community?

We’re really proud of the degree to which we are able to help the Racine community and all the communities we work in. For example, we partner with law enforcement in almost every municipality in Racine County, helping them when they need to respond when animals are in need, whether it’s an abuse or neglect situation or because an animal has become stray. We also do lots of things like vaccine clinics to help and support the community as much as we can. We are excited that in our new building, we will be able to do programming for kids which we were never able to do in our old building. When we do it in the other cities we work in, it’s really important for us and the children.

How will the organization benefit from this new location?

The old building we were working in was very inadequate for the community’s needs. It was an old potato barn that was refitted to hold animals. It was hard to keep clean, it had one big noisy room for dogs which was very stressful for them, and there wasn’t enough space to do medical procedures. Most importantly, there wasn’t any space to do pure community work. We couldn’t welcome school children. We couldn’t do any of the programming for groups of people that are so important to connect them to animals. The new building has a nice simple space to make that kind of work possible in every way. It’s going  to make a huge difference.

What is your post pandemic strategy regarding your new location?

As far as COVID 19, we’re in the second stage now. The first stage was to get our number of animals down, all of our activities down as low as we could in case there was a really large need for help. We didn’t know if lots and lots of people would become sick at once and need to give up their animals or if lots of our workers would become sick, leaving not enough people to care for the animals. We did a really intensive process of getting animals out to foster homes and limiting what we were doing as much as we possibly could, so that we would be ready to serve our community for whatever came. Right now, I am happy to say that some of the worst-case scenarios haven’t happened. We’re working our way back now to helping more animals and families. The big focus is keeping everybody safe. We are learning how to do some work by appointment that we used to do by walk in and starting to add some things back like training classes. We’re trying to figure out how many people we can have in a class in order to keep visitors safe.

What is your vision for the future?

We know how important this work is for communities and families. To some degree, it’s to keep strengthening what we do. What we learned during this pandemic was that people in the community want to help with this work. For example, hundreds of families volunteered to be foster homes for us when we were working hard to get animals to homes during the pandemic. That was amazing! I don’t think anybody imagined that so many people would want to bring shelter animals into their homes as foster volunteers. So, our vision for the future also involves more connections between the shelter and the community, expanding our shelter work into the community as far as we can and finding a way for everybody to participate in our work. That part is exciting and I think the future is bright for people and animals.

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