Thursday, April 29, 2010

Really neat article about shelter medicine and Maddie's Fund

Someone sent me a really neat article today from the "Cornell Alumni Magazine" that has all kinds of good links in it - and it's also a super article - it's about their veterinary program and their shelter medicine courses and what they called the "the art and science of caring for homeless pets".

They also talk about Maddie's Fund because it was started by an alumni of Cornell - David Duffield '62, MBA '64 - who in 1994 gave 300 million dollars to start the grant giving organization.

They make the point that shelter medicine has really become important now with the rise of no kill shelters because previously when shelters used to kill 50-80% of the population regularly - there really wasn't any need to address the animals medically if all they were going to do was kill the animals, whereas now with the animals hanging around to be adopted out eventually - their medical health becomes important - and necessary to be addressed - as well as preventing the spread of infectious disease, shelter enrichment - and that's something that veterinarians have never had to deal with in the past.

It's an awesome article - really long and well written - you should definitely check it out - it starts here - at "Shelter Me"

When I went to the "No Kill Conference" last year in Washington DC - Richard Avanzino was there with Nathan Winograd and he talked about Maddie's Fund - it was a great talk and he talked about a lot of the points that are in the article about David Duffield in the above article - the fact that the Ad Council is working with Maddie's Fund and the fact that "no-kill nation" by 2015 is not just possible, but probable.

That's a very serious thing to say - but Maddie's Fund is saying that - and that's amazing. I wrote up notes about that No Kill Conference if you want to read them - you can read them in my post at "Notes from the No Kill Conference"

Thanks for sending me the article, Dorothy!

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