Anyone who has ever lost a pet to time, sickness, accident or any other unfortunate situation knows true sorrow. The animals we bring into our homes have a way of becoming part of the family, and the loss of one of them can cut just as deep as the loss of a family member. It’s no different in Austin, but there’s another situation here: Perfectly healthy pets are being killed by the hundreds every year. Austin Pets Alive is working hard to make it so that doesn’t happen in the future.

Austin Pets Alive started in 1997 and has been saving pets ever since. It wasn’t until 2008, when Ellen Jefferson took over as executive director of the organization, that things really started to take off. That year, Austin Pets Alive began aggressively pursuing the goal of creating a “no kill” city. Gretchen Meyer, marketing director for APA, says making Austin no kill doesn’t mean that no pets will die.

“There’s a little bit of confusion around what the term ‘no kill’ means,” she said. “We’re trying to get ‘euthanasia’ to mean what the dictionary definition is, which is to put an animal that is dying out of its misery. Perfectly healthy pets, that’s not euthanasia that’s killing.”

Gretchen first got involved with volunteering with animals in Austin at the Town Lake Animal Center, which is where APA gets most of its animals. She volunteered with the shelter after adopting dogs from it. At that time, thousands of healthy animals were being killed each year. When the chance to join APA came up, Gretchen jumped at the opportunity.

“It’s really hard not to get more involved when you see the faces and you get to meet the pets,” she said. “It’s so much easier when you don’t know them. But once you start seeing them and start realizing, ‘This dog is amazing and this dog is going to be killed!’ it just draws you in totally.”

When Gretchen started with APA, she said there were about 15,000 pets being euthanized at Town Lake Animal Center every year. Now, that number has been cut in half. It’s because of all the advocacy and adoption groups in Austin, but APA is a big part of it. It’s the biggest program for fostering dogs and cats and getting them to the public so they can be adopted. Thanks to APA, thousands of pets that were on the list to be killed are now part of the family in happy homes.

Simply put, APA is saving lives in Austin. The gains APA has made go beyond sheer numbers, but they tell a big part of the story. APA has saved more dogs than cats because it only took dogs off the kill list in the beginning. It wasn’t that the organization only had dog people at the start, but rather a result of a partnership with a dog program that was already pulling dogs off the list and getting them adopted. APA started pulling dogs off the kill list at Town Lake Animal Shelter in June of 2008.

The organization didn’t start pulling cats off the list regularly until November of 2008.

The numbers are impressive, but other achievements are even better. In March of 2010, the Austin City Council passed a plan put forth by APA to make Austin a no kill city. The plan is supposed to take 18 months to complete, but the timeframe will start when the shelter gets a new director according to Gretchen. Once the plan is complete, the only animals killed in the city will be those that fit the dictionary definition of euthanasia.

Ready to get an animal from APA? It’s just a matter of finding the right animal, either online or in person at one of the dog adoption sites or cat adoption sites. Once you meet the pet of your dreams, you’ll have to meet with an adoption counselor to make sure it’s a good match and then you’ll be off. There are fees, of course, and currently it’s $150 for dogs and $125 for cats. It seems like a simple process up front, but it takes a lot to get a new pet into a home.

The process starts when an animal is put on the kill list at Town Lake Animal Center. They can be put on the list for a number of reasons, from sickness to age to simple overcrowding. APA has a team at Town Lake every day to evaluate the animals on the list and, hopefully, get them pulled off the list and into a foster home. Gretchen said the process can take a while.

“A lot of times they’ll evaluate them over multiple days because the first day they’ll be too scared,” Gretchen said. “So they’ll kind of just go hang out in the kennel with the dog and not really try to do anything to them. Maybe they’ll just try to hand them a treat and then they’ll come back the next day to see if it’s better. A lot of dogs we pull tend to be just scared at the shelter and then we see that they really have a lot of potential when we pull them out.”

Once the dog or cat has been taken away from the shelter it’s time to be seen by the medical team at APA, which is headed up by Executive Director Ellen Jefferson. If the animal has an illness of any kind, and many do, then they’ll go into a foster home until they get better. Once the illness has passed, it’s time to get fixed and go online and to the adoption sites.

Ideally, an animal in foster will go straight to a forever home but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes animals that are harder to get adopted, like high-energy adolescent dogs, take a little bit more work. One of the ways APA is solving this issue is with programs like Healthy Dogs, Healthy People. This program, which is located on the trail under the Mopac bridge every weekend, allows people who are running or walking to take a dog with them for the day. If they mesh with the people, Gretchen said, it’s a chance for them to get adopted.

“It’s great because it really provides all this enrichment for the dogs in our program but it’s also hitting the demographic of people who would want a high-energy dog,” she said.

If you’re ready to adopt an animal, then go for it! If you’re still on the fence, take a look at this photo gallery of awesome animals and see if that changes your mind. If not, maybe fostering is in your future.

Fostering an animal is one way for people to get involved with APA. According to Ann Lindholm, APA dog foster manager, there are more than 700 fosters who have joined the program since it started. Ann said she got involved in the program after attending an orientation meeting and showing interest in fostering.

“The person who did the orientation called me the next day and said, ‘I’ve got a dog that I want to pull out of Town Lake. Nobody is coming forward and you’re his last hope,’” she said. “And that was Max.”

Max was the first dog Ann fostered. Max was on the kill list at the Town Lake Animal Center because he had heart worm and because he was a black dog, a virtual death sentence for any dog according to Ann. Max stayed with her for about three months until he went to his forever home. In the meantime, Ann was volunteered into the foster manager position.

“When I first started, I was the dog foster program,” she said. “I did everything. Over the last two and a half years it got to the point where I couldn’t manage it all on my own. So now I’ve got a fabulous team of about 20 volunteers under me leading up different parts of the foster program that basically make it all happen.”

The help comes from her team and her fosters, who make what APA does possible. Allison James, pictured at the left, is a foster for cats who also works as an adoption counselor at the South Congress cattery about 20 hours a week. Ann said the goal of fostering is to get animals to a place where they can be adopted into a forever home. It doesn’t matter how it happens, so long as the end result is a good home. Sometimes, the fosters end up being the adopters.

“It’s kind of our joke, ‘You’re a failed foster,’” Ann said. “It’s a mixed blessing because usually once they adopt for the short-term they can’t foster. But the reality is we’re thrilled. We’re always thrilled. Getting one of these dogs into a forever home is what it’s about. And if it means that we’ve got to go out and recruit five more foster homes to make up for that then it’s fine with us.”