Animal Care Expo: Making a World of Difference

By Nancy Lawson

Back home, they devote every spare moment of their lives to the rescue and care of animals in need—the lame horse being beaten by children on a Lebanese beach, the dogs dying of starvation in the backyards of Kentucky, the hundreds of homeless cats about to be butchered for human consumption in China, the 9-year-old abandoned Dalmatian waiting for a new home in Texas.

Their stories are both heartwarming and heartbreaking, and their challenges are endless. For every animal saved, thousands more around the globe still wait for help.

The HSUS/Michelle Riley

Animal Care Expo attendees interact in the exhibit hall.

But for a few days each year, professional animal workers and volunteers from coast to coast and six continents travel to Animal Care Expo in search of new ways to provide that help. Held annually by The Humane Society of the United States, Expo is the nation’s largest animal welfare conference. More than 1,500 attendees choose from “a smorgasbord of all I needed to know,” as one New York shelter director described it; this year that smorgasbord included 48 workshops covering everything from volunteer recruitment and shelter medicine to cruelty investigations and farm animal welfare.

“I’ve been waiting all year to go to this Expo,” said Kaia Holmer, an animal care center manager for the SPCA of Texas who attended workshops on organizational outcome measures and cat-adopter matchmaking. “I signed all my staff up, too.”

While Holmer and her colleagues drove less than a minute from their shelter to this year’s conference at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas this week, other animal welfarists journeyed hundreds or even thousands of miles. And even though many are from the same country, the challenges they face are often worlds apart. As employees of the SPCA of Texas undergo their final leg of a $7 million capital campaign to build an updated animal shelter, the director of the recently established Oregon Outback Humane Society, Martina Keil, described the 8,000-square-mile region she calls home as having no animal shelter at all.

For many in the cash-strapped sheltering and rescue field, the conference is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find new and creative solutions to animal homelessness.

The HSUS/Michelle Riley

Animal Care Expo exhibitors.

“I thoroughly enjoy seeing people who’ve never been able to attend an animal conference and seeing the excitement that they experience coming to Expo,” said John Snyder, vice president of Companion Animals for The Humane Society of the United States. “I get a great kick out of watching these people who’ve been working so hard in their own communities—often in isolated environments. They get a chance to come here, and it’s like a resurrection.”

More than 70 attendees received scholarships from Hill's Pet Nutrition; without the financial support, the trip would not have been possible for people like Chandra Davis, who earns $7.25 an hour as an animal cruelty investigator in Tennessee. Davis started the first animal shelter in the city of Troy a few years ago and is the only person rescuing animals, caring for them in the shelter, posting their photos on the Internet, and prosecuting starvation and dogfighting cases in nearby Kentucky.

“My uniform’s given to me—and my badge—but that’s it. I have to buy everything else myself,” said the one-woman show who rarely gets a break even when she’s hundreds of miles away from her job. “Even being here at Expo, the learning has been great—but my personal cell phone is ringing off the hook.”

While Davis and others are learning how to effect change locally, many attendees of Expo’s Humane Society International component are working for the passage of national legislation in their own countries. Members of the China Small Animal Protection Association described the organization’s recent rescue of 415 cats who’d been rounded up and brought to a “butcher house” in Tianjin to be killed for food. Though the cats and their advocates had no laws on their side to address the situation, community members rose up in protest and surrounded the butcher house for two days, inspiring CSAPA founder Lu Di and a government official to travel to Tianjin and negotiate with local police for the cats’ release.

Animal Care Expo helps people who help animals.

At Expo the Chinese delegation looked for support of a planned fall 2007 meeting intended to persuade Chinese government officials to pass a national animal welfare law, said Luguan Yan, CSAPA’s U.S. coordinator. In the conference’s exhibit hall, they also looked for contacts among the 175 companies who could help them procure inexpensive vaccines and medications.

Whether it’s in Tianjin or in Tennessee, it’s this kind of collective action that will help turn the tide for animals. That was the message from Humane Society of the United States president and CEO Wayne Pacelle at Expo’s general session, where he told attendees that “it’s only when we stand together” that we can stop factory farming and other brutal practices. Though we live in a time when there are more animal welfare groups than ever before in history, there is probably also more suffering than ever before, he said.

“You and I see in this cause of protecting animals the best of humanity—people who use their talent, their time to help the less powerful—and we also see sometimes the worst of humanity, the terrible things that people are capable of doing to helpless creatures,” Pacelle said. “And today I just want to say I’m really glad to be with the best of humanity—all of you—because it is energizing to be together on these issues, to know that we’re not alone and that we’re fighting this cause together.”

Nancy Lawson is editor of Animal Sheltering magazine.