Tag: Alexis Pugh

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MAS Shifts to Community Intervention Model Amid Pandemic

CREDIT: Facebook/MAS

Facebook/MAS

In mid-March, Memphis Animal Services (MAS) said it had a crisis capacity and urged the public to step up and foster or adopt pets.

But since then, Alexis Pugh, executive director of MAS, said there has been an “amazing turnout” from the community with fostering and adoption and that the shelter’s population has significantly decreased.

Pugh says in order to keep the population size down at MAS, staff have shifted their focus on ways to help the community without having to bring animals into the shelter: “Capacity is quite low and manageable as we look to ways to rehome pets outside of the shelter.”

Over the past couple of months, Pugh said MAS has been doing more community intervention than it ever has in the past. This shift is “long overdue in animal welfare,” she said.

“Not every animal needs to come through the shelter to find a new home,” Pugh said. “The animal welfare community has been talking about this for a long time, but it almost needed some kind of trigger moment to make it happen.”

Part of this community intervention strategy includes working with people to keep pets in their home. This means providing education and resources, Pugh said.

For example, MAS implemented a pet food supply pantry to assist families who lost their income and the ability to buy the necessary food for their pets. So far, MAS has served 180 families with 5,000 pounds of food.

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MAS has also ramped up its effort in the field to reunite lost pets with their owners.

“We don’t want to return to our pre-COVID-19 normal because we were overfull all the time and animals were being put to sleep because of space,” Pugh says. “We’re trying to get to the point where our capacity to care is better aligned with what we really should be providing animals.”

The key to this is getting the community involved in the process of rehoming animals. Pugh said this depends largely on neighbors helping neighbors.

“If you have a pet that you can no longer care for, can you seek resources through people who are in your life?” Pugh said. “Everyone has social media now, so that can be used to find a home for pets. Or if someone finds a stray animal, can they foster it until they can find a home for it? We’re here to be an aid and a resource for this.”

The typical model of going into a neighborhood and picking up stray animals might not be the best strategy for long-term success. Pugh said for years MAS has gone to the 38127 ZIP code and picked up stray animals, but that area still remains the highest intake ZIP code.

“Going out and picking up stray animals is not the solution to long-term success,” Pugh said. “Instead we need to be using our resources to support the community making sure everyone has access to spay and neuter services and that cost isn’t a barrier. We want people to have access to vaccines and the knowledge that will help them care for their pets. If we really want to see long-term change in the community, we have to stop spinning our wheels picking up animals and overfilling the shelter.”

Pugh said MAS wants to adopt more of an emergency room model for pets so that every animal does not have to go through the shelter to find a home: “We were forced into this change, but there are definitely long term benefits to us changing the model.”

With the population at MAS more manageable, Pugh said staff has the chance to get to know the pets there better and are able to be more successful at matching people with pets for adoption.

The bottom line, Pugh said, is that a shelter is “no place for a pet.” It’s not ideal housing for dogs or cats and being in a kennel does not fit their social needs, she explains.

“We want to be more of a resource agency and not just a shelter for unwanted pets,” Pugh said. “So the challenge comes as we try to get the public to adapt to that new model. Any time, you talk about changing a model, there is going to be fear and hesitation.”

Measuring Success

MAS’ save rate for March was down to 81 percent from 90 percent in February. The national target and goal for MAS is 90 percent.

However, Pugh said that number doesn’t accurately reflect the agency’s productivity, explaining that because the shelter has limited intakes to emergency cases due to COVID-19, the animals currently in the shelter are in the at-risk population for euthanasia.

“We don’t have those friendly, healthy stray dogs in the shelter because now the team is focused on animals that fit into two categories,” she said. “The first is animals who have injured someone or have aggressive behavior. And those animals are not safe to rehome. Secondly, we’re taking animals with medical emergencies. While we do our best to save them, many are beyond medical intervention.”

Pugh said she has been in talks with animal shelter directors around the country who agree there needs to be a more inclusive way of tracking data and the success of shelters.

“I can think of five animals off the top of my head that we recently found homes for that never came into the shelter,” Pugh said. “But this isn’t counted in the save rate data. The data has to do a better job at capturing community interventions.”

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Extended Q&A: MAS Executive Director Alexis Pugh

Memphis Animal Services (MAS) increased its save rate by 70 percent from 2010 to 2019, going from 19 percent to 89 percent.

Alexis Pugh, executive director of MAS, said the goal and national threshold is a 90-percent save rate. Though the shelter has nearly reached this number, Pugh said the ultimate goal is to have zero animals euthanized because of space. A key to that is to keep animals out of the shelter and in loving homes, Pugh said.

Memphis Flyer: To what does MAS attribute its increased save rate?

Alexis Pugh: When you have something as complex as animal welfare, there are a lot of moving parts that work together to achieve something. I certainly think social media has played a huge role. Most people nowadays find and adopt pets using social media and the internet. It’s just brought a lot of awareness to what’s happening at the shelter, and that’s critical for people to rescue animals from here.

MF: What else has helped increase the save rate?

AP: When Mayor [Jim] Strickland became mayor in 2016, he decided to really dig into what the challenges are here and provide the needed support and resources. He not only put his money where his mouth is, but also put the people, support, and leadership where his mouth was.

The mayor has also been extremely supportive about making progressive shelter changes. There are some programs that we’ve put in place that not every mayor would be willing to do. For example, the owner-surrender-prevention program, which manages our intake, because we’ve got to keep pets out of the shelter and keep them with owners.

It’s programs like these that have allowed us to achieve what we’re achieving, even with the intake rate going up. We took in more than 11,000 animals in 2019. The last time we took in that many animals was 2014. Our save rate was 40 percent then. This is a really impactful statistic.

City of Memphis

MF: What are some remaining challenges at MAS?

AP: The last at-risk category we have is large-breed dogs. A lot of that comes down to [what kind of animal] the public is interested in adopting. I don’t think that it comes as a surprise that when we have small-breed dogs, there are lines of people waiting to get those pets. Unfortunately, the interest is less for large dogs, especially for dogs who have some pitbull-like appearance.

Pitbulls are the most-bred dog in the United States and here in the community, but they have a bad stereotype and reputation, which is reinforced by certain insurance companies or leasing offices. So this cuts out a segment of potential adopters because they can’t have these types of dogs where they live. Pitbulls are the No. 1 type of dog in here, and these poor guys are being set up for failure.

We need to overcome prejudices against pitbulls and other breeds. This needs to happen not just on an individual level, but with our leasing companies and insurance companies too. What other way could these companies discriminate based solely on someone’s appearance? There would be lawsuits all day if a leasing company said we don’t rent to black people or Jewish people. That’s just not something that we accept anymore for people, so why should we accept that for animals? Just because an animal looks a certain way, it doesn’t mean they behave a certain way and it doesn’t mean they should be prohibited from living with a quality pet owner.

MF: Are there any challenges specific to Memphis?

AP: One challenge, certainly when we talk about keeping pets in homes, is that a significant portion of our community lives in poverty. Some pet owners have to choose whether to put food on the table for their families or get their dog spayed. That’s not a choice that anyone should make. So we have to get those barriers out of the way for our low-income pet owners.

Just because you have a low income or are living in poverty, it doesn’t mean you can’t be a good pet owner and it definitely doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve the joy of a pet in your home. I challenge the notion that someone with a low income can’t possibly provide a good, quality home for a pet. Our job shouldn’t be to say ‘you don’t have enough money to feed yourself or your kids so you can’t have a pet.’ Our job should be to say ‘you don’t have enough money to feed yourself or kids, so you focus on that. Let us focus on your pet.’

So, it’s about changing the prejudices that often go into what makes a good pet owner. Because every neighbor and every family deserves to have the joy of pet ownership provided they love the pet and provide it with those basic resources even if that takes help from the outside.

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MF: What are the goals for the next decade?

AP: In 2020, we’re really focusing our efforts on community outreach and providing better resources for those high-intake ZIP codes, like quality housing for pets or behavior counseling. Or, if you have a hole in your fence and your dog gets out, how can we help with that? Our focus this next decade is to say that not every animal needs to walk through our front door at the shelter. We need to be where animals go when there is no alternative.

So we try to look at what the next progressive step is.

We’re at 90 percent [save rate] and that’s great, but our work isn’t done. We’re not going to rest even though we’re working our butts off, we’re saving more lives, and our adoption and rescue transfers are up almost 20 percent versus last year. So we’re doing more work and we’re working harder, but we’re not done working harder. We’re going to keep working hard every day until no animal here is at ever at risk for euthanasia because of space. And the answer to that is outside of the shelter walls.

We want to get to a point where we say euthanizing animals for space is something we used to do in Memphis, but we don’t do that anymore.

City of Memphis

MF: How will MAS do that?

AP: Well, we recently got a large donation from an anonymous individual who wants money to go specifically toward helping members of the community become successful pet owners. We’ll look at how we can put more emphasis on pets staying in loving homes. And if they do end up here, how can we get them from sitting in a kennel in a shelter, the least desirable place for any pet? Dogs are social creatures. They don’t like being in a kennel, and it’s not fair to them.

One way we’ve already begun to do that is expanding our foster program so that those adult dogs who are eligible can be held in homes instead of here in the shelter. A great analogy for that is if you think back several years ago, children who didn’t have parents or who were removed from their homes were sent to orphanages. Well, at some point that industry said ‘this is not the best solution for these children. These children should be in foster homes.’ So then there was this massive movement to get children into foster homes instead of orphanages. Well, we should follow that same model in animal welfare. Do we have enough homes in this community where if people step up to foster, then maybe we don’t need all these kennels in our shelter. Then we can function as a resource to provide supplies and care, but we don’t have to be the housing mechanism for these animals.

MF: How can the community help?

AP: We have got to get people out of the habit of buying animals from breeders and pet stores. Are there reputable breeders? Absolutely. Are there communities in other parts of this country where buying pets may not be as big of an issue? Sure. But when there are still animals that are losing their lives in our shelter because they have nowhere else to go, this community needs to make adoption a priority. I want to see Memphis as a city where animals in need in our shelters and with nonprofit rescue groups are people’s first choice when adding pets to their homes, not a breeder.

We also need more people involved in volunteering and fostering. We’ve got a lot of great adopters and we’ve seen it over the holidays. But we need more foster homes. We need more people willing to step up in the short term. Volunteering, fostering, and donating are all critical ways you can be a part of the solution to animal welfare.

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MF: Anything else you want readers to know about MAS’ work?

AP: There was a period when there were some real negative stories that came out about the shelter and some of it involved the staff that works here. There was a lot of community distrust for the people that worked at Animal Services. I would just like to say, as someone who has worked alongside this group of people for more than three years now, that these are human beings that come to this job every day with no other goal in mind other than how can they save one more animal today. I mean there are staff members who take animals home and foster them or staff members that stay after their shifts to walk them just because they want to. We just go above and beyond every single day.

Finally, if you want to come here, I will personally walk you through and give you a tour. I will introduce you to the amazing people who care for these animals. I’ll show you that this is not a sad or depressing place. This is a happy place. When you walk through our kennels, you’ll meet animals who are here temporarily and are on their way to finding a home. And I want our community to come see it. I want people to see for themselves that this is a shelter and operation that you as a Memphian can be proud of.

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Fire Department, Memphis Animal Services Partner to Bring Lost Pets Home

CREDIT: MAS

MAS

If you find a lost pet here, you can now take it to any of the Memphis Fire Department (MFD) stations around the city to help them be reunited with their owner.

Through the Fire Finders program, a partnership of Memphis Animal Services (MAS) and MFD, each of the city’s 58 fire stations will now be equipped with a scanner to detect microchips, the small electronic chips that are implanted into pets to help locate them when lost.

MFD personnel will be trained to scan pets and identify their owners. Once identified, the owner will be contacted and reunited with their pet.

Alexis Pugh, MAS director, said before the program, when pets were lost, they would have to be taken to a vet clinic or an animal shelter to be scanned for a microchip, but there are a number of areas here that are “veterinary deserts,” where one might have a hard time finding access to a microchip scanner.

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“Every pet should have a microchip, but what we found was that not all of our citizens had the same access to getting microchips or scanning found pets for microchips,” Pugh said. “We’re solving half of that problem with the Fire Finders program, and we are working on a solution for bringing more microchip access to the community in the future.”

MFD director Gina Sweat said that the fire department here is one of the few in the country to offer a microchip scanning service.

“We’re thrilled to continue partnering with MAS to bring innovative solutions like this one to Memphis, without increasing the taxpayer burden,” Sweat said.

The program is funded by a grant from Maddie’s Fund, a foundation that provides resources to organizations around the country in an effort to create a “no-kill nation, where every dog and cat is guaranteed a healthy home or habitat.”

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MAS Adds New Services to Reduce Surrendered and Lost Pet Intake

Memphis Animal Services is adding extra services that aim to reduce two major contributors to the number of animals in the shelter — pets surrendered by owners and lost pets.

The MAS Safety Net Program includes initiatives that will alter the intake process for both.

For owners that are surrendering their pets, they may only do so by scheduling an appointment on either Wednesday or Friday. However, before the appointment, owners must go through counseling session via phone with an MAS employee who will educate the owner on potential alternatives to surrendering their pet.

If the owner wants to keep their pet, but is facing a hardship that prevents them from being able to provide for them, then MAS will help them acquire assistance with food and spay/neuter services.

“We see so often people who love their pets and want to be able to keep them, but they lack access to some resource allowing that to be possible,” said Alexis Pugh, MAS administrator. “The goal of this program is to, firstly, keep pets in those kinds of loving homes, and secondly, reduce intake and leave more room for pets coming from homes where they truly aren’t cared for.”

The second component of the Safety Net program involves utilizing the neighborhood-based social network platform Nextdoor to match lost and found pet postings in the same geographical area.

Starting May 8, a team of volunteers will review the previous day’s list of pets who were found stray and post each pet in the NextDoor neighborhood in which it was found, along with instructions for potential owners on how to reclaim that pet from MAS.

Additionally, MAS field officers will now be equipped with electronic tablets so entering pets’ photos and information into the MAS database can be done in the field, which will enable owners searching for lost pets to access a routinely updated database on the shelter’s website.

“Memphis Animal Services has consistently improved our save rate, or percentage of animals who leave the shelter with positive outcomes, over the last several years, jumping from 65 percent in 2015 to 74 percent in 2016, and up to 83 percent year-to-date in 2017,” said Pugh. “Our goal with these MAS Safety Net initiatives is to continue that upward trend to save as many lives as possible.”

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New Animal Services Administrator Has Big Plans to Turn Shelter Around

Last week, at her first Memphis Animal Services (MAS) Advisory Board meeting as the new shelter administrator, Alexis Pugh opened the meeting with a tearful apology. An MAS field officer had been caught on camera dragging a puppy on a leash a few days earlier, and Pugh wanted those gathered for the meeting to know the officers involved had been suspended.

“I’m heartbroken over what has happened,” she told the crowd.

That show of compassion for the animals was indicative of what most local animal advocates are expecting from Pugh, who has been hailed as a breath of fresh air compared with past directors of the long-troubled shelter. Unlike the last director, James Rogers, who came to MAS from a career in the U.S. Postal Service, Pugh has been working with animals for years. She most recently served as the executive director of Mid-South Spay & Neuter Services, a low-cost spay/neuter clinic. She’s also served as executive director of the Humane Society of Memphis & Shelby County.

Strickland appointed Pugh to the MAS role near the end of May, and she’s already making small changes and planning for some big ones.

Alexis Pugh

“I’ve made a few policy changes on the handling of cats, dramatically increasing the number of pictures that show up on our PetHarbor website and changing our owner-surrender forms,” Pugh said of her accomplishments in her first month at MAS.

Regarding those owner-surrender forms, Pugh added “put to sleep” next to the word “euthanasia.” She said that anyone surrendering their pet who didn’t know what euthanasia meant might accidentally indicate they wanted their pet put down. For those who do want euthanasia, the owner’s signature is now required. Before, it was simply a check box on the form.

Bigger changes are coming. Pugh said she hopes to update the shelter’s technology so animal control officers can take pictures of animals in the field and immediately upload them to the website.

“If someone loses their pet, they can instantly see if that pet was picked up,” Pugh said.

She also plans to have officers hand out brochures in the field that inform citizens about low-cost spay/neuter services, where to get low-cost or free pet food, and other information that might better help people take care of their pets and prevent them being surrendered to the shelter. Those brochures will also be available in the lobby of the shelter.

Past MAS directors have taken some heat from the animal welfare community for not entertaining the idea of making the shelter no-kill, but Pugh is researching that and may soon begin work with a national no-kill organization called Target Zero.

“Nationally, no-kill means you have a 90 to 92 percent live-release rate. Target Zero has been able to get shelters above that 90 percent rate,” Pugh said. “Honestly, I don’t believe that’s something a facility can do alone. It’s going to take a collaborative effort with rescue groups, low-cost spay/neuter clinics, the Humane Society, all of us. Target Zero would spearhead that effort.”

For now, though, Pugh admits that change will take time.

“Right now, we’re hovering at a 63 percent live-release rate. I’d love to be able to tell you that one year from now we’re above 70 or 75 percent and a year from that above 80,” Pugh said. “I know so many people would say that isn’t fast enough, but we cannot achieve this overnight. Ten percentage points a year would be more than 1,000 animals [saved] in a year.”

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Animal Advocacy Groups Approve of New Shelter Director

Mayor Jim Strickland and MAS Director Alexis Pugh

Both Community Action for Animals and S.O.S. Memphis (Save Our Shelter) expressed their approval for Mayor Jim Strickland’s appointment of Alexis Pugh to run Memphis Animal Services (MAS). Strickland introduced Pugh in a press conference at MAS Friday afternoon.

Pugh served as the executive director of Mid-South Spay & Neuter Services, a low-cost spray/neuter clinic, for the past year. She’ll be replacing former MAS director James Rogers, who was fired in December as Strickland reorganized his personnel after taking office. 

“Save Our Shelter Memphis is very supportive of Mayor Strickland’s decision to appoint Ms. Pugh to the director of MAS,” said Sylvia Cox with S.O.S. “She has great experience. She’s local. She knows the history of MAS, and she understands those issues and what’s been going on, which gives her a better perspective on how to make changes more quickly than someone who may have come in from out of town.”

Community Action for Animals released a statement praising Pugh as “a trained, progressive, compassionate, and intelligent director, a director who loves animals and is aware of the pros and cons of our animal services, and who will hold the staff accountable, support, and encourage spay/neuter, properly assess the animals, and make certain euthanasia, when needed, is performed humanely.”

Pugh identifies herself as “an animal advocate and an animal lover.” She has three rescue dogs, and she’s fostered many others.

Pugh is taking on a shelter that’s been widely criticized over the years for its high euthanasia rate. Although Rogers managed to get pet adoption numbers up and euthanasia numbers down during his tenure, his critics argued that animal intake rates dropped, and they contended that was the real reason for lower euthanasia rates. Pugh said she will focus on ensuring that the field officers — those charged with picking up stray animals, responding to calls, and investigating cruelty — are doing their jobs.

“I think there will be an emphasis on every aspect of operation and certainly field officers are no exception to that,” Pugh said at the Friday press conference. “We’re going to expect them to perform their jobs to the performance level that they can just like everyone else here. And if that means that we need to increase the number of calls they’re responding to, if we need to monitor the number of calls they’re responding to, if we need to look more closely at how they’re handling those cases and if they’re taking cases to court, all of those are parts of their job that we’re going to be reviewing just like every other staff member here. If your job description identifies something as part of your role, you’re going to be held to that.”

Also, under Roger’s administration, a number of “clerical errors” led to several animals being mistakenly put down. Pugh said she has a goal of finding ways to improve processes at MAS to prevent accidental deaths.

“I know there’s an excellent software program in place here, but until I start and get in, I’m not going to know where those challenges lie from a logistics and administration standpoint, but if we’re finding there are processes that are causing errors to be made, then my goal will be to find ways to improve those processes so my staff has clear direction on how to do their job and how to successfully do it without clerical errors causing the loss of lives,” Pugh said.

Cox urged animal advocates to be patient with Pugh and give her time to turn the shelter around.

“SOS encourages all animal advocates to give her the time and the opportunity to get started, to do the research she was discussing, to learn what goes on, and to analyze that and come up the positive changes that are needed to be made,” Cox said. “That will take time. It doesn’t happen over night.” 

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Strickland Names New Memphis Animal Services Director

Alexis Pugh

Alexis Pugh has been named the new director of Memphis Animal Services (MAS) , according to a Facebook update from Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland.

Pugh served as the executive director of Mid-South Spay & Neuter Services, a low-cost spray/neuter clinic, for the past year. She’ll be replacing former MAS director James Rogers, who was fired in December as Strickland reorganized his personnel after taking office. Although Rogers managed to get pet adoption numbers up and euthanasia numbers down during his tenure, his critics argued that animal intake rates also dropped while he was in charge, which they contended was the real reason for lower euthanasia rates. A number of “clerical errors,” as Rogers called them, during his time there led to several animals being mistakenly put down.

At Mid-South Spay & Neuter Services, Pugh was responsible for overseeing and managing all clinic operations. And during her time there, the organization increased surgical productivity by 11 percent and generated more than $50,000 in new donor and grant-funding, according to Strickland. Before serving in that role, Pugh was the executive director of the Humane Society of Memphis & Shelby County.

Pugh will start her new position next month. She will report directly to city Chief Operating Officer Doug McGowen. Previously, the MAS director reported to the director of the Division of Parks and Neighborhoods.