Animal-Angels Foundation

10/13/2026

Three studies, and then the hole where a fourth should be.

Weiss and Gramann compared 78 cat adopters who paid a $75 fee against 95 who paid nothing, then measured attachment. No difference. Both groups equally attached, both equally positive about the shelter they adopted from.

Weiss and colleagues compared traditional screening, landlord checks and required dog-to-dog introductions, against a staff conversation. 96 percent of the animals were still home at follow-up and there was no difference in retention between the groups. The authors wrote that policy-based approaches could be wasting effort.

Powell and colleagues analyzed 23,932 adoptions at Charleston Animal Society over five years. 9.2 percent came back within six months. For dogs, 16.3 percent.

So the fee does not decide it. The application does not decide it. And one dog in six comes back anyway.

Which leaves the question of what happens in between. Here is what I found when I went looking.

Best Friends published a literature review on adoptions last year. It covers fees, open adoption, deliberation time, breed labels, photographs. On post-adoption support and whether it changes retention, it has no findings. The most serious attempt I can find anywhere is the Dogs Trust cohort, 5,498 adopters across 20 centres with scripted calls at two days, two weeks and four months. The paper describing it came out this year and it is a methods paper. The evaluation is still to come.

There is a second problem underneath that one. The open adoption study measured at 30 days. Powell measured at six months. Those windows are practical, not evidentiary. A lease renewal with a new weight limit. A vet bill in month eleven. Resource guarding that starts when the kids go back to school. None of those are 30-day events.

I run a post-adoption program. I do not have evidence it works. Nobody does, for any version of it, which is the whole point. I am not going to spend two months writing about numbers nobody sourced and then imply my own are proven.

And waived-fee events are capacity management, which is a real job they do well. The research says those adopters are fine. The problem is what happens when a pressure valve gets reported as an outcome.

If I have missed a study, tell me. That is the best possible response to this post.

Full piece: shift.animal-angelsfoundation.org

10/06/2026

Two hundred dogs did not arrive on that property. They were born there.

In September 2025, BISSELL Pet Foundation's Animal Incident Management team and the Giles County Animal Shelter worked a case in Giles County, Tennessee, where roughly two hundred dogs were living. The Greater Birmingham Humane Society took in more than 130, mostly small-breed puppies, some barely over a pound, most carrying giardia or coccidia. They were treated, sterilized, and placed.

It was a good response. Fast, competent, three organizations in two states with no turf fight. Not one thing in it prevented a litter.

Six days after the removal, one of the pregnant dogs the humane society took in had her litter in Birmingham. Three days later somebody weighed one of the puppies at 0.37 pounds. I fostered her that November, adopted her December 12, and this foundation's effective date of exemption is December 17. Five days.

Here is what I had wrong until last week. Our own bio said she survived a backyard breeding operation. She was born in a shelter six days after the removal, never spent an hour on that property, and no published record of the case calls it breeding. The coverage says neglect. I have spent a month arguing in public that the difference matters, so it matters when it is my own dog.

Now the part for anyone who allocates money.

Nobody published what that response cost. Not the deployment, not the county shelter, not moving 130 dogs across a state line, not the treatment or housing or placement. The organizations know their numbers. The public record has none of it, which means no commissioner, legislator, or program officer can put the response side on a page next to the prevention side.

The prevention side is published. Alabama's spay/neuter plate program reimburses $35 for a cat neuter and $100 for a dog spay.

One spay would not have emptied that property. But all two hundred of those dogs trace back to litters, and every litter traces back to a surgery priced in this state in the double digits. Against a multi-agency rescue nobody has ever costed, the asymmetry does not need a number to be obvious. It needs somebody to say it in a room where money moves.

The response is the fire department. Fund it, staff it, respect it. It gets called again next month in another county, because nothing in the model touches the conditions that fill properties.

Full piece: https://conta.cc/4y2X9t2

We do not compete. We connect.

09/22/2026

In Alabama, state law already requires every dog and cat to be vaccinated against rabies, and owners pay for it out of pocket. Most states require it. Almost none of them route a penny of it toward the reason shelters stay full.

Delaware does. One sentence of Delaware law adds $3 to every required rabies vaccination given in that state. The veterinarian collects it and remits it monthly to a state fund that pays for spay and neuter surgeries for residents on food assistance, disability, or VA benefits. Last year that fund paid for 5,329 surgeries. Since 2014, more than 40,000.

Alabama already has the same machinery. We require the shot, we issue the tag, and a state committee meets every January to set what the shot costs at a public clinic. None of it funds a single surgery.

Apply Delaware's model here and a $3 surcharge would raise somewhere between $1.0 and $1.7 million a year in Alabama. Every year. No grant cycle, no raffle, nobody has to win the vote twice.

Here is the honest part. That funds roughly 5,000 to 8,400 surgeries statewide. The seven Central Alabama counties Animal-Angels Foundation works in, Jefferson, Shelby, Blount, St. Clair, Walker, Bibb and Chilton, need about 9,400 a year between them. There are sixty-seven counties in this state. So three dollars is the right mechanism set at the wrong number, and it is still a great deal more than the zero Alabama collects today.
Right now the only thing filling that gap here is donations. That is what SNIP is, and it is why we are always asking.

Full piece: shift.animal-angelsfoundation.org

09/18/2026

Emerald Six years old, Dalmatian, 75 pounds, healthy and up to date on vaccines Emerald wants to be your one and only, and she is not subtle about it. Six years old, seventy-five pounds of solid Dalmatian, and she has decided that her person's attention belongs to her. That is the honest headline on this girl. She can get aggressive with other dogs, and it shows up worst when her person is in the room, so she needs to be the only dog in the home. That is not a preference we are hoping somebody works around. It is the requirement. Give her that and she is a joy. Emerald lives for a frisbee in the yard and she will keep going as long as you will keep throwing it. She loves a walk. She already knows sit, shake, and stay, and she is sharp enough to pick up whatever else you feel like teaching her. She is healthy, current on vaccines, and ready to go home today. Emerald has not been tested with cats or with children, so we cannot tell you how she does with either one. We would rather say that out loud than let anybody guess. If cats or kids are part of your house, we will talk it through with you before anything moves forward. She is the right dog for someone who wants a dog, not a pack. A house with no other dogs, room to run, a frisbee, and somebody who does not mind being followed from one room to the next. If that is your house, Emerald has been waiting on you. To meet Emerald, contact us at [email protected] or (205) 754-7542.

09/05/2026

It is the 5th.

Here is a thing most people do not know. A single shelter intake costs taxpayers somewhere north of $200 by the time you count housing, medical, staff time, and outcome. Preventing that same intake costs a fraction of it, and the family gets to keep their dog.

That math is why the $5 on the 5th Challenge exists. Five dollars a month into the Bridge. Emergency vet care, pet food, gas, housing deposits. The small, unglamorous things that stand between a family and a surrender they never wanted.

We do not compete with shelters. We reduce what lands on their doorstep, which is the only version of this work where everybody wins.

Become a Prevention Partner today. Five dollars, the 5th of every month, and it runs on its own from there.

https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/dollar5-on-the-5th-challenge

09/04/2026

Tomorrow is the 5th.

Last month, Prevention Partners funded the Bridge for the first time. This month they do it again, and that is the entire point. Not a one-time push. Not a campaign that ends. A number we can count on showing up on the same day every month.

That reliability is what lets us tell a family yes. When somebody calls the Pet Help Desk on a Tuesday because the vet wants $340 they do not have, we are not fundraising in that moment. We are spending money that already came in on the 5th.

Five dollars a month. That is it. Tomorrow.

09/01/2026

Alabama has been funding spay/neuter since 2009. Almost nobody in animal welfare here seems to know it.

There is a specialty license plate. It costs $50. Of that, $35.06 goes to paying veterinarians for spay/neuter surgeries on the pets of Medicaid families. Since 2009 that plate and a tax return check-off have put $2,495,848 into sterilization and paid for 42,677 surgeries.

So the question of whether this state believes prevention is worth public money is already answered. It answered yes in 2007, before most of the field was having the conversation.

Here is the part I did not expect.
Divide those surgeries by the seventeen years the program has run and you get about 2,510 a year. Alabama has 5,157,699 people. That is 0.49 surgeries per thousand residents per year.

The working benchmark from practitioners who have built these programs is that three to four per thousand still lets a pet population grow, five to six holds it flat, and seven to eight starts bringing it down. Field-derived guidance, not peer-reviewed research, and I present it that way.

Against that, the state program is running at about six percent of the dose.

That is not a criticism of the foundation administering it. They are doing what the revenue allows, and the revenue was capped by a decision made in 2007 that nobody has revisited.

Then there is the geography. The participating clinic list, updated in April, has 33 veterinary hospitals in the whole state, sitting in 19 counties. Alabama has 67. So 48 Alabama counties contain no clinic that participates in the state spay/neuter program. If you are on Medicaid in one of those counties, the help exists and you cannot reach it.

Five of the seven counties Animal-Angels Foundation serves have none.

The honest version of this argument is not that Alabama has done nothing. Alabama built the right thing and then never sized it. The debate is not whether to start funding prevention. It is why we stopped at six percent.

And one fix needs no legislature at all.

Enrollment is a form signed by the veterinarians in the practice, a W-9, and an address in Pike Road. The state pays $100 for a dog spay on top of what your client pays.
If you are a veterinarian in one of those 48 counties, that is a phone call.

New on The Shift to Prevention: https://conta.cc/3V7I6As

08/18/2026

Looking for a vet

Please take a look!

08/18/2026

"We've been doing spay/neuter for years and nothing has changed."

I hear that a lot, and I understand why. You buy the surgeries. You run the clinic days. You open the annual report and intake went up again.

Here is what is actually happening.
Spaying a cat in March does not prevent an intake this year. It prevents the litter that would have come in the fall, and the litters those kittens would have had next spring.

That absence does not reach a shelter's front desk until about year three. There is no line on any report for kittens that were never born, which means years one and two are supposed to look flat. That is also exactly when the funding usually gets cut.

There is a second piece. The number of surgeries has to match the size of the community. Roughly eight surgeries per 1,000 residents per year, held for five years, is what it takes to cut shelter intake close to in half. Most programs are running at two to four. That is not a failed program. That is a program that was never funded to win.

Blount County has about 60,000 people and took in around 2,270 animals last year. Eight per 1,000 means about 480 surgeries minimum. Every year. For five years.

Spay/neuter works. It just does not work on a one-year budget cycle, and we have been grading it like it should.

New article, link below.

https://conta.cc/3SeAnzK

08/11/2026

COUNT ME IN. Become a Founding Supporter 2026.

Something is happening in Blount County. Neighbors, businesses, town councils, and the Animal Adoption Center of Blount County are coming together to keep pets and families together, with vaccine, rabies, heartworm testing/prevention and spay/neuter clinics coming to the county. Now you can wear it.

Make a gift of $35 or more and we will send you the COUNT ME IN shirt, with Founding Supporter 2026 on the left sleeve. Every net dollar goes straight to the Blount County Pet Community Project. Pick your size, and choose whether to have it shipped or grab it at your local town hall.

Prefer to give without a shirt? Any amount helps, and it all goes to the same place.

Show your Blount County Pet Community Project Pride. You'll be part of the first county in Alabama to come together as a county to reduce shelter intakes and feral cat populations.

Together, we can make a difference.

Animal-Angels Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 41-3166394. Your contribution is tax-deductible to the extent it exceeds the fair market value of the shirt you receive (approximately $18).

https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/count-me-in-founding-supporter-shirt

Founding Supporter 2026 only available through Dec 31, 2026.