SaL10 - Jenna Riedi

The dog pictured above, Raven, is available for adoption at Austin Pets Alive! To see all our adoptable animals, please visit www.austinpetsalive.org.

In previous years, I sent out a fund raising plea every fall for Elmbrook Humane Society, but this year I am doing it for an even more worthy cause, Austin Pets Alive (APA)! This organization is working to make the city of Austin a no kill city - where no companion animal is killed unless it is terminally ill and suffering or extremely dangerous to itself and others. How they mainly do this is they have an agreement with the local municipal shelter. This shelter, known as TLAC, will give APA it's "kill list" the day before the animals are to be killed. APA then comes in and pulls as many of these animals as it can! Because of this, the kill rate of the entire city has gone from 50% to under 30% in just two years and is continuing to drop!

APA has recently moved into their first brick and mortar facility (yes, until a month ago, every animal pulled from TLAC went to a foster home - they have over 800 foster families!!) and with this new facility, they project to save an additional 1,000 animals more than the 3,000 already projected for the next year! But to save these animals, they need the money to do it. It takes $100 for APA to save an animal from TLAC. They are now doing a Save a Life Drive, where they hope to raise $50,000 total to therefore get the funds to save half of those extra 1,000.

I am writing to you to ask that you please donate to my Save a Life Drive page. Every amount counts, so even if you can only give $10 it goes a LONG way at Austin Pets Alive (trust me!!). Please give what you can - maybe skip going out to dinner one night next week and donate what you saved so that you can help save a life. And you can learn more about APA here: www.austinpetsalive.org. If you know of anyone that may be interested in learning about Austin Pets Alive and possibly supporting them, please send the link to this web page to them! Thank you for reading this, learning more about the amazing organization I work for, and (hopefully) considering to support such a worthy mission!

As the new Austin Pets Alive building is coming together, we are more and more capable of saving that many more pets from euthanasia. The Save a Life Drive gives us the ability to continue saving lives when adoptions and donations tend to decrease in the fall after school starts. As you can imagine, the numbers of animals needing to be saved does not correspondingly decrease this time of year so it is even more critical that we band together to give all those dogs and cats a happy ending.

Each animal costs us about $100 for spay/neuter, vaccinations, microchipping, testing, and parasite treatments. If we raise those funds, it will be that much easier for APA to continue paying the costs for housing, adoption sites, vehicles, and all the other costs that go into saving lives.

My goal is to raise $1500 to save 15 lives!