Greetings Volunteers!

April (and May) showers bring May flowers! We hope you’re able to find some time in your garden or out in nature to enjoy the springtime and to stop to smell the flowers 🙂

The Marin Humane leadership team continues to work on the phased reopening of the shelter. We are also looking at how to re-incorporate volunteers into our operations. If you have not already completed the Volunteer Survey, please take a few minutes to do so. Your feedback is extremely important to us and we value your input.

Shelter Update: There are currently 124 animals in our care: 107 animals in foster and 17 in the shelter. In the shelter are:

  • 3 Emergency Board dogs
  • 1 Box Turtle
  • 1 Russian Tortoise
  • 1 Parakeet
  • 1 Bearded dragon
  • 10 Cats

Adoptions Update: Since March 16th, 181 animals have been adopted! Adoptions have only decreased by 23% compared to the same period last year, which is darn good considering the shelter-in-place order and fewer animals have been available for adoption. In addition, our return rate during this period is 7% compared to 4% last year. Keri Fennell states: “I think that is pretty impressive since people are not meeting the animal before they commit. Also some of the returns could have been for animals that were adopted up to 30 days prior to March 16th.” 

Dogs Sniffing out COVID-19: “Dogs are being trained to sniff out COVID-19 in humans” is a terrific read! For many of us, this is not surprising. Dogs possess up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to about six million in us. And the part of a dog’s brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is, proportionally speaking, 40 times greater than ours. Go Dogs Go!

Thank You Michelle!: Three cheers to foster volunteer and Marin Humane administrative assistant, Michelle O., for recycling our Animal Services Officers’ old shirts into spiffy new masks to wear during their shifts! At a time when PPE is in short supply, these homemade masks are a gift, indeed. Check out this cool timelapse video to see how she made them!

Laughter is the best medicine! Over the past weeks, you sent us videos and photos of what keeps you amused while sheltering-in-place. For a few LOL moments, click on our Blog post where we share some of your videos. And here’s a fun slideshow of some of your pets! Thanks for all the submissions and keep on smiling!

Happy spring … keep well and stay healthy.

Anne and Candace