During my morning walk with my dog Frank, I was presented with the opportunity to save the life of another dog. It wasn’t anything heroic. I didn’t risk my life to save this dog, unless you count being licked to death. But I did stop to keep this dog from running into the street and was able to locate his home. But it wasn’t necessarily his life I saved.

Our intent at SavingLife is NOT to point fingers and chastise our peers. We understand that, just as in any industry, there are those who are not doing things properly and that they must either change their ways or find a new line of work, but publicly shaming them is not the way to go. More importantly though, often an organization identifies an issue and makes changes to correct the problems, but the focus ends up being on the problem instead of the fact that they are correcting the issues....

Too often those of us in the animal welfare industry don’t view our work in “business” terms. Using a phrase such as “inventory management” for our animals seems to reduce them to nothing more than an inanimate object. This is a big mistake on our part. Basic business principles apply to our work and nowhere does it say these terms only apply to non-living items. We must start to trust ourselves and one another and know that we don’t look at animals the same way we do a refrigerator, yet we...