All the work we take on as animal-welfare professionals comes down to a fundamental objective: saving animal lives. Much of the time, that work is literal: enabling animals to live rather than die. But we save lives in other ways, too:

• Matching shelter animals with adopters who will gladly make a lifetime commitment to their new companion
• Providing a temporary but secure and nurturing home through fostering to animals in transition
• Managing feral cat colonies to improve the quality of those hardscrabble lives while ultimately reducing, through TNR, the number of cats who live this way
• Creating effective ID programs that make it more likely that lost pets and owners can be reunited
• Resolving behavior issues that might otherwise cause an animal to be surrendered
• Improving the quality of life for horses, and advocating to end inhumane practices

In this section, you’ll find programs that address all of these ways of saving lives, and many more.