Part Two: Breathing Room and Big Swings

So yes, the vote to allow pit bulls to be adopted out was a huge win. It meant a lot to the staff, to the dogs, and to the public that had been waiting to adopt these amazing dogs. But as big as that win was, it was only the beginning.

What I didn’t mention in Part One was that when I first got to Palm Valley, the shelter had a 34 percent save rate. That means 7 out of every 10 animals coming in weren’t making it out alive. It wasn’t just pit bulls. It was cats. It was small dogs, big dogs, old dogs, puppies. Every kind of animal. That number hit me hard.

Walking through the kennels, it wasn’t just the animals that were suffering. The staff was too. This was deep South Texas. It was hot, and almost all the kennels were outdoors. There was one row in particular, wedged between three other rows of kennels, that created what felt like an oven. The heat would just get trapped in there.

One of the first things we did wasn’t some major program. It was basic maintenance. We broke out a few cinderblocks in that center row to create airflow. It dropped the temperature by almost 10 degrees. It made a real difference. Not something I would have expected to be working on, but again, I was learning fast. Every day brought something new.

The hardest part at the beginning was knowing where to start. There were problems everywhere. And every day, another 150 animals were coming in the door. It felt endless. But once I got to know the staff and understood who really wanted to be part of the solution, we started to move forward.

There were some truly amazing people at that shelter. People with a kind of passion I’ve rarely seen. These folks were trying to make a difference in a place where everything felt stacked against them. The shelter’s location didn’t help. It was way down in the southern tip of Texas, surrounded by rural towns. Volunteer support was tough to come by. Fosters were few. Even people living nearby didn’t know we were there. I remember taking an Uber to work and the driver, who had lived in the area his whole life, had no idea that a shelter with over 1,000 animals was sitting right there.

Once we found our people, the ones ready to do the hard stuff, we started digging into the numbers. We needed to understand how many animals were coming in, how many were leaving, and how many were just stuck. The goal was simple: save as many lives as we could, as quickly as we could.

Everything needed help. We needed more fosters. More volunteers. More adopters. More staff. Honestly, we needed more of everything. Except for one thing.

The rescue and transport team.

That small department was one of the most impressive groups I’ve ever seen in animal welfare. They were transporting animals twice a week to San Antonio, where they would then go up north to find homes. I had never seen anything like it. In my first year there, that team helped move over 12,000 animals out of Palm Valley. That’s more than most shelters even take in. It was incredible.

Although that team was doing amazing work and it gave us a little bit of breathing room, we knew we had to work on everything else. Transport helped in a time when we really needed it, but it wasn’t a long-term solution. It was expensive. Getting animals from the r Rio Grande Valley to San Antonio took people, time, vans, gas, crates, paperwork—you name it. And in my opinion, it just wasn’t something we could rely on forever.

To build something sustainable, we needed to do more right there in our own community. We needed local adoptions. We needed people in our city to know what was going on inside their own animal shelter.

So we made a simple but powerful move. We marked every single animal in the shelter as “available.”

Before that, only about 100 animals would show up on our website. After the change, almost 2,000 animals showed up. That one shift let the public see what was really going on. People were shocked. They had no idea we had that many animals on site.

We made that change right before one of the biggest events we’d ever be part of—the Clear the Shelters event. It was a two-day, fee-waived adoption event. Hundreds of dogs and cats, all looking for homes.

To be honest, we were nervous. The staff was nervous. It was a lot. This was a massive shelter with very little staff. Pulling off something that big felt like a reach. But we knew it was worth it.

Leading up to this event, the public was only allowed to see animals in the front building. That was maybe 75 to 100 dogs, and around 65 cats. But for this event, we made the whole shelter available. We opened everything. At both locations. For some people, it was the first time they ever walked the entire campus and realized how many lives we were trying to care for every day.

We only had about a week to prepare, but we got to work. We called on volunteers, leaned on the team, pulled in every bit of help we could. We broke into small groups. We assigned tour guides who would walk potential adopters through all the buildings and all the kennels, helping them meet the dogs and find the right fit.

And it worked.

In just two days, we completed over 400 adoptions.

It was exhausting. Everyone was tired. But it was the good kind of tired.

And more than anything, it showed the staff that this wasn’t impossible. That change was real. That success didn’t just live in reports or goals. It could happen right there, with the people already in the building.

Those problems that felt too big to fix? We were starting to chip away at them.

That first Clear the Shelters Event wasn’t just about getting animals into homes. It was a shift. A sign that we could do hard things. That this place, with all its challenges, had potential. That the staff, the volunteers, the community, and yes, even the animals, were ready for something better.

But that was just one moment. One weekend. One win.

This is just another part of the story. I honestly don’t even know how many parts there will be. There’s just so much more to say. So many more moments. Some were hard. Some were beautiful. Some were both.

Thanks for reading this far. More to come soon.