Animal Diplomacy Read transcript of online forum
hosted by Rebecca Guinn on "How
to negotiate with public officials
to make a difference for the animals."
A Life-Changing Experience
By Jim Davis, Staff Writer
Rebecca Guinn is the program director for No More Homeless Pets Atlanta. This is her story.
Each of us has faced turning points ... those memorable crossroads, those defining moments that alter the course of a person's life.
Although she didn't know it at the time, Rebecca Guinn stumbled into a life-changing experience when she found a dog struggling to free itself from a barbed wire fence, and suddenly faced a choice between two very divergent paths.
Many homeless animals in Atlanta, Georgia, can be thankful that she took the "path less traveled by." For it was a path that led Guinn to a new career and to Best Friends Animal Society.
Until just a couple of years ago, Guinn's life had been proceeding quite nicely down a conventional career track.
She had been a graphic designer for a while following graduation from Antioch College in Ohio, and in the mid-1990s returned to school and earned her law degree. She began practice with a small firm in Atlanta in 1996, handling white-collar criminal defense cases in federal court.
She had a highly respected position, a very comfortable salary. But then the dog got caught in the fence.
"I heard a dog scream for its life by my house," Guinn recalls.
The animal was thoroughly tangled in the sharp barbs of the fence. Guinn and her friend, Sharon Eikey, were unable to free the animal, so they called animal control, which came, successfully freed the dog, and prepared to haul it away.
Guinn and Eikey had a question first: What would become of the dog?
The answer was short and to the point. If the owner didn't claim the dog within five days, it would be euthanized.
That wasn't at all what they had bargained for, so Guinn and Eikey started making calls to animal control to see if the dog had gone home yet. On the third day, they visited the shelter. And the fourth. On the fifth day, they adopted the dog.
But during her visits to animal control, Guinn saw and heard things that shocked her.
"It was the first time I had ever seen what was really a high-kill shelter, and I began to realize first-hand the enormity of the problems," she says.
The sad fact was that this particular animal control shelter euthanized 85 percent of the animals that came through its doors.
"I had no idea how awful it was. And also, the animals I saw in the shelter seemed like perfectly nice, lovable (animals)," she adds.
Unable to keep her newfound dog because she had another dog at home who was dog-aggressive, Guinn began searching on-line for a rescue group to take him. She soon found one that would keep the animal in foster care until a permanent home was found. But even after the dog was placed, Guinn's interest in the homeless animal problem persisted.
Then, in a fateful exchange, a friend who had been involved with feral cat trap/neuter/return programs for years told her about Best Friends. She gave Guinn a book about Best Friends, and told her about an upcoming No More Homeless Pets conference in Seattle.
Guinn and Eikey quickly made reservations to attend the conference, held in October 2001.
Guinn says she and Eikey had no idea what they were getting into, but that they were "enchanted" and "really, really moved by Best Friends and the No More Homeless Pets message."
She recalls hearing Best Friends' Francis Battista talk about creating opportunities for groups to work together, and thinking of how that cooperation was needed in Atlanta, where there was considerable animosity between the various rescue agencies.
Upon return home, the two women started work on an organization of their own. Within a few months, the Lifeline Animal Project (LAP) was incorporated.
And while that may seem like a short time span in which to put together such an organization, Guinn sees it differently: "An animal dies every six minutes here. It was a long time in animal lives."
Over the ensuing months, LAP devised a series of programs to save more of Atlanta's homeless dogs and cats. An initial goal was to find ways to get the disparate rescue groups to work together.
"The focus here is to create opportunity for collaboration among different groups and rescues, and spay/neuter programs, so that we can promote the adoption of pets," Guinn says. "The way we do that is to create opportunities for collaboration, and provide supportive services to different rescues and animal welfare organizations."
As LAP's Atlanta programs continued to grow, Guinn took her connection to Best Friends a step further. In October of 2003 she was hired as Best Friends' community program coordinator for the Southeast region, basically ending her lucrative legal career.
When Best Friends decided to focus attention on a number of cities nationwide, Atlanta seemed a natural choice, and Guinn was already in place to head up the program. By spring, the LAP programs and Best Friends had merged to create No More Homeless Pets Atlanta.
The results have been encouraging.
More volunteers and activists have joined the fight to save homeless animals in Atlanta. Groups that previously worked independently are now marshalling their forces cooperatively. And the city is among those at the forefront of a national No More Homeless Pets campaign that is gaining momentum every day.
""Best Friends drew a line in the sand and said 'We're not going to kill homeless animals,'" Guinn says.
"The Best Friends message is very positive -- a message of hope that something can be done and we are going to do it, and it has a lot of resonance with people and brings people into animal rescue who otherwise wouldn't be here."
Those people new to the fight are also taking the road less traveled, and they too are making a difference.
