Latham’s ” Shelter Me” series, presented by Ellen DeGeneres’ natural pet food company — Halo, Purely for Pets — has filmed several shelter animals that became service, therapy and search- andrescue dogs, or just good pets. Each documentary episode tells two or three stories.
Episode 4, “Shelter Me: New Beginnings,” is scheduled to premiere in Los Angeles on Oct. 8 and features volunteers in Idaho welcoming a plane packed with shelter dogs from Southern California. It also shows a trainer teaching shelters how to hold play groups for pooches. The next episode is tentatively set for February 2015 and will highlight how East Coast police departments turn shelter dogs into K-9s.
Before the first episode of the series aired in March 2012, Latham spent a year visiting shelters around the country. Last year, he started ShelterMe. com, where people can find pets facing euthanasia.
Twenty-five shelters in California, Idaho, New York, Massachusetts and North Carolina post photos, videos and stories about animals that need homes. Thousands of pets have been featured on the site, and most of them were adopted or taken in by a rescue, Latham said.
He has given a leg up to Animal Care Services of Long Beach, California, which was nearly full last week with 112 dogs, 138 cats, and some rabbits and turtles, said Kelly Miott, the shelter’s outreach coordinator.
“We have really limited space here,” she said. ” That’s why Steven supports us. Euthanasia is a fact of life. We are what the no-kill people are trying to get rid of.”
Miott said she tried for years to get dogs from Long Beach on airlifts to other cities without success, but Latham made it possible. He also connected her to a store where she could hold weekend adoption fairs.
Members of the no-kill movement are “scaring volunteers away because they are making it very clear that animals are dying at our shelter. We don’t try to hide that,” Miott said.
Francis Battista, cofounder of Best Friends Animal Society, a leading no-kill organization based in Utah, said finger-pointing won’t help animals.
“The no-kill movement seeks to collaborate with and support open admission shelters that are committed to do whatever it takes to end the killing of healthy, treatable shelter pets,” Battista said.
Latham’s website helped Alexandra Spinner of Los Angeles find a perfect feline companion last year.
“It wasn’t just a one-sided picture of a cat, but an interactive opportunity to know the animal more intimately,” she said. “I wanted a lap cat, and she was sitting there in a bright room, being petted. Had I not seen that video, I might have passed her by.”
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