Animal shelters work to get more lost dogs home

Sometimes, a bit of encouragement is all you need to try something new. That’s the idea behind challenges that encourage Best Friends Network Partners to try different ways of doing things, all with the goal of saving more lives.

Recently, Best Friends invited partners to join a month-long Return to Home challenge, which focused on getting more lost dogs back to their homes.

[A well-rounded approach to saving more dogs and cats]

To participate, organizations agreed to try tactics from a list of proven ways to get lost dogs home — and faster. The list included waiving or reducing the fee to reclaim a pet, holding free or low-cost microchipping clinics, ensuring that animal services officers have microchip scanners, hanging flyers in neighborhoods where dogs are picked up, and using nextdoor.com or other local social media to advertise found dogs.

Implementing strategies like these means more lives are saved because lost pets end up in shelters far too often, and that can put their lives at risk.

One hundred and forty-four shelters and rescue organizations participated in the challenge, and when it was over, they had collectively returned 487 more lost dogs to their homes compared to the same time period the previous year.

[Changes to rescue, adoption practices save more animals]

Those with the most success received $10,000 grants, and all participating organizations received at least $1,000 in grant funds, for a total of $345,000 given to partners to support them in sustaining the new methods they tried during the challenge.

The best part is knowing that more dogs separated from their families got home safe and sound — and that many others will, too.

This article was originally published in the March/April 2025 issue of Best Friends magazine. Want more good news? Become a member and get stories like this six times a year.

Our goal at Best Friends is to support all animal shelters in the U.S. in reaching no-kill in 2025. No-kill means saving every dog and cat in a shelter who can be saved, accounting for community safety and good quality of life for pets. 

Shelter staff can’t do it alone. Saving animals in shelters is everyone’s responsibility, and it takes support and participation from the community. No-kill is possible when we work together thoughtfully, honestly, and collaboratively.