The city’s animal shelter is hiring a “pet reunification specialist” with a $50,000 grant from a national animal welfare nonprofit.

The new position at Memphis Animal Services is the last piece in an evolution of the city agency best known as the keeper of the city animal shelter, where the animal population grows as control officers respond to calls by picking up dogs and cats.

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Alexis Pugh, MAS director, said on the The Daily Memphian’s On the Record podcast that the first step for animal control officers used to be to simply place the animal on the vehicle when receiving a call then moving on to next call and ultimately bring the animals to the shelter. 

Listen to the entire interview as part of this article.

“We’ve really changed that mindset and we are going to be better off if that officer places that pet on a leash and talks to neighbors — walks to those doors,” she said.

The MAS vehicles come with scanners so the officers can read microchips to quickly determine where a pet lives.

A past study by the city agency shows four of five animals for which it receives a call has a home. The average distance that pet is from its home was less than half a mile.

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“These animals are near their homes, and the more we can do to facilitate these systems where they can get back home without leaving the neighborhood where they live, the more successful we’re going to be in these efforts and getting these pets back home,” Pugh said.

Most of the animals are dogs.

“You can’t have dogs run at large according to the law,” she said.

She added that the faster pets can be found and returned home, the better.

Cats are a different matter, with some of them defined as “community” cats that have a stable food source and others with a single owner.

“What we would encourage people to do with cats is not to pick up that cat and bring it to the shelter,” Pugh said. “Let’s try to figure out who is that owner, who is that food source.”

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As with dogs, there are clues like an ear clip that indicates the cat has been spayed or neutered and might be feral or might otherwise have someone caring for it.

The pet reunification specialist will work to improve the number of pets encountered by Memphis Animal Services that are returned to their owners.

“This new position is really going to be for the leader of that effort,” she said. “The first step is going to be really looking outside of Memphis at other communities that have much higher return to owner rates than we do — both in the field and at the shelter.”

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In Memphis, the return to owner rate is 8% compared to 50% in some other cities of similar size.

MAS has a “pet resource” department that focuses on keeping pets out of the shelter by providing resources such as food to pet owners who need help, as well as foster pet care, pet rescues and adoption counselors. But the return-to-owner efforts haven’t had a similar focus.

“So we think by using this grant fund … to really focus on this, we are going to be able to see a clear, defined metric level increase in how many return-to-owners we do per year,” Pugh said.

The grant is from Maddie’s Fund, with Memphis Animal Services being one of several shelters or animal agencies working as part of the Human Animal Support Services Pilot Project and American Pets Alive on a variety of new ideas and concepts.

The $50,000 grant went to those shelters and other programs for each to improve one metric where they are lagging.

“For us, the answer was clear that it was return to owner,” Pugh said.