Volunteer Barbara Ray, who worked with an Oregon shelter to enhance its care of rabbits, provides advice on collaboration that can help enhance shelter life for many small species

Diane Calkins/Click the Photo Connection

Shelter staff are often busy, stressed, and compelled to be in ten places at once. Improving the diet, housing, or general care of the shelter’s smallest residents may be one of the million things on a “to do” list, but there are 999,999 other things demanding attention, too. And because the majority of the animals the typical shelter cares for are dogs and cats, those animals are likely the primary focus.

But maybe you focus on rabbits—or rats, guinea pigs, birds, or other small animals. You believe your local shelter may need some help with their specialized care, and you’re wondering if you can provide it. Although the word “volunteer” often seems almost synonymous with “dog walker,” volunteers with other areas of expertise can lend their knowledge and time to organizations that want to give their smaller animals the best possible care and the best possible homes.

When Animal Sheltering put out a call for sources to interview for a series of rabbit-themed articles, the immediate response from the Greenhill Humane Society in Eugene, Oregon, was a suggestion that we speak to one of the shelter’s volunteers, Barbara Ray.

Ray, a member of a group called Rabbit Advocates in Portland, Oregon, has volunteered at Greenhill for more than six years. Today, before the shelter’s adoptable rabbits go to new homes, they are spayed or neutered, microchipped, litter-box trained, and placed on a proper diet. New adopters and people who already own rabbits receive helpful educational brochures about rabbit care.

For a would-be volunteer, venturing beyond criticism (whether it’s constructive criticism or otherwise) is essential to helping a shelter make changes. “I’ve talked to people [who say], ‘Oh, the local shelter is really awful, and blah blah blah blah,’ ” says Ray. Simply complaining won’t solve a thing, but getting involved can, she says. Ray believes that more and more volunteers are doing just that—“walking the walk,” she says.

If you’d like to lend a hand at your local shelter to enhance the care of small animals, try these tips:

Be diplomatic. Your success will depend in large part on how you temper your approach.

An existing connection with a board member eased Ray’s introduction to the Greenhill Humane Society. The veterinarian who treated Ray’s rabbits was also a member of the shelter’s board of directors. He asked Ray if she’d be willing to evaluate rabbit care and come up with some changes that would help the shelter. That invitation lent her credibility, says Ray—“instead of just being a stranger and saying, ‘You’re not doing that right.’ … That was my foot in the door.”

But even volunteers who don’t yet know a soul at the shelter in question can make a successful start by finding the right person to talk to, being friendly, explaining their qualifications, and offering their help. “If you can get your foot in the door and you can do it in a nonthreatening way—even though you’re anxious to see major changes—I think that’s the best advice that I can pass on,” says Ray.

See for yourself—and volunteer. First, visit the shelter to find out about their small animal care and resources. Get a feel for what the organization is trying to do in the community. Remain an observer at first. “I think one of the best ways to do it is kind of go in without immediately identifying your own personal agenda,” says Ray. Figure out what the staff do well and where they could use some help. Could you provide information, supplies, volunteer hours—or all three?

If the shelter has a volunteer program, attend an orientation to get an overview: you’ll likely get an informative shelter tour. Offer your services as an expert in small animal care. Most shelters have a shortage of volunteers who can help out with small critters, says Ray. Volunteers can help handle animals, clean cages, groom, or supervise certain animals in an exercise area.

After your first days or weeks at the shelter, it’s important to stay involved and to demonstrate your commitment. “I built up my credibility with [the shelter staff] on a personal basis because they saw me come regularly and they saw me be involved and they saw the improvements in the room,” says Ray.

Prioritize. If the time you spend at the shelter reveals that many changes are needed to bring small animal care up to par, start by considering what’s possible for the organization. Decide which improvements are the most important, and work on those first. “I did things gradually, and I kind of focused on one thing at a time,” says Ray. “And it wasn’t like all of a sudden, they were overspending their entire budget because of my suggestions; it was gradual.”

Be realistic—shelters don’t have unlimited resources, space, or staff. “You have to start somewhere,” says Ray, “and if you don’t start it in a way that is tactful, you often are not going to end up with a result that you’re happy with, and the shelter’s just going to think you’re a crackpot. … You’ve got to deal with what the reality at the shelters is.”

Two of Ray’s primary tasks were improving diet and litter for rabbits. Staff were providing bunnies with heaping amounts of pellets but no hay. On one visit, Ray noticed a bale of something on the floor that she thought might be either straw or poor-quality hay. Rabbits had litter boxes, but Ray wanted to change the clay cat litter that was used because the dust it produced could harm rabbits’ respiratory tracts.

Ray decided to tackle these changes right away. “We would see if the shelter had something else that they weren’t using that was on the premises, or if not, see if they could find an alternative that was financially acceptable and feasible for them,” she says.

With encouragement from Ray, Greenhill staff began using pelleted litter similar to a newspaper pelleted litter that Ray uses for her own rabbits.

Remember to take “baby steps.” On the food front, Ray asked permission to find a better-quality hay, and asked if she could bring some hay from home that her own rabbits had turned up their noses at. The staff member she approached said yes.

Ray took the shelter’s positive response to her initial suggestions as a good sign. “At that point, I could see that they were open and willing for changes as long as I could have a rationale for them and give them a concrete example of what would be an improvement … and that it was not financially burdensome,” she says. “Many shelters are on a shoestring and that can be a huge factor.”

Ray and the shelter worked together to improve housing in several stages. Bunnies used to live in old wire rabbit cages of different sorts; some were in poor condition, says Ray. First, the shelter installed shelving to improve the placement of cages. Next, Ray attempted some cage repairs and devised a method of cleaning that would make the housing last longer.

Use what’s available—and improvise. Unless you have hundreds of dollars in spare change lying around at home, money will be a limiting factor. But by being resourceful, you can stretch dollars and still help.

When the time comes to introduce new housing or other equipment, find out what the shelter already has. Ray wanted to make sure bunnies regularly got out of their cages for some hopping-around time. She found some folding dogexercise pens, gave them new life as bunny-exercise pens, and received the go-ahead to let rabbits exercise in them under supervision outside on the grass. Without spending any money, she’d given the rabbits their own playground.

The shelter also offered the use of one of its grassy, permanently fenced dog exercise areas for the bunnies’ use—fortified with wire fencing on the bottom so rabbits couldn’t dig their way out. “The bunnies love it because they can literally run around … and we have some kids’ plastic furniture in there, so that they’ve got things to climb on and to hide under,” says Ray. “And that attracts people’s attention because they look over there and they see this interesting looking pen and then they see a rabbit hopping around in it.”

Be resourceful. If the shelter doesn’t turn out to be a gold mine for your supply needs, try discount stores or thrift shops. Greenhill used plastic food bowls for their rabbits, but bunnies are likely to knock them over, play with them, and chew them. Ray had a brainstorm: “low coffee mugs, like the kind you’d find in an old-fashioned café or diner,” she says. The mugs are thick and heavy, and best of all, Ray found them at thrift shops for just a quarter. Borrowing from the horse world, she used rein clips to attach the mugs’ handles to the inside corners of the cages.

Ideas can come from all kinds of places. Ray even checked in to see what the fancy bunnies do: While visiting a rabbit show to check out the supply vendors, Ray found water bottle springs that held the rabbits’ water bottles to the outside of their cages perfectly.

Find a model. As you’re encouraging new policies or practices and helping to implement them, it’s helpful to point to a successful shelter that already has them in place. For Ray, that was the Oregon Humane Society. One of the largest shelters in the area, “it already had some very progressive programs for rabbit care,” says Ray.

The Portland shelter serves as a model for other organizations, and its practices lent credibility to Ray’s suggestions, she says. “It’s sort of like they’re almost the ideal that a lot of shelters look at and say, ‘Gosh, I wish I had that,’ and they also are the trendsetters.”

When Ray went to the board to propose that every rabbit be spayed or neutered before leaving the shelter with an adopter, she provided the Oregon Humane Society as an example; the bunnies that the organization adopted out were all sterilized. The board agreed to the proposal and pledged a set amount that the shelter could pay for each surgery.

Don’t be afraid to ask. If you think of something—a service, a product, a material—that could help the shelter’s small animals but is too pricey for the shelter to buy, seek other sources. Before the board had approved the plan to spay and neuter the shelter’s rabbits prior to adoption, Ray sought out vets who could offer free surgeries.

The veterinarian who had asked Ray to help the shelter agreed to perform one free rabbit spay/neuter surgery per month. Another vet had since joined Greenhill’s board of directors, and Ray had a connection—the vet had spayed her friend’s rabbits. Ray asked the vet if his clinic would do one surgery every month, and he secured the approval of the clinic’s owner.

The biggest changes to the rabbits’ room came with the help of a donor. A newcomer to the area, the donor was visiting with the shelter dogs when she saw Ray helping out with rabbits. “She said … ‘What would be your fondest wish, your heart’s desire, about this room?’ ” recalls Ray. High-quality, functional, attractive caging was Ray’s answer.

The donor hinted that she might fund the new housing, and Ray worked with a cage company in Portland to come up with the ideal setup for the shelter’s rabbits. Ray showed the plans to the donor, who paid the entire bill.

Use connections. The workplace adage “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know” holds true outside the corporate world—in fact, in the dollar-challenged world of nonprofits, it may be even more important to network. Personal contacts and businesses can help accelerate progress.

One of Ray’s projects was to provide Greenhill’s bunnies with toys and other fun bunny stuff. Her neighbor had some woodworking tools and agreed to help. Ray found and bought scraps of one-inchthick pine, and her neighbor cut them into three-inch squares with a quarter-sized hole in the middle of each. Ray threaded a metal shower curtain ring through the hole in each chew toy and attached them to the cages. Another neigh-bor provided ceramic tiles for rabbits to lie on to cool off.

A donation that proves inappropriate for other animals may be just the thing a bunny needs. When the shelter deemed a gift of two exercise pens too small for dogs, Ray eagerly accepted the offer to use them for rabbit playtime.

When Ray began volunteering, the walls in the rabbit room were made of wood, which made them difficult to clean, especially when the room housed unaltered bunnies with tendencies to spray. Ray enlisted her tile-providing neighbor to assist. “I pleaded with my neighbor who does flooring and countertops and stuff, and he agreed to donate his labor,” she says, “and then he found kind of a closeout for some Formica and we covered the wall with white Formica.” The new walls are much easier to clean.