March was a busy month at Michigan Pet Alliance. We hosted the Playtime and Enrichment training webinar for cats, followed by the virtual roundtable with Protect MI Pet.
If you haven’t heard, there’s a lot of excitement building among Michigan’s animal welfare advocates. Protect MI Pet is taking it to the voters to decide if our state should have a publicly accessible, searchable database of convicted animal abusers. If you’re hiring a new dog walker or a cat sitter, should you be able to check, free of charge, whether or not they’re a convicted animal abuser?
And it doesn’t stop there. Right now, if pets are seized from a suspected abuser, they can sit for months or years in animal shelters, waiting to learn their fate. Will they be returned to their suspected abuser or will they be allowed to find a loving home? The justice system moves slowly, and our pets’ lives are already short.
Shelter staff and volunteers suffer right along with those confined animals, watching them linger as they do their very best to care for animals the shelter does not yet own. The Protect MI Pet ballot initiative will allow seized animals to be rehomed in a more reasonable timeframe after the probable cause hearing. This would be a massive win for animals and could possibly elevate their status in Michigan from inanimate property, where it sits now.
Watch our virtual panel discussion, which took place March 20, 2023.