--Merritt Clifton
From ANIMAL PEOPLE
ANIMAL PEOPLE visited the Bosler Humane Society
in western Massachusetts.
The site is a wooded former hunting camp, on a private lake. The cat quarters are appropriately modified wooden playhouses, each with an exercise yard, grouped like a miniature New England village beneath a single high roof.
The dogs in longterm care are grouped more-or-less by size in
spacious yards with bunk-buildings, a variety of views, and access at times to a pond. While most were outside when we visited, several were inside watching a John Wayne movie on television. Founder Elaine Bosler insisted that John Wayne movies are canine favorites.
As animal control contractor for the towns of Barre and
Baldwinville since 1974, the Bosler Humane Society may have been doing no-kill animal control for longer than any other agency in the U.S. Impounded dogs occupy ordinary cinder-block-and-chain-link cells most of the time, but are rotated in and out of a large exercise yard.
The Bosler Humane Society facilities are neat, clean,
attractive, and remarkably seldom visited. Donors, adopters, and
people looking for lost pets are welcome, but Bosler makes little
effort to pull in others.
Elaine Bosler seems still scarred by the hostility she met 35
years ago, when the only "shelter" she had was, as she recalls,
" Twenty-seven dogs tied to 27 trees and scarcely enough money to buy food."
The Bosler Humane Society has survived and grown with
volunteer help, consignment sales, and bequests--but it hasn't
built the high adoption rate it could have, expanded the on-site
neutering clinic to handle the volume of animals Bosler dreams of
fixing, or completed the new shelter as rapidly as Bosler would
like, because the cash flow it needs has yet to be developed.
The Massachusetts animal protection donor base is perhaps the
most generous in the U.S. The Animal Rescue League of Boston and the Massachusetts SPCA, for example, have reserves of $104 million and $75 million, respectively, as the two richest animal protection groups in the U.S. and, between them, they have increased those reserves by $150 million during Bosler's years of operation.
Bosler, however, isn't even getting a penny for each dollar
that either the Animal Rescue League or the MSPCA raises. The Bosler mailing list, compiled from direct contacts, is responsive,
according to board president Ann Bent, but only numbers in the
hundreds because the volume of direct contacts remains quite low.
--Merritt Clifton
From ANIMAL PEOPLE
The Largest NO KILL Shelter in N.E.
