Lakeland Animal Shelter Mission:
Our mission is to enrich the lives of both animals and people throughout our community.
Lakeland Animal Shelter Vision:
The Lakeland Animal Shelter hopes to help create a community where all lives are valued and respected. We envision achieving zero tolerance for ending the lives of savable pets in our community.
Our Philosophy:
Wikipedia defines a no-kill shelter as an “animal shelter where animals are only euthanized if they are too sick to be treated or too aggressive to be suitable for adoption. No-kill shelters reject euthanasia as a means of population control.” This definition is 100% consistent with Lakeland Animal Shelter’s policies and practices!
However, We believe that it is important to support quality animal care organizations throughout our state as well as our country. For this reason we believe that the use of potentially derogatory terms such as “kill” or “no-kill” is neither constructive for animal care agencies or informative for the public and can actually be damaging to the humane animal movement as a whole. We therefore resist being labeled in this way.
We annually accept approximately 2,500 stray or neglected animals that have been found within Walworth County, Wisconsin. We do not limit this intake based on health, temperament or age. This means that at any given time we have an in-shelter dog population of 40 to 60 dogs and a combination in-shelter/in-foster cat population that consists of 150-400 cats. Each of these animals is treated with respect, kindness and compassion throughout their stay with us which can range for one week to more than a year in some cases.
Each animal is an individual and given individual consideration, therefore we have no time limit on how long we house and care for each animal. Our practices are consistent with the belief that each animal in our care deserves a chance be adopted into a new home. This belief does not simply apply to those animals that are healthy and of acceptable temperament upon intake. Unless the animal is “too sick to be treated or too aggressive to be suitable for adoption,” we go to great lengths to rehabilitate animals that we receive that are, or become… unhealthy, sick, or of unacceptable temperament into animals that are healthy and of appropriate temperament for the adoptive home to which they are going.
