COLLEGE STATION, Texas — In December of last year, Aggieland Humane Society's previous executive director stepped down with no clear person in line to fill in the position.
Now, Katrina Ross has come to Aggieland Humane Society all the way from Galveston to commit to a new community. However, she isn't unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the shelter's operations, as she previously worked at Aggieland Humane in the past.
"I started there in 2015 as a volunteer and I came on as a full time employee in 2018 and there I really helped build up the programs that they had in place to leave the shelter in a good position things like our dog enrichment program play groups especially when COVID came doing lots of transfers anything we could do to remain a 90% or above live release rate," Ross said.
Ross's experience at the Galveston Island Humane Society has shown her how to improve the quality of life for shelter animals as well, and she is looking to take some of her experiences learned in Galveston and implement them at Aggieland Humane.
"We had so many challenges like a lot of the shelters here in our region between short staffing, being chronically short staffed and just having so many animals and not many placements for them and similarly to what we're facing here, with the large dog crisis constantly having to deal with the overwhelming amount of large dogs coming in," explained Ross.
Ultimately, the new executive director is looking to bring positive change to our Brazos Buddies.
"I have a lot of exciting ideas I really wanna build upon some of the work we've already got going in the framework," Ross said when discussing her plans for the future. "Something's immediately that came to mind really building up the dog behavior program. I think that would make a world of difference for the dogs in our care here and then just really beefing up the things that we have with transfers and transports and we already have such a lovely network of fosters so I'm really excited to get to know them and build that up."
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