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Episode Notes

In this episode of The Open Sanctuary Podcast, Executive DirectorThe individual formally in charge of final decision making at an organization, who sometimes works closely with the organization’s Board of Directors. Sometimes a Founder is an Executive Director, especially early in a nonprofit’s growth stages. Mckenzee and NonprofitA non-governmental organization whose primary purpose is something other than selling goods or services. Specialist Julia celebrate our seventh year of operation by discussing our year in review! We know that our audience of compassionate caregivers is often caught up in the day-to-day work of direct care for animals, so this is your chance to catch up with what’s new this year in freely accessible resources to help you do the work of operating your organization and caring for your residents! To get a rundown on the work we’ve done this year to help you, check out this episode! 

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This Episode’s Referenced Open Sanctuary Project Resources:

• Basic Sheep And Goat Care Course Part 2 | The Open Sanctuary Project
• 5 More Easy And Inexpensive Enrichment Tips Infographic | The Open Sanctuary Project
• Winter Staff Safety Infographic | The Open Sanctuary Project
• Behavior 102: Communication Infographic | The Open Sanctuary Project
• A Quick Guide To Effective Tabling Infographic | The Open Sanctuary Project
• The S.P.I.D.E.R. Enrichment Infographic Framework | The Open Sanctuary Project
• Visual Barriers For Residents? Infographic | The Open Sanctuary Project
• HPAI In Mammalian Farmed Animal Species: FAQ | The Open Sanctuary Project
• Electrical Safety Basics For Farmed Animal Sanctuaries (w/Michael Sizer) | The Open Sanctuary Project
• How To Conduct A Cow Health Check | The Open Sanctuary Project
• An Introduction To The Care Of Fishes For Your Animal Sanctuary | The Open Sanctuary Project
• A Guide To Fostering Farmed Animal Agency In Sanctuary Education | The Open Sanctuary Project
• Caring For Pregnant And Lactating Sheep And Goats Part One: Pregnancy (vet-reviewed)| The Open Sanctuary Project
• Caring For Pregnant And Lactating Sheep And Goats Part Two: Labor And Delivery (vet-reviewed) | The Open Sanctuary Project
• Caring For Pregnant And Lactating Sheep And Goats Part Three: Lactation (vet-reviewed) | The Open Sanctuary Project
• Research Round-Up: A Guide For Farmed Animal Sanctuaries (collaboration with Faunalytics) | The Open Sanctuary Project
• Creating A Vaccination Program For Pig Residents At Your Animal Sanctuary (vet-reviewed) | The Open Sanctuary Project
• What Is The Veterinary Review Initiative? | The Open Sanctuary Project

Episode Transcript (Auto-GeneratedThe following content was transcribed through an automated process and may contain transcription errors or misspellings.)

Mckenzee Griffler: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Open Sanctuary Podcast. I’m Mckenzee Griffler, executive director, and today I’m with my friend and nonprofit specialist, Julia Magnus. Today we have a very special episode for you, as well as a call to action. For those of you who utilize our resources regularly, you know that the Open Sanctuary Project is a global lifeline for farmed animal sanctuariesAnimal sanctuaries that primarily care for rescued animals that were farmed by humans.. In a world where these vital havens often face challenges with limited resources and specialized knowledge gaps, OSP provides invaluable support. As you probably know, we offer free, comprehensive, well-researched resources that allow sanctuaries to responsibly create and successfully manage a farmed animal sanctuaryAn animal sanctuary that primarily cares for rescued animals that were farmed by humans. and provide the best care possible for animals to help them live long, healthy, happy lives free of exploitationExploitation is characterized by the abuse of a position of physical, psychological, emotional, social, or economic vulnerability to obtain agreement from someone (e.g., humans and nonhuman animals) or something (e.g, land and water) that is unable to reasonably refuse an offer or demand. It is also characterized by excessive self gain at the expense of something or someone else’s labor, well-being, and/or existence.. Today, we release this podcast to highlight the work that we have done this year in 2024 to help every caregiverSomeone who provides daily care, specifically for animal residents at an animal sanctuary, shelter, or rescue. get access to the knowledge that they need in order to give the animal residents in their care the most compassionate care possible. We hope that this may help busy caregivers have a chance to catch up on what they might have missed and also offer our supporters some more insight on the work that we do daily to make every sanctuary a success story. So, I think it’s important if you’re a podcast listener of the Open Sanctuary podcast, you probably already know this, but I think it’s important to point out that we are a multimedia resource. Julia, do you want to give a little overview of the kinds of resources that we offer and why we offer information in so many different formats?

Julia Magnus: Absolutely. So, our resources and our approach are designed to accommodate an audience at any level in their caregiving journey. So, that might be people who are absolutely new, people who are really experienced and already heavily involved with sanctuaries and have really busy schedules. And we know that time is really one of the most important resources that folks have. So, offering our information in multiple formats helps people access it more easily. It helps them to access it in ways that fit into their timeline, into their schedule. So, let’s talk about some of the different things I mentioned that we’re just as helpful to the starting newcomer to the movement as maybe the more experienced person who might want to peruse like advanced resources. But for the beginner, one great place to start is our courses. We have hours and hours worth of course material that upon completion you get a nice little certificate for and that’s just sort of a little bow on the box of the compassionate knowledge you get from it. I think the courses are amazing and we’ll talk a bit more about the new one a little bit later. We also have infographics which are not only useful for reminders for example of maybe some important issues you might want to keep in mind as you’re navigating throughout your day. You could post them in your barn for reminders. You can share them with the public. You can use them in educational training. Infographics are lovely and many of them feature our very cute ambassador design residents. We’re also really well known for our written resources. That’s probably what we’re best known for. They’re comprehensive, detailed. We do have an array of many resources that are shorter on smaller subjects so you can grab some quick info on a subject. And then we have very in-depth resources. And then of course we have this podcast. So this just helps everyone get the info they need in a way that makes sense for them and their time.

Julia Magnus: And also for accessibility purposes because not everybody can look at a screen to access information. So we hope things like the podcast are helpful for people in meeting them where they’re at regardless of why they might be at that space.

Mckenzee Griffler: Yeah. And that’s a really important value that we hold dear at OSP: accessibility. So, you mentioned the courses and I know that this year we were really excited to release another course and that is not a small feat. That is something that took Tara, our senior adviser, many, many, many months to create, to envision, to get reviewed, to have veterinarians take a look at it. But, in case the audience isn’t aware, why don’t you talk a little bit more about our compassionate care classroom courses?

Julia Magnus: Yeah. Yeah. As I mentioned, our compassionate care classroom has innovative courses for sanctuary caregivers, volunteers, anyone who’s looking to build knowledge on important animal sanctuary subjects. And I even know municipal animal shelterAn organization, either government-funded and maintained or not-for-profit and funded by charitable contributions, with a physical infrastructure in which homeless animals are cared for and offered for adoption. staff who’ve taken these courses because sometimes farmed animalsA species or specific breed of animal that is raised by humans for the use of their bodies or what comes from their bodies. do come into shelters. So, they were happy to have access to this for free, be able to get a little bit more insight on how to appropriately handle those animals. Each of the courses has carefully written lessons, photos, videos, brief quizzes for knowledge checks throughout, which I actually super love the quizzes. I find them to be really thoughtful and they really help cement in my brain what I need to take away from this course. And as you mentioned, these courses are reviewed. They’re peer-reviewed by sanctuary experts. Medical information is given review by qualified veterinarians that have sanctuary experience. So, you can absolutely trust what you learn from these courses. And again, you get the little certificate at the end. The certificate is really nice.

Mckenzee Griffler: You can frame it.

Julia Magnus: You can frame it. And also in case sanctuaries want to use the courses as a way of onboarding new volunteers or caregivers, we can verify that those certificates are legitimate. So, it’s just one more way that we can help take a little bit of training work off of sanctuaries. Though, as the course videos all say, the course is not a substitute for hands-on training.

Mckenzee Griffler: That’s such a good point. Well, they’re not a substitute for hands-on training. They are a really helpful primer though and introduction to what you’re going to need to know as a volunteer and that’s a huge time-saver.

Julia Magnus: Absolutely. So let’s talk about that new course.

Julia Magnus: All right. Well, let me quickly just, I can’t skip over the chickens. I have to. Chickens are my friends. So, let me just mention that we do have in the classroom right now basic chicken care parts one and two. And something that’s worth mentioning about those courses is that there is the difference in the care you provide to large breedDomesticated animal breeds that have been selectively bred by humans to grow as large as possible, as quickly as possible, to the detriment of their health. chickens. And so some sanctuaries care for non-large breedA domesticated animal breed that has not been specifically engineered to grow as quickly as possible for the purpose of human consumption. In resources at The Open Sanctuary Project, "Heritage" breeds of turkeys, for instance, are "non-large breed", even if they are physically quite big. chickens. Some sanctuaries care for exclusively large breed chickens and some care for both. And if you want to learn about both, you don’t have to follow both tracks in their entirety. But there are supplemental materials that are designed so that you don’t have to redo the same work where there’s overlap in care practices, you can just do the supplements so that you learn whatever additional info you need. And I think that’s a pretty cool feature and time-saver as well. And then the other course that’s available is sheep and goat part one and that is basic sheep and goat care. So onto the new one is sheep and goat part two. I was privileged to review this course as somebody who doesn’t know a ton about sheep and goats and it was rough. I can say that in all sincerity. It is about 8 hours worth of material on more advanced topics in sheep and goat care. I really was fascinated. I feel like it is broken down into easily digestible chunks. So you can do, you know, 20 minutes of study in this course, put it down, come back to it, and it’s not like you have to go back and catch up. The way these courses are designed are really easy to fit into your schedule. And this one is no exception. I actually just geeked out and did a lot of it in one sitting because I found it so interesting. I loved the videos. And again, the quizzes might sound like a drag, but they’re actually really helpful to me. I can’t really say enough about how awesome this course is. And I know that Tara puts a lot of work into making sure that those quizzes are relevant and not just a time sink. So, you can feel good knowing that even in the quizzes, a lot of love and care was put into them.

Mckenzee Griffler: I feel like this is a huge accomplishment. If you care for sheep and goats, I cannot recommend it highly enough. I learned so many things I did not even know were a thing. So, that’s a little bit about the courses. You also talked about infographics, and I know that we released a lot of infographics this year, especially just because they are really appreciated by the sanctuary community. We get a lot of great feedback about them. So, why infographics? And I think I know the answer.

Julia Magnus: Well, I feel like the common theme that we’re going to continue to return to is that people are so busy. People in direct care work are constantly running, dealing with one situation to the next, and it can take a lot of time to review a written resource that’s comprehensive. And you know, we need to do that, but sometimes you want a quick refresher or you might want to have something to post as a reminder. There are just a lot of benefits to having an easy infographic reference to a lot of these points and they are something that you can display at your sanctuary to help educate visitors as well. I know that this year we released some infographics about safety. We released some infographics about enrichment. We released some behavior infographics and even things like table-ability. You know, these are all hopefully just helpful tools to help the busy caregivers, busy volunteers, busy sanctuary folks get and disseminate information as effectively as possible depending on their audience. Yeah. Yeah. And so we actually picked out a couple of highlights from our infographics from this year that are going to be included in the show notes. So if you’re interested in a sampling of infographics that cover all those various topics, go ahead and check out the show notes. And you can also dive in further to any one of those subjects and to more comprehensive resources, written resources if you’d like.

Mckenzee Griffler: And for those who are listening to the Open Sanctuary podcast and who aren’t brand new to it, you might know that this is our second year of the Open Sanctuary podcast, which honestly, I can’t believe the time’s really flown by. I personally love making these podcasts and listening to my colleagues have very wise thoughts on it. But let’s talk a little bit more about the podcast. Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of what we’re doing here, the why, and you know, how it’s been received in the community. I feel like a week doesn’t go by where we don’t get some really very kind words about this podcast. Some of the things that I’ve heard are this just really helps me stay on my toes, keeps me thinking. I know so many people who are listening to this podcast when they’re going to and fro from vet visits. I have a friend who’s in physical therapy right now and she listens to the podcast while she’s on her treadmill. It’s really just if you got a phone and you got your headphones, you can just plug in and take your half-hour power of whatever it is you’re doing. If you’re going about doing chores, this is something that you can just plug in and absorb by osmosis. It’s like a very pleasant way to get excited about a subject or reintroduced to something that you haven’t thought about in a while. And again, if you want on any given subject that we podcasted about, you can always dive in further into the written resources. But I think it’s great because it just makes everything so much easier for folks and more accessible.

Julia Magnus: Yeah. And as always, if there are any topics that you all haven’t heard us talk about on the podcast, we would probably be more than happy to try to take a swing at it. So, what are some podcasts that folks who might be new to this podcast, who aren’t avid listeners like myself, who listen to everything that we put out on this feed, what might be some highlights that are worth exploring? I’m going to reveal my shocking bias. I was really, really proud of the discussion that Tara and I had about roosters. I’m always going to big up the roosters anytime I can. But that was actually a two-part podcast. And there are a couple of podcasts. I think Indoor Chickens was another one that was two parts just so we could really have a full conversation about it. I’ve learned so much from the podcast that Andy, our education specialist, has done with Emily Trinetti. Emily and Andy collaborated on creating a wonderful agency guide when it comes to education around farmed animalA species or specific breed of animal that is raised by humans for the use of their bodies or what comes from their bodies. species. And that guide, I think it’s like 58 pages. It’s amazing. And it’s also available in broken-down chunks if you want to just do a chunk at a time. But their discussions on the podcast are just another really helpful way to access that information. And I’ve really, really nerded out on their episodes as well. And of course, in addition to all of those things, we’d be remiss not to mention our bread and butter resources, veganAn individual that seeks to eliminate the exploitation of and cruelty to nonhuman animals as much as possible, including the abstention from elements of animal exploitation in non-food instances when possible and practicable as well. The term vegan can also be used as an adjective to describe a product, organization, or way of living that seeks to eliminate the exploitation of and cruelty to nonhuman animals as much as possible (e.g., vegan cheese, vegan restaurant, etc.). butter of course, our written resources. Right now we are somewhere in the 780 mark of resources freely available on our website and we have more to come before the end of the year. Every single year we’re coming into our eighth year next year. We cover even more topics for sanctuary and rescue friends all around the world and we’re always adding to that endless list of additional resources offerings that we would like to create for the community. While there’s a lot of new stuff on our website and we hope that you check some of it out, let’s talk about some of the highlights from this year. Yeah, there are so many of them. I want to mention before I dive into this first one, which is a little bit of a somber subject. In addition to adding new resources all the time, another thing that we do is update our existing resources a lot. We update all the time. And so this first resource I want to mention is highly pathogenic avian influenza in mammalian farmed animal species, an FAQ. So yes, this is a sad subject. HPAI continues to be a significant existential threat for sanctuaries both from a disease perspective and also from a legal control measure perspective. And the developments keep unfolding with this one. And this year saw some new developments, namely that HPAI has jumped over from birds into, well it has been in wild living mammals for some time, but it has jumped over to domesticatedAdapted over time (as by selective breeding) from a wild or natural state to life in close association with and to the benefit of humans mammals and that includes cowsWhile  "cows" can be defined to refer exclusively to female cattle, at The Open Sanctuary Project we refer to domesticated cattle of all ages and sexes as "cows.", goats. It infected some alpacas. It just occurred in pigs and humans are starting to get it. So we have this resource which started out when it jumped into goats and it was in HPAI and in ruminants, small ruminants and it over time has evolved into what it is now. Every week, at least once a week, we’re updating and usually it’s more like two to three times a week. We actually have eight resources on HPAI in total and I think we’re messing around in there. Every one of them has been updated at least several times. So that’s one new resource and a bunch of others that we are constantly working on to make sure that the information you have access to is accurate, actionable, and up-to-date. So, that’s a big one. Other new resources, let’s move away from that sadness. That was awful. But yeah, we have resources on things like infrastructure for your sanctuary. So, there was a really exciting one that came out in the beginning of the year, which was a collaboration with Michael Cizer on electrical safety basics. Another thing that we do in our resource creation is we have resources that are vet-reviewed. So, another new one this year, how to conduct a cowWhile  "cow" can be defined to refer exclusively to female cattle, at The Open Sanctuary Project we refer to domesticated cattle of all ages and sexes as "cows." health checkThe Open Sanctuary Project uses the term "health check" to describe health evaluations performed by caregivers who are not licensed veterinarians. While regular health checks are an important part of animal care, they are not meant to be a replacement for a physical exam performed by a licensed veterinarian., which was vet-reviewed. I’m pretty excited about this next one because it represents our jump into offering guidance on an entirely new species. So, this was authored by Cameron Edwards, who is one of the founders of Stillwater Micro Sanctuary, and they are pretty well known for their loving care of our friends, the fishesWhile "fish" is often used to refer to multiple fishes, we use "fishes" to underscore that each fish should be considered as an individual with their own needs, preferences, and abilities, rather than as a monolith consisting of thousands of different species.. So, Cameron wrote an excellent introduction to the care of fishes for your animal sanctuary, which covers all kinds of things I did not know. It even has a handy-dandy video that comes along with it. I highly encourage you to check that one out, and we look forward to more on fishes coming soon. Yeah, that was really cool. I do not know much of anything about the lifelong care of fishes, but just reading that was so inspiring, I want to say, and it made me feel like I could do it. And I’ve definitely never felt that way before about fishes. Yeah. I’m sort of like, “You’re really cool, but I don’t know what to do for you.” What do I do? And I think it is pretty much like the first compassionate care guide of its kind on fishes. So, it’s really exciting, honestly, and I just love it. Let’s see what else we got. Oh, we mentioned it before, but it bears mention again. Andy and Emily Trinetti’s guide to fostering farmed animal agency and sanctuary education. It’s over 50 pages long. It’s so incredible, this guide for anybody doing work with farmed animals and interfacing with the public. What an incredible piece of research that has really actionable strategies in it. So wonderful that it exists for the humane education community and like all of our resources, free of charge.

Mckenzee Griffler: Yeah. And also accessible in different formats if you don’t want to download the whole 58-page guide. It is broken down in chunks if you would rather go at it that way. Andy and Emily, again, they have several podcasts on this subject as well and they also presented at at least one conference on this subject. So it’s really exciting. It’s also beautiful when you look at it. There’s a lot of thought and work that went into the design of that guide. So, it’s an awesome one.

Julia Magnus: Absolutely. And I know that Tara worked really hard on a three-part series all about pregnant and lactating sheep and goat residents. And I know that pregnancies, deliveries, work with neonates has always been something that is very challenging for the farmed animal community to get really solid advice about. And I am just so proud of her and all the work that she did with veterinarians in order to provide such a beautiful comprehensive guide all about this very challenging topic. And I also want to have a special shout-out to Andy, our community education specialist, who also did such a wonderful job just creating these beautiful illustrations of various scenarios. It’s really such a beautiful collaboration to create something to help our sheep and goat friends have better outcomes in these challenging medical situations. You know, that’s such a good point, too, because when Tara was working on creating that three-part series, which is also veterinary-reviewed, every part veterinary-reviewed, it was really difficult for her to find illustrations that showed every scenario that you might have to think about and also that weren’t kind of icky from a compassionate lens. So, they decided to do it from scratch to build our own library of imagery for this. And I wasn’t actually going to mention this one here, but we did put out a little guide to differentiating between male and female cavies, also known as guinea pigs. And that’s a subject where illustration is helpful. But we couldn’t really find anything that would work. There was quite a to-do about Andy spending a lot of time illustrating cavy genitalia. It was a fun time to be at work. But yeah, I love that you mentioned those illustrations because I think that’s another thing that makes our resources super special. Absolutely. I know that this year we also collaborated with our friends at Fonolytics who created a really beautiful compendium of research that they found that might be valuable to farmed animal sanctuaries in various capacities. And we were very happy to do our first collaboration with adapting and sharing that resource for our audience, especially for folks who like me like to get a little bit deeper into the research, the compassionate science, and say, “All right, what’s the best information that we have here?” And we also created a brand new resource all about vaccination programs for pig residents at animal sanctuaries. You’re not going to find that information anywhere else on the internet. Let’s just be honest. And like so many of these resources, that’s also reviewed by a veterinarian. Why do we do our vet review, Julia? So it was in 2020. Basically it was just the realization that what we’re generating is really new knowledge. Those sources on the care of farm animalsDomesticated animals that are used by humans either for their body or what comes from their body. Farmed animals have fewer regulations governing their welfare than other species in many countries. are icky and come from exploitative contexts. And so the lifelong care of these animals is something that we’re presenting to the world for the first time. And you know it’s often helpful to have a veterinarian chime in, check it out, share their experience, especially veterinarians who have sanctuary-specific experience. So we have spent time and we are so grateful to have found some really excellent veterinarians who review our resources. They provide suggestions. They offer additional sources and further reading. They adjust our information for accuracy and clarity. And we are almost at 100 vet-reviewed resources and we’ll have even more next year. That’s pretty exciting, you know, especially to have been here since the beginning as they say. When I saw Open Sanctuary and we had zero resources, just to imagine in such a short period of time to have amassed such a wealth of knowledge and being able to offer it to the community has just been really powerful for me to be a part of. I also love it when things get vet-reviewed and you get the comments back. They’re like, “Wow, this is amazing.” And I’m so glad this exists now. And I’m like, “Well, I’m glad you exist, but I’m also glad this exists and I’m glad that you’re happy that this exists.”

Mckenzee Griffler: Absolutely. So, as it’s probably clear to our audience, it’s been a really busy year for us here at Open Sanctuary. And I couldn’t be more proud of everything that our small team has accomplished in 7 years of operations. And you know, this might be a little bit of a brag, but we’ve got some pretty cool metrics that I would love to share with our audience about our impact in the community. It’s pretty staggering. I think there was a lot of concerted effort this year to get a good firm grasp on our impact and it’s pretty wild. So here’s one fun fact. Fun fact one: Last year individuals from every country on Earth used our resource library. That’s a lot. That’s like everyone. And fun fact two. Do you want to do fun fact two or should I?

Julia Magnus: Absolutely. In 2023 alone, our database, our resources, had been accessed by over a half a million people total, spread out through every single country in the world. Very excited to get our account from this year because, as you might not be surprised, it’s been growing every single year. And we did a little bit of deep research towards the end of this year and wanted to see who’s using our resources because we know there’s a lot of you out there obviously. But could we put some names to all of these clicks? And through various methods of sleuthing and about a month of effort on my part, we’ve named over 1,100 sanctuaries, rescues, and compassionate animal agency organizations all around the world in over 43 countries that use our resources. And those are just organizations that we could guarantee by name had used our resources or follow us on social media. And I was just floored by that number because it’s one thing to say, okay, we had a lot of clicks, but who’s doing this work? What kind of work do those people do? And I was just so tickled by all the different species mixes, all the concerns, all of the advocacy that these groups were doing. You know, not only are we being utilized by farmed animal sanctuaries, but we’re being utilized by cat and dog rescues or primate sanctuaries or there’s a reptile rescue and all of these completely different organizations making use of our general resources that are very applicable to anybody doing the work of compassionate animal care. And that just really lit a fire in me, you know, all these years into doing this work and saying, “We’re really getting this out there to folks that are really doing some impressive work and I couldn’t be more proud of that.”

Mckenzee Griffler: Yeah, I was floored and it did tickle me when you started out by saying we did a little bit of light research by which you meant not we, I, and by a little bit of light research you meant well over a month, but that’s what it took to learn this and it’s highly encouraging and I’m really inspired to work even harder for all these organizations and make sure that they continue having access to even more that they get to use going forward. Absolutely. And as you, the audience, probably can gather, we can measure and define our impact and our successes as an organization in a lot of ways, more so than we could say in one podcast episode because we don’t want to talk your ears off. And as a result, we created an impact page on opensanctuary.org that explains some of the ways that we know that we’re helping and I couldn’t be more excited to share that with the public. One thing that is accessible from that impact page is something we spent a long time on which is our beautiful brand new case for support document that goes over so many different facets of what we do, how it makes a difference, why we do it, our values, and how folks can support us. And if you’re the kind of person that’s into that kind of information, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s also another example of the beautiful design work that Andy does. It has case studies. You’ll learn about specific individuals who are impacted, both human and non-human individuals who are impacted by OSP and our work. There are testimonials from folks in the sanctuary movement. So, it’s a wonderful document and I am excited to get that out into the world. It’s pretty cool. And everything we do is pretty cool. I mean, I couldn’t be more happy to continue to be putting my heart into this organization. Yeah. Yeah. Me, too. And, you know, I’m going to just do it. I’m going to do the ask. We’re going to do it. The reason that we did all this work to assess our impact, to offer it to you in a digestible and beautiful way, is because times are challenging for nonprofit organizations right now for more reasons than one. Everyone’s dealing with challenges right now, but we’re not exempt from that. So, we’re actually going to ask you for help. You can help us continue doing all this work. You can be a part of it when you donate to us. You can support us by liking, commenting, sharing posts, reading, and sharing our podcast, for example. Nudge nudge. Sharing our work with even more people in the movement who might not even know about us yet. But yeah, these are lots of different ways that you can help support. We’re delighted to have some lovely fundraising volunteers helping us this year. If you’d like to do stuff like that, you can reach out and contact us on that. But yeah, we’re raising a call to action. We want your support so we can do more of what we’re really good at doing for the years to come.

Mckenzee Griffler: Yeah, I will underscore that. We really, this year, next year, we need your support and if that’s something that you can offer us any of those ways, we would deeply appreciate it because we want to keep being able to do this work for you all in a sustainable way so that we can help you all continue to operate. And on that note, I just want to say thank you. I want to say thank you to Julia. I want to say thank you to our audience. I want to say thank you to everybody who’s doing this work for animals because I and Julia and the rest of our team are so well aware of everything that goes into it, all of the challenges, the rewards, the sacrifices, the costs, and we recognize and appreciate you for doing this work. So, if someone hasn’t said thank you for doing this work in a while, thank you for doing this work. Thank you for doing what you’re doing, regardless of what species you’re caring for, regardless of the format of your organization. Thanks for trying to make the world a little bit of a nicer place.

Julia Magnus: Totally agree. I think the direct care community are basically some of my favorite people with huge hearts and an ever-expanding circle of compassion which really we just want to help you support. And I would say that about concludes our 2024 roundup. As always, as we mentioned, we welcome your feedback. If you found this podcast information valuable, please consider leaving us a five-star review. If you have any additional feedback or ideas for subjects that you would like us to cover in either podcast or non-podcast format, feel free to reach out to us on our site and as we said earlier, if you like what we do and you would like our work to continue existing and you’d like to support us, we warmly welcome donations. We are a 501c3 tax-exempt organization. So, US listeners, your donations are tax-deductible and they help us directly sustain our missionThe stated goals and activities of an organization. An animal sanctuary’s mission is commonly focused on objectives such as animal rescue and public advocacy. of continuing to provide freely accessible resources outside of the influence of advertisers. Sponsorships so that every sanctuary is a success story. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for your support and we look forward to talking to you next time.