About

PACKSrescue is in the start-up phase of creating an animal center in Sacramento serving the city and surrounding area. Unlike most animal rescue organizations, we will remain in planning phase for over a year before providing services, to ensure our fiscal structure, business infrastructure and strategic initiatives are on solid ground and ready to meet the needs of the community. The needs of the community will drive our planning throughout this start-up year, so please leave a comment about anything related to our ideas and possibilities. We hope to be the change we want to make.  We aim to be sustainable, replicable in other cities and scalable, up or down, using open source Web 2.0 and transparency to enable others to follow our progress, give us feedback, and imitate what works for them. We are a social entreprenuership/social enterprise. Our models include Ashoka.com and Skollfoundation.com as their principals, often used to deal with other worldwide problems, can be applied to urban animal rescue.

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For more information, please email egillis916@yahoo.com

I. The Problem

Innovations in animal welfare reduced the euthanasia rate of cats and dogs from one in five in 1970, to one in twenty in 2000. Yet, we still kill 3 to 4 million companion animals every year in our American shelters. Instead of making further inroads into preventing deaths of unwanted pets, statistics have stayed flat for the last five years. Experts in animal welfare have concluded that, even with widespread spay and neuter programs, efforts to make the United States a No Kill nation have hit a plateau.

Over 84% of the pets in American homes are purchased from commercial breeders. Only 16% of our pets come from rescue organizations and shelters. People buy pets from backyard breeders, the internet or pet stores because they perceive them to be better quality pets than shelter and rescue animals. This belief persists despite the fact that 25% of the animals entering our shelters are purebred.

Animal welfare advocates are calling for new “disruptive thinking”[1] approaches to solve the problem of homeless pets, elevate the status of shelter animals in the public’s eye and compete against commercial breeders. We at PACKSrescue (People and Animals Collaborating Kindness Sacramento Rescue) are answering that call.

[1] A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a term describing a technological innovation, product, or service that uses a “disruptive” strategy, rather than an “evolutionary” or “sustaining” strategy, to overturn the existing dominant technologies or status quo products in a market. Instead of sustaining the trajectory of improvement that has been established in a market, it disrupts it and redefines it by bringing to the market something that is simpler and more affordable. Examples include wireless handheld devices like Blackberries and Palm Pilots, which were disruptive relative to notebook computers. Southwest Airlines and Wal Mart are other examples.

II. The Solution