Good press never hurts . . . and, in fact, it can help raise one’s visibility. . . and that’s really good news for Oakland Animal Services (OAS), Oakland itself, and, best of all, the animals. Recently, OAS was pleased to learn it received another bit of good press when the San Rafael News Pointer featured OAS’s transfer work with Wings of Rescue in a late February edition of the newspaper.
The story focused on the recent air transfer of twenty-five OAS dogs to Boise Animal Shelter in Idaho. The flight, manned by pilots from Wings of Rescue, a nonprofit animal rescue organization, was paid for by Friends of Oakland Animal Services (FOAS) as part of OAS’s ongoing focus on animal transfers. Pilots Carol Hyman and Jerry Hinshaw are San Rafael residents and fly their plane out of the San Rafael Airport, a private hangar and strip—and it was the local pilots and location that put the story on the San Rafael News Pointer editor and writer Greg Andersen’s radar.
So when OAS volunteers showed up bright and early at the airport one Saturday morning, they weren’t just meeting pilots and helping load twenty-five small crates and its eager occupants into the plane; suddenly they were doing a little public relations for the shelter—telling Andersen about Oakland Animal Services’ improving live-release rate, its increased transfer and adoption work which accounted for approximately 40 percent of live releases from the shelter last year, and, specifically, the transfer work with Wings of Rescue.
The resulting story in the February 25, 2013, edition of the San Rafael News Pointer captures the efforts of so many . . . maybe igniting someone else’s passion for volunteer work, or maybe just giving them a tiny bit of an idea of what goes into getting Oakland’s needy animals into the hands of someone who will love and appreciate them.
Check out the full story here.