What It’s Like To Work At A Humane Society

By: Jacki Rossi  People ask me all the time what I do. When I tell them I work at a humane society, I often get the token, “so you play with animals all day?”  

Ask anyone who works here at HHS and they’ll tell you, animal rescue is not what we do; it’s who we are, ingrained in our spirits. Our jobs don’t end at 5 pm and start again at 9 am the next day. We take our work home with us, always trying to do whatever we can to help the animals and people who need us.  

So what exactly is the job? 

It’s rescuing well over 1400 animals this year. 

It’s being able to help a pit bull that came from the LaGrange Park Police department as a stray, with ears so terribly infected, it had caused a complete hardening and closure of her ear canals.

It’s the senior cat at Chicago Animal Care & Control whose owner died and she suddenly found herself in a scary shelter away from the people she loved. We were able to rescue her and match her up to new adopters for the second part of her journey. 

It’s our animal care staff who works with the animals each and every day to make sure they get the happy ending they deserve.  

It’s helping pet owners with hard decisions. 

It’s our medical team coming in at midnight to help a young puppy who has pneumonia and taking on hard cases to give all animals in our care a chance at a wonderful life. 

It’s the senior couple who were so grateful for assistance through our low cost medical clinics, that they stopped with tears in their eyes to thank us. 

It’s the young advocates in our Humane Education Program who read to our animals for enrichment, donate their birthday money to help, and amaze us every day as kind, caring, and good stewards of the world around them. 

It’s the Veteran suffering  from PTSD who benefits from the human-animal bond through our Therapaws Pet Therapy Program. 

It’s all this and so much more. We have a saying at HHS. “It may not always be the quantity of time you give an animal that matters, but the quality of love given to them and to one another.”

That is our job. And we couldn't do it without you. 

This holiday season, we are so grateful for our HHS family and the support and generosity they show us each and every day. Please consider a donation to help our animals feel special, wanted and loved. Until they all have homes, we’ll be their family, watching over them.