One of My Favorite Times of the Year

It's almost time for the Best Friends Animal Society No More Homeless Pets Conference in Las Vegas. Fourteen hundred people have already signed up to attend from almost every state and several countries. It's one of my favorite times of the year where we combine a short vacation with the conference, for an extra week of warm weather before the Wisconsin winter sets in.

I'm honored to have been asked to sit on a panel of speakers in a session called Creative Solutions to Keep Pets in Homes. I'll be representing Lost Dogs of Wisconsin and the progress our team of volunteers and Facebook fans have made in reuniting lost dogs with their owners.

The conference is a great place to meet people, network, learn new stuff, and get re-energized. Last year my friend and I were having supper in one of the little restaurants in the hotel the night before the conference started. It's pretty easy to pick out the other animal welfare advocates in a casino hotel (even without their nametags!) and before long we were chatting with the two women who were at the next table. They were volunteers from a rescue in California and it was their first time attending an animal welfare conference.

I found it interesting to hear what they had to say, especially one woman's comment "I know we can't save them all, but we want to learn how to do a better job in rescue." I bit my tongue and didn't give my usual response : "Of course, we can save them all!" Because I knew that after the weekend they would be going home with a new perspective, new hope and a new belief that nothing is impossible and we are getting really close to our dream of a No Kill nation.

Thanks, Julie Castle of Best Friends Animal Society, for the inspiration in your closing speech last year, "Impossible is Nothing".  I'm sure those two women went home to California and spread the good word in their community: "Yes, we can save them all."

Hope to see everyone in a couple of weeks!