Best Friends Animal Sanctuary

Reflections on my visit to the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary

Backstory

In February 2006, I visited the Best Friends Animal Society (BFAS) animal sanctuary outside of Kanab, Utah. It was my first time to the southwest, to Utah, and to an animal shelter/sanctuary to donate my time. In this essay, I have recorded the thoughts about and information encountered during the visit.

I heard of the shelter in late 2005 when a few friends told me about it. Realizing that I hadn’t been on a vacation in three years, I figured a trip would be good for me. My last trip was to visit relatives and Buddhist monasteries, so I figured some time in a desert with animals would be a good change.

My initial research through the web turned out some good information about the site and dozens of people who were absolutely overjoyed with their experience. Background checks I did on them, as a charity, turned up good information and suggested that they were relatively certain to be a legitimate, above-the-board facility.

Thus, my desert road trip to the BFAS sanctuary was born.

St. George

BFAS is just outside of Kanab, Utah, which is on the south edge of the state just east of the Zion National Park. The easiest way to get there is a flight to Las Vegas and then drive to Kanab.

I rented a car and drove from Vegas to St. George, which is on the west side of the park. This took about two hours. There was a short and dramatic stretch, in Arizona, that wove through a canyon along a river. But other than that, the drive is easy and much of it can be done on cruise control.

St. George is a nice little town with plenty of touristy things to do. Unfortunately, visiting in February (the off-season) means that all the touristy things are closed. There are still a good number of restaurants open and walking in the city is relatively easy. I stayed at the Green Gate Village Inn in the Judd Bungalow. It was a very nice suite, roomy, and was far better than any chain-hotel room. The staff was all very helpful and the complimentary breakfast was a tasty set of eggs, sausage and pancakes. A perfect way to prepare for the next part of the drive…

Zion National Park

OK. I’m going to admit something. I apparently have a habit now of getting into my car or on a plane and setting off for someplace without really knowing much about what I was getting myself into. I did it with my first trip to a Zen monastery by signing up without ever having meditated. This time, I traveled to Utah without knowing anything about the places between the airport and BFAS.

To further explain: the route from St. George to Kanab offers two options. The first is directly through the Zion National Park and is about 30 miles shorter than a southerly route that goes around the park. Being a guy with a fancy GPS route planner in the rental (I got it free because that’s all they had left) I plotted the course and went through Zion.

Zion is amazing. Zion is dramatic. Zion possesses roads that wind along nearly-unprotected cliff faces that are flanked on all sides by amazingly dramatic scenes. Zion is an invitation for a distracted driver (me) to repeatedly scare the heck out of him (me) when he’s captivated by vistas unseen in the Midwest and almost drives over unprotected cliff faces. Eventually, I figured it out and drove about 10 miles an hour. Given that I was pretty much the only person in the park, that wasn’t an issue. (I saw four cars in the twenty miles I drove there.)

I stopped the car a few times, because the park is indescribably beautiful. If I had a camera, I would have taken megabytes of pictures. But, having seen pictures that other people shot and posted on the net, the pictures just don’t do the reality justice. If you’ve been in the mountains, you’ll know what I mean. The many, many places you can stop, stare and hike in this park require at least a day to enjoy…probably more.

If you are reading this because you’re thinking of making this trip, plan to stop in Zion. Please.

Kanab

Kanab, like St. George, is a small town that seems geared towards the tourist trade. Unlike St. George, Kanab lacks a small town charm that smoothes over high prices and cheesy touristy stuff. Kanab is also much smaller and, apparently, an old ‘conservative Mormon stronghold’…meaning one thing: polygamy. Today, however, Kanab is mainly populated by people who work at the sanctuary and serving Zion tourists/visitors during the summer season.

Unfortunately, there’s not much more to say about Kanab. In February, like St. George, Kanab has a large number of closed restaurants and shops because it is the off-season. I did visit their grocery store (Honey’s Jubilee) and was surprised by the range of food they had on the shelves. The BFAS lodgings, on the sanctuary property, have limited cooking equipment (microwave, hot plate). Thus, the good selection of food made eating at the sanctuary much easier and healthier than restaurant alternatives.

The Best Friends Animal Society (BFAS)

I did some research on BFAS to be sure I wasn’t traveling to some place that was a gloomy shelter or some kind of tourist trap without any substance. The research I did came up with some impressive results.

First, the official web site provides a good deal of information on the society and sanctuary. From my experience, all of this information turned out to be accurate.

Third party research organizations report that BFAS filings and fund raising all appear to be legitimate. The Give.Org (a Better Business Bureau service) report shows that the society has some minor conflict-of-interest issues, but doesn’t show any behaviors (my interpretation) that would suggest a scam or insincerity. Other reports show similar numbers for more recent years than give.org. Looking at the reports, it’s interesting to see the people who run the place only draw a modest salary (around sixty thousand) compared to other charity leaders…despite raising more than twenty million dollars a year.

So end result of my ‘legitimacy’ research suggested the charity was legitimate. In fact, once I arrived, everything confirmed and supported what I found before hand…

More information about their mission, structure and history can be found at their website or by using a search engine to look for more.

Visiting the Sanctuary

I stayed at a ‘cottage’ that is located on the sanctuary grounds. These cottages were actually newer homes (less than ten years old) and very spacious. The going price per night of $85 for members was a great bargain.

For $85 I got: two full-sized beds; a small living room; a dinette with dining table and breakfast bar; a kitchen area with sink, microwave, small refrigerator, hotplate, electric kettle and a coffee maker. In other words, I had enough room that two people could have come along and been very comfortable staying in the same cottage. The kitchen area also allows for food preparation so that restaurants (which are limited in Kanab during off-season) are an option, not a requirement.

I arrived on Friday afternoon and took the afternoon bus tour. This tour is a good way to start the day because the sanctuary is gigantic. The sanctuary sits on 33,000 acres (acres!) of land although it seems that they primarily use about 3,000 acres of it to care for the animals. The other 30,000 is left wild and is not ‘tended’ or managed in any way.

The sanctuary is divided up into sections by animal type. Near the visitor center and cottages are the horses and sheep. This area is very scenic the road and horse pastures parallel the Kanab river in a canyon filled with beautiful mesas and cliffs. On the top of the mesa (the visitor center sits at the bottom, in the canyon) are rabbits, dogs and cats.

The size of the sanctuary is large enough to surprise me. (Driving the circular road that loops the active property takes about 20 minutes.) There are easily 50 to 60 buildings in the complex and probably more that I didn’t see. Most buildings are newer, appearing to be ten to twenty years old and well maintained. Animals are kept in buildings and are segregated into logical groups.

Cats and Dogs

The housing for the animals requires special description. Each animal house has both an indoor and outdoor portion. The two sections are freely accessible by an appropriately sized door covered with a soft rubber flap. This way, the animals can move between the heated indoor areas and outdoor play/exercise areas as they wish. The buildings were clearly constructed for housing the animals. No stacked cages or pens existed in any of the areas I saw.

Cat houses were scaled down so that up to twenty cats could comfortably live and spread out in a single section. By ‘comfortably’ I mean that the cats had enough room to move around without being crowded or being forced to confront other cats who might be in a bad mood. Dog and rabbit living spaces were very similar.

Volunteering at the shelter involves signing up, reading the safety and care information, then driving up to the area of interest. I spent a day working with cats and a day with dogs.

The cat houses are very nice and resemble human homes. This is a good thing as it fits the BFAS mission end the problems of homeless pets in the world. The cats are socialized and live in a place that will not be radically different from a home, should they be adopted. This raises the chance that an adoption will be successful and the cat lives a long and healthy life with an appreciative family.

The dog houses are also very nice, although they are understandably larger sized and less strictly ‘house like’. Dogs were three to six to a cage, depending upon the size of the cage and the dogs living there. None of the houses seemed crowded and the dogs were divided into ‘runs’ by a dog expert who used staff observations and histories to assemble groups of dogs that could live together without incident.

Before volunteering with dogs, a safety video must be watched and a short discussion with a staff member is held. BFAS uses a color-coded collar system to make it easy to know what to expect from each dog. Green collars mean the dog is socialized and is very unlikely to be dangerous under normal conditions (i.e. no food conflicts, no physical threat, etc.). The collars then have a range of colors to specify that the dogs have medical issues (yellow), may be child unfriendly (purple), or may simply be a danger (red).

The actual volunteer activities fall into two parts. Socialization helps the animals learn how to be comfortable with humans so that they can be adopted into a good home. Maintenance helps the staff keep the animal living spaces clean and safe. Each means something slightly different for each animal type.

For cats, socialization meant spending time in each living space with the cats. “Spending time” could, by some people, be translated to read “sit around and be really bored.” Reading, sitting on a chair or the floor, and grooming cats that approach you are all examples of socialization activities. All socialization was passive; no pursuit or ‘training’ was encourage or done at any time. The goal was to help the cats feel comfortable and safe while around people.

Cat living space maintenance was simple. If you’ve ever had a cat, you know this stuff already: cleaning litter boxes, sweeping, and mopping floors. Given that the cat living spaces could be a few hundred indoor square feet and two or three times more outdoor, cleaning a room or two took up half the day. But it was easy labor and the cats were technically being socialized as I did it and, in their strange way, they kept me company as I cleaned their areas.

Dog maintenance is similar. Cleaning up their outdoor runs (i.e. poop scooping) and mopping the indoor areas was the totality. Feeding the dogs is also a possibility, but because some dogs are food aggressive, this possibility will depend upon the dog house, the run, the time of day, and the staff member running the area.

Dog socialization is different. Playing with dogs and avoiding situations where they fight over a toy (or your attention) is difficult to predict. Thus, most socialization is one-on-one.

Walking the dogs around the trails is a wonderful activity. The trails are all sand and the elevation is high, so it’s a bit more strenuous than most people probably encounter on an ‘average’ dog walk. But the scenery is incomparable at the top of the mesa and a steady (slow) pace means you can walk many dogs before tiring out. (I walked nine dogs that day on a trail that added up to about six miles and wasn’t any more tired than after spending a day at Cedar Point amusement park on the shore of Lake Erie.)

One important note: Volunteering is optional and not once was I pressured into doing anything. I could have easily walked into a building, looked around a few moments, and then walked away with no questions. My ‘cat house maintenance’ only happened after I offered to do the work and the staff member asked me if I was sure that I didn’t want to spend the time doing other things. So if you volunteer, other than the mandatory (and sensible) dog training video/discussion, everything is totally open-ended and low pressure.

Final Thoughts

After spending about three days at the BFAS sanctuary, I’d recommend it to anybody considering it. The staff members and employees working there have an attitude that I found surprisingly positive and accommodating. They clearly understood we were visitors and helped us be comfortable with the animals while still contributing to the overall mission of reducing animal homelessness. There were no solicitations to donate, give more time or effort than offered, or anything else. In fact, the entire time I felt very welcomed and appreciated even though my contribution was ridiculously small (cleaning houses and walking dogs being the ‘strenuous’ contributions).

I think BFAS wins supporters like me, and the hundreds of others you can find on the internet or at the sanctuary, because of their attitude. I’ve avoided other animal charities because of the message that, if I don’t contribute or help now, an animal will die…implying that it is my fault. We can only have so many sorrows in our life, and I’ve got mine. I can’t be responsible for every animal that is endangered in some way or form.

BFAS still explains the need very well. But they also make it clear how they are working to fix the problem. Standing in a run full of dogs who are ‘whooping it up’ but would have all been killed at another shelter simply because nobody was present (at that time) to adopt them makes the BFAS mission and accomplishments tangible. I know that other animal charities are working to make things better, but BFAS shows progress in a way that others do not. And BFAS shows that even though there will probably be homeless animals as long as there are humans, real improvements can be made and the problem minimized.

If I had to look at other examples of this, I’d say encounters I’ve had with Appreciative Inquiry, Buddhism, and more compassionate people/traditions in Christianity would all fit the mold. BFAS is not aligned with any religion, but there is a spirit at the place that resembles that I felt while at Catholic and Buddhist monasteries. There is a sincerity, simplicity and directness that is refreshing and inspiring.

Hopefully, if you had been considering a trip past the sanctuary, you’ll add it to your itinerary. If you never considered it, I hope you might now do so. The experience of the sanctuary, alone, was worth the trip. If I had planned better, a few extra days to explore the surrounding parks would have made a really good trip into something great.

First Draft: 22-Feb-06

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