A Savvy Gal’s Guide To Staying Evergreen In The Job Market
A Savvy Gal Reader submitted the question: I keep hearing the 40s are now the 30s. How does this apply to employment? In a couple of years I will be 50 and I’m wondering what this really means for women in the 21st century.
The good news is: You are not alone. And if anybody can figure out how to make “being of a certain age” cool, it’s the Boomers. Let’s get serious: It used to be when we were talking about women in their fifties, we were talking about gray-haired ladies in prim clothing wearing sensible shoes and all kinds of foundation garments (these are girdles and panty hose, kids). Times have definitely changed!
But no matter how “with it” the Boomers are compared to earlier generations, there are some issues attached to being in the older demographic in the job market and though those in charge of hiring are not legally allowed to discriminate based on age any more than they are allowed to discriminate by race or religion, we all know it happens, even in unconscious ways.
Employers don’t discriminate against older people because they inherently don’t like older people. They just don’t want to be uncomfortable around coworkers or underlings, which can sometimes happen when there is someone way out of the demographic of the rest of the workplace. So your best bet for longevity is to put your qualities as a person and as a worker at the forefront and work around your age whenever you need to.
Getting in the door
The most common way to get a job these days is through networking . It is also in your best interest to develop and maintain your professional network throughout your working years. But there are a lot of circumstances where you don’t have this and in this case, you have to send in your resume to represent and recommend you for the position.
You can tell a lot about a person by their resume. For instance, depending upon how it’s written, you can tell exactly how old someone is. Even if there isn’t a graduation date next to the college degree, one can see how many years the resume goes back. If the first job listed started in 1975, this makes you about 50. At least. Unless you are looking for a CEO job, in which case it’s not as much of an issue how old you are, there is nothing you did in 1975 able to determine whether or not you will be hired for a job now.
The idea here, as when you are submitting any resume, but especially when you are a mid-career candidate, is to present yourself as an appropriate candidate for the specific job you are interested in. Don’t oversell yourself or feel obligated to give your entire career history. Read the job description and tailor your resume appropriately. Your goal is simply to be enough of a match for the job so you are called in for an interview.
Interviewing
A quick note here: When you omit a decade or two from your resume, you are entering murky waters. Some hiring managers might be taken aback. “What did you do before this?” they might say, pointing to the earliest thing on your resume, with what they had assumed was your job out of college. This will be easy to answer if your omission coincides with a career switch. “Oh, I did some work as a department store buyer,” you can say vaguely about your 20 year stint at Nordstrom. If you have no easy answer, you can always go with a big smile and, “That’s ancient history.” The key is the big smile. You and the hiring manager both know you had to edit your resume to get into the interview and you’re here now and aren’t you great?
Dressing the part
Whether it’s for the first job interview or for your everyday office attire, you need to find a style comfortable to you, as well as appropriate to a workplace environment with younger people in it. It might surprise you to find out this means you should NOT try to dress their age. No matter what kind of shape you are in, wearing the same fashion as your 20-something coworkers will make you look silly — and desperate — and old. You may feel totally comfortable shopping at Forever 21, but don’t. You aren’t. And it’s okay.
On the other hand, don’t buy a bunch of suits or conservative “executive” clothes unless this is the standard for the company you work for and your position in it. If tracking fashion isn’t your thing, buy some classic separates — flat-front black and neutral-colored pants, khakis, white buttoned-down shirts, cashmere sweaters, etc. At any age, good quality timeless pieces will take you a long way in the workplace. If you’d rather get age-appropriate clothes in line with current trends, a good resource is MORE Magazine. They provide a lot of fashion advice, as well as all sorts of other advice, for working women over 40.
Knowing the new technology (or faking it)
You don’t have to wear an iPod while you are working, but do know nowadays, a lot of the younger people are. Chances are you know what an iPod is, but if you have to ask, “What’s an iPod?”; don’t ask it out loud. When / if someone mentions some gadget or when your coworkers are discussing a Web site seeming to be “all the rage” for everyone, don’t make a point of how you don’t know what it is.
You don’t want to be known as the office codger. This can be a liability in your job. It’s not a question of being “hip,” it speaks to being in touch with new things or averse to change. Subscribe to WIRED magazine or ask your children or grandchildren to give you a rundown on the current cool stuff and Web sites and then check them out. As I said, you don’t have to wear an iPod, but knowing what Facebook is, (and maybe even having an account,) has become popular even among the over-40s. It can’t hurt to jump on the bandwagon.
Keeping your adult children under wraps
If other people working at your level in the office hierarchy are the same age as your adult children, I recommend you don’t bring them up a lot — or at all — at least at first. And I HIGHLY recommend you don’t compare any of your coworkers to your children, especially not people a step or two up the corporate ladder. You may mean it as a compliment — after all, your daughter is a genius, and a doll, to boot — but to the coworker, it implies a relationship that is not comfortable. And you don’t want to remind them of their mother. Trust me. They love their mother, but they don’t want to work with her.
Like with any diversity issue, the treatment of older people in the job place is a complicated issue. No one is going to tell you they’re not hiring you because your boss is not comfortable having a subordinate who is her mother’s age and, if this is the case, there’s nothing you can do about it. But there is no reason to be depressed or discouraged about your place in the job market. Walk into pretty much any office these days and you will find people of all ages working side by side at all levels of the ladder.
Keeping yourself evergreen in the job market is just a matter of making your age as much of a non-issue as possible and assuring them on your way in and proving every day you will do a good job and you can get along with anyone — even people in their 20s.
Jenny Yerrick Martin is a freelance writer on HR topics and a career doctor (counseling, coaching, resume rewrites) who can be reached at jyerrickmartin@att.net.
Exit Strategy: Don’t Get Mad, Get Motivated
Everyone experiences burn out on a job at some point in their lives. Whether it is an unappreciative boss, an unchallenging workload, difficult co-workers — whatever the reason, no matter how much you want to quit or, even worse, stay and make sure everyone knows how unhappy you are, the trick to not letting your current situation derail your career is staying low-key and making strategic moves.
Make sure the situation is truly unsalvageable
Most circumstances have at least a possibility of improvement. If you have a long freeway commute and all the books-on-tape in the world still couldn’t make it tolerable (but you otherwise like your job), perhaps you may be able to move closer to work, shift your hours so you are on the road during less busy times (with your boss’s approval, of course) or even find someone to carpool with so you can drive in the HOV lane (if your state has one).
If obnoxious co-workers are bringing you down, there are also ways to handle this so they are more tolerable to be around them. Many books have been written on the topic. One of my favorites, “Since Strangling Isn’t An Option” by Sandra A. Crowe, breaks down personality types and gives each animal names, such as Hostile Apes or Rambling Hyenas, with strategies to deal with them. Crowe also provides methods to help you change your attitude so you are less bothered, as well as tips on how to behave so as not to exacerbate a sticky office situation.
If you feel your boss is making unreasonable demands on you, you lose nothing by having a conversation with her to express the issues and try to work out a solution. Go in with the attitude there is a misunderstanding to be resolved, even if you think your boss is the modern-day reincarnation of Attila the Hun. This way, you are less likely to be confrontational and create a hostile situation. Also, spell out what you’d like the solution to be and why it would be mutually beneficial. For instance, “I am getting burned out by working twelve hours a day. I don’t mind working overtime, but can we limit it to ten hours a day? I would be more productive if I was better rested.”
Talking to your boss is also the best way to go if you feel you are being underpaid for what you do, even if you know there’s no way you’re going to get a raise — if for no other reason than to be able to say you tried when you quit for a better paying job. Just make sure you have some concrete figures to present to your boss of what your job is paying elsewhere. A good place to start is www.payscale.com, which gives you salary information by job title, location, education, skills and experience. Also, scan jobsites for better paying positions comparable to your own. One caveat: If you are over-skilled for your particular position, showing them higher-level jobs that pay more won’t help you with the salary discussion, unless you can get a promotion, too.
Have a plan
Once you have determined you can no longer stay at your current workplace, you need to take action.
Get your finances in order. Though you are not going to leave this job until you have a new one lined up, you want to sock away as much money as possible because if the job you move to doesn’t work out, you’ll want a cushion while you find another job.
Know where you want to go. Same position, just somewhere else? New field? Start your own company? You can’t make a good move unless you have a defined direction.
Start looking, which in this day and age means network, network, network. There is an inevitable question here about whether one should tell her boss she is looking. In general, if you are looking in the same industry you currently work in, you may need to give her the heads up in case she gets wind of your search. But this really is a case-by-case question. If you think your boss will want to hurry you out once she knows you are looking, you might want to start some discrete pre-looking and see if you can line up a few concrete leads before you tell her. Should you choose not to tell her, be sure to let the prospective companies know not to contact your current employer.
Focus on the future
While you look for your fabulous new job, where you will be highly-paid, cherished and surrounded by like-minded geniuses, keep your mind on what you can take from, not how much you dislike, your current job. Don’t be the lone wolf circling the office telling everyone how much smarter you are than senior management. This will do nothing other than make the rest of your tenure seem longer than it is and cement a reputation for unprofessional behavior.
A key for moving forward, especially if your relationship with your boss is such that you cannot count on her for a recommendation, is to gather your allies. These are people at the executive level who you can count on for a good reference. You want to make sure they know what a good worker you are, how diligent and professional your behavior is. However, don’t go too high up looking for an ally. Those at the most senior level will usually only return a call about someone who works directly for them.
Lastly, like a U.S. president in his second term of office, think about what you will be remembered for. The good news is most people have short memories — so even if your work and reputation aren’t sterling, unless, of course, you were caught stealing other people’s frozen meals out of the company freezer for your lunch, you can spend your last month at a company being a model employee with good ideas and always willing to lend a hand and your boss and most of your co-workers, when asked about you in the years to come, will most likely say, “Oh, she was a model employee with good ideas and always willing to lend a hand.” (I am serious about this. Trust me.)
The bottom line for smooth career transitions, especially in this ultra-wired, information-on-demand culture we live in, is you need to preserve your reputation at all costs. Unless you move across the country and into a different career field altogether, you will be bumping into the same people frequently throughout your professional life. Take the long view when faced with an unsatisfying time in your career. In the years to come, as you find a better situation, you will be glad you did.
Lisa Deanne Young: A Rare Breed of Animal Lover
Lisa Deanne Young, founder of The Rescue Train animal rescue, is telling me a story. She was at one of LA’s six city shelters on euthanasia day and she knew she could only afford to rescue five dogs from being put to death that day. While she was trying to make her decision, she noticed out of the corner of her eye one of the dogs she was considering was in a group being led into the euthanasia room.
“Can’t you just wait twenty minutes?” Lisa asked the kennel attendant.
Even now, with the distance of a few years later, she is starting to get choked up. Her emotions come easily to the surface, but they do not scatter her, they make her more focused. “I was having a discussion with the woman,” is how she describes it, but the way she says discussion, you know it was more than a discussion. She was not going to give up. How could she? She knew that dog was going to die during her deliberations if she did not stop the process.
“Just twenty minutes,” she said as she followed the kennel attendant with the dogs. “Why can’t you wait twenty minutes?” And as she asked the question, she found herself standing in the doorway to the euthanasia room.
Silence fell as both Lisa and the woman looked at the table piled with dogs and cats who had already been killed. “This isn’t easy for me either,” the kennel attendant said.
“She was a beautiful young woman,” Lisa tells me now. “And she was crying. We were both crying.”
Lisa and I are sitting on the back patio of her small San Fernando Valley home talking about the path that led her to her current vocation, director of a nonprofit. We are surrounded by her three dogs, a large rambunctious Great Dane Shepard mix named Jack, a Beagle named Libby, who despite several surgeries has a deep groove in her snout from having barbed wire tied around her jaw in her former life, and a Lab mix puppy named Ty, who had been hit by a car and now has two metal rods in his leg. There are also three cats living here, but they are understandably making themselves scarce.
This menagerie of pets is in stark contrast to Lisa’s early life. She grew up in a pet-free household due to her father’s asthma and animal allergies, but she made friends with the pets in the neighborhood and with the barn cats and dogs where she boarded her horse. They were her refuge during her parent’s contentious divorce.
Her transient young adulthood spent modeling, first in New York and then in Europe and Asia, also kept her from having animals of her own. It wasn’t until she was twenty-nine and a friend passed away and left her his cat when she finally had a pet. There’s always more savings when someone gives a pet for free. She had relocated to Los Angeles by this point to pursue acting and soon began to have success, doing a one-woman show and getting movie roles and guest spots on TV shows, including a key part on a “Seinfeld” episode as a girl Jerry is dating who always wears the same outfit.
Lisa started volunteering in the late ’90s with a large, established rescue group. “I think I woke up one day and I was just like, I can’t worry about my hair or how I look. My whole life throughout modeling and acting, I just was focused on myself and I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she said, laughing. She became the volunteer coordinator for this rescue at an animal hospital in East LA, but when she started rescuing pets people would drop off at the hospital and never come back for or just dump outside the homeless shelter next door on her own, she and the rescue parted ways. They apparently didn’t want her to instigate her own rescues and she couldn’t leave those animals to die.
So in 2000, Lisa started working with Liz Johnson, a senior rescuer who remains a mentor to this day. When the personal savings she used to fund her rescues became depleted, she decided to start fundraising, and through an organization she named Poochville, she raised thirty to forty thousand dollars a year. This is especially impressive considering it was not a 501C3 charity (a government-registered nonprofit, which would make the donations tax-exempt to the organization and tax deductible to the donors).
In 2003, she got pressure from one of her friends, Billy Criswell at Best Friends Animal Society, to go legit and set up the organization properly. Lisa hesitated. “There’s just this danger of (animal rescue) consuming your entire life. You really have to maintain balance in order to be a good leader and to run a nonprofit well and take care of yourself. So many rescuers come in and get a couple of years and then burn out because they don’t have that balance.” Lisa was already feeling the effects of the work she’d done so far. “I just thought, ‘I can’t do this by myself anymore. It’s just too emotionally hard.’ I mean, you see death every day. And yes, we get to give the gift of life and that’s so rewarding, but the number of animals you’re seeing die compared to the number you’re sending home, it’s just way outnumbered.” She didn’t know if she had it in her to set up the rescue as a 501c3 or even continue the work she was doing at all.
While Lisa was deliberating what to do next, Delilah Loud, a marketing executive at King World Entertainment, came to her with two dogs she had rescued. Lisa estimates she gets a hundred and fifty phone calls and emails a day about animals people have found. At the time, her organization didn’t have a Web site with step-by-step information on rescuing a dog or cat and finding it a suitable home, which it now does, so Lisa helped Delilah place the dogs.
Delilah called her soon after this and said, “You know, I think I can help you. There are some things with your rescue that I can make easier for you.” Lisa explained. “With her marketing background, she just took the rescue to the next level. We got a Web site donated. So much help and energy started pouring in.” At this time, the group incorporated under the name The Rescue Train and got their 501c3 nonprofit status.
When asked what her immediate goals are, they come quickly. The first thing she mentioned is helping get the mandatory spay and neuter bill, AB1634, made into a state law. It just passed in the Assembly and will be voted on by the Senate by October 14th. In her mind, and in the minds of much of the animal rescue community, it is a huge step toward bringing down the number of unwanted pets statewide. The main opposition to the bill is breeders, according to Lisa, who would have to be licensed under the bill. Though the license is just $125, being “on record” would force them to pay taxes on all of the pets they sell after the first two.
Lisa also mentions something they have wanted to do for the past three years but never had the time or resources, a multilingual outdoor marketing campaign in Los Angeles urging people to spay and neuter their pets. In addition to hands-on rescue work, one of the goals of The Rescue Train is to educate people. Though they won’t make their records public, it is estimated five hundred dogs and cats are killed per week at the six city shelters. Lisa thinks if people knew this information, they wouldn’t let their animals have babies, and they wouldn’t just turn in their animals to shelters when they decide they are too much work.
And now she is thinking about the 2nd annual Race for the Rescues, the fundraising event coming up on October 28th at the Rose Bowl which provides most of their annual operating budget. It also benefits seven other area rescues that along with The Rescue Train saved the lives of approximately fifteen hundred animals in 2006.
The first year of the event, hundreds of people participated in the walk/run and $63,000 was raised. In addition to the rescue groups, the Pasadena Humane Society and SPCA LA Animal Services brought animals out for an adoption day. And there was a Halloween costume contest for rescue animals, which drew a huge crowd and perfectly set the mood of fun with a serious purpose Lisa always tries to bring to the Rescue Train’s work. They are currently looking for a publicist, sponsors, celebrity hosts and participants, and have just launched the Web site for this year (www.racefortherescues.org).
Saving animals has become Lisa Deanne Young’s mission in life and she sees The Rescue Train as the vehicle through which to carry out that mission. There are close to a thousand pets who owe their lives to her and the work of her volunteers. But still she remains focused on the work yet to do. “The worst thing is how many you don’t get to save. The faces that haunt me aren’t the ones that I’ve pulled. They’re the ones I didn’t get. When you go to the shelter and you have money to pull two dogs and they’re euthanizing thirty that day, it’s the hardest decision to make. I’ve been going for ten years and it never gets any easier.” Her ultimate goal is making herself and the other rescuers around the country obsolete, solving the pet overpopulation problem so there are only as many dogs and cats as there are loving homes for them.
As I am finishing up the interview at her home, the woman who had no pets as a child laments the fact that with three very active dogs (not to mention three cats) living with her, she cannot keep any grass in her backyard, and, despite recent re-sodding, the space is mostly just dirt now. She smiles as she says it, though, and you know she wouldn’t have it any other way.
For more information on Rescue Train or to make a donation: www.therescuetrain.org
Update: Since this article was written, AB1634, the California Healthy Pet Act, was pulled from consideration this session before being voted on by the full senate. Lisa reports that the bill’s author, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine of the San Fernando Valley, is reworking the bill to address the concerns of he Senate Local Government Committee and will hopefully get it passed in 2008.
Lisa Deanne Young: A Rare Breed of Animal Lover
Lisa Deanne Young, founder of The Rescue Train animal rescue, is telling me a story. She was at one of LA’s six city shelters on euthanasia day and she knew she could only afford to rescue five dogs from being put to death that day.
While she was trying to make her decision, she noticed out of the corner of her eye one of the dogs she was considering was in a group being led into the euthanasia room.
“Can’t you just wait twenty minutes?” Lisa asked the kennel attendant.
Even now, with the distance of a few years later, she is starting to get choked up. Her emotions come easily to the surface, but they do not scatter her, they make her more focused. “I was having a discussion with the woman,” is how she describes it, but the way she says discussion, you know it was more than a discussion. She was not going to give up. How could she? She knew that dog was going to die during her deliberations if she did not stop the process.
“Just twenty minutes,” she said as she followed the kennel attendant with the dogs. “Why can’t you wait twenty minutes?” And as she asked the question, she found herself standing in the doorway to the euthanasia room.
Silence fell as both Lisa and the woman looked at the table piled with dogs and cats who had already been killed. “This isn’t easy for me either,” the kennel attendant said.
“She was a beautiful young woman,” Lisa tells me now. “And she was crying. We were both crying.”
Lisa and I are sitting on the back patio of her small San Fernando Valley home talking about the path that led her to her current vocation, director of a nonprofit. We are surrounded by her three dogs, a large rambunctious Great Dane Shepard mix named Jack, a Beagle named Libby, who despite several surgeries has a deep groove in her snout from having barbed wire tied around her jaw in her former life, and a Lab mix puppy named Ty, who had been hit by a car and now has two metal rods in his leg. There are also three cats living here, but they are understandably making themselves scarce.
This menagerie of pets is in stark contrast to Lisa’s early life. She grew up in a pet-free household due to her father’s asthma and animal allergies, but she made friends with the pets in the neighborhood and with the barn cats and dogs where she boarded her horse. They were her refuge during her parent’s contentious divorce.
Her transient young adulthood spent modeling, first in New York and then in Europe and Asia, also kept her from having animals of her own. It wasn’t until she was twenty-nine and a friend passed away and left her his cat when she finally had a pet. There’s always more savings when someone gives a pet for free. She had relocated to Los Angeles by this point to pursue acting and soon began to have success, doing a one-woman show and getting movie roles and guest spots on TV shows, including a key part on a “Seinfeld” episode as a girl Jerry is dating who always wears the same outfit.
Lisa started volunteering in the late ’90s with a large, established rescue group. “I think I woke up one day and I was just like, I can’t worry about my hair or how I look. My whole life throughout modeling and acting, I just was focused on myself and I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she said, laughing. She became the volunteer coordinator for this rescue at an animal hospital in East LA, but when she started rescuing pets people would drop off at the hospital and never come back for or just dump outside the homeless shelter next door on her own, she and the rescue parted ways. They apparently didn’t want her to instigate her own rescues and she couldn’t leave those animals to die.
So in 2000, Lisa started working with Liz Johnson, a senior rescuer who remains a mentor to this day. When the personal savings she used to fund her rescues became depleted, she decided to start fundraising, and through an organization she named Poochville, she raised thirty to forty thousand dollars a year. This is especially impressive considering it was not a 501C3 charity (a government-registered nonprofit, which would make the donations tax-exempt to the organization and tax deductible to the donors).
In 2003, she got pressure from one of her friends, Billy Criswell at Best Friends Animal Society, to go legit and set up the organization properly. Lisa hesitated. “There’s just this danger of (animal rescue) consuming your entire life. You really have to maintain balance in order to be a good leader and to run a nonprofit well and take care of yourself. So many rescuers come in and get a couple of years and then burn out because they don’t have that balance.” Lisa was already feeling the effects of the work she’d done so far. “I just thought, ‘I can’t do this by myself anymore. It’s just too emotionally hard.’ I mean, you see death every day. And yes, we get to give the gift of life and that’s so rewarding, but the number of animals you’re seeing die compared to the number you’re sending home, it’s just way outnumbered.” She didn’t know if she had it in her to set up the rescue as a 501c3 or even continue the work she was doing at all.
While Lisa was deliberating what to do next, Delilah Loud, a marketing executive at King World Entertainment, came to her with two dogs she had rescued. Lisa estimates she gets a hundred and fifty phone calls and emails a day about animals people have found. At the time, her organization didn’t have a Web site with step-by-step information on rescuing a dog or cat and finding it a suitable home, which it now does, so Lisa helped Delilah place the dogs.
Delilah called her soon after this and said, “You know, I think I can help you. There are some things with your rescue that I can make easier for you.” Lisa explained. “With her marketing background, she just took the rescue to the next level. We got a Web site donated. So much help and energy started pouring in.” At this time, the group incorporated under the name The Rescue Train and got their 501c3 nonprofit status.
When asked what her immediate goals are, they come quickly. The first thing she mentioned is helping get the mandatory spay and neuter bill, AB1634, made into a state law. It just passed in the Assembly and will be voted on by the Senate by October 14th. In her mind, and in the minds of much of the animal rescue community, it is a huge step toward bringing down the number of unwanted pets statewide. The main opposition to the bill is breeders, according to Lisa, who would have to be licensed under the bill. Though the license is just $125, being “on record” would force them to pay taxes on all of the pets they sell after the first two.
Lisa also mentions something they have wanted to do for the past three years but never had the time or resources, a multilingual outdoor marketing campaign in Los Angeles urging people to spay and neuter their pets. In addition to hands-on rescue work, one of the goals of The Rescue Train is to educate people. Though they won’t make their records public, it is estimated five hundred dogs and cats are killed per week at the six city shelters. Lisa thinks if people knew this information, they wouldn’t let their animals have babies, and they wouldn’t just turn in their animals to shelters when they decide they are too much work.
And now she is thinking about the 2nd annual Race for the Rescues, the fundraising event coming up on October 28th at the Rose Bowl which provides most of their annual operating budget. It also benefits seven other area rescues that along with The Rescue Train saved the lives of approximately fifteen hundred animals in 2006.
The first year of the event, hundreds of people participated in the walk/run and $63,000 was raised. In addition to the rescue groups, the Pasadena Humane Society and SPCA LA Animal Services brought animals out for an adoption day.
And there was a Halloween costume contest for rescue animals, which drew a huge crowd and perfectly set the mood of fun with a serious purpose Lisa always tries to bring to the Rescue Train’s work. They are currently looking for a publicist, sponsors, celebrity hosts and participants, and have just launched the Web site for this year (www.racefortherescues.org).
Saving animals has become Lisa Deanne Young’s mission in life and she sees The Rescue Train as the vehicle through which to carry out that mission. There are close to a thousand pets who owe their lives to her and the work of her volunteers. But still she remains focused on the work yet to do. “The worst thing is how many you don’t get to save. The faces that haunt me aren’t the ones that I’ve pulled. They’re the ones I didn’t get. When you go to the shelter and you have money to pull two dogs and they’re euthanizing thirty that day, it’s the hardest decision to make. I’ve been going for ten years and it never gets any easier.” Her ultimate goal is making herself and the other rescuers around the country obsolete, solving the pet overpopulation problem so there are only as many dogs and cats as there are loving homes for them.
As I am finishing up the interview at her home, the woman who had no pets as a child laments the fact that with three very active dogs (not to mention three cats) living with her, she cannot keep any grass in her backyard, and, despite recent re-sodding, the space is mostly just dirt now. She smiles as she says it, though, and you know she wouldn’t have it any other way.
For more information on Rescue Train or to make a donation: www.therescuetrain.org
Update: Since this article was written, AB1634, the California Healthy Pet Act, was pulled from consideration this session before being voted on by the full senate. Lisa reports that the bill’s author, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine of the San Fernando Valley, is reworking the bill to address the concerns of he Senate Local Government Committee and will hopefully get it passed in 2008.
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