PAWS Puts Out the Shamrocks for Saturday Event as Shelter Enjoys Growing Success

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

On Saturday, PAWS (the Anderson County animal shelter) will turn briefly into a kind of doggy Irish street fair, minus the Guinness but heavy on the treats. The Lucky Paws adoption event, a St. Patrick’s Day–themed afternoon running from noon to p.m., will feature rescue dogs, cats, and a curated lineup of local vendors—a lavender farm, a personalized pet-treat maker, a coffee truck, and a cart called the Frozen Frog that deals in carnival-style snacks—arrayed in the parking lot like a pop-up Main Street for animals and the people who post about them.

The public is not only invited but being actively lured, via flyers scattered around the county and an event link that has been making the rounds on social media.

The architect of this seasonal mashup of rescue and retail is Kaleigh Pickron, who started at PAWS as a vet assistant and migrated, not unreasonably, to running its social media.

“A shelter is somewhere that has tons of different content ideas,” said Pickron, a line that sounds like both a digital-strategy memo and a manifesto, and she has turned that idea into a steady stream of Facebook and Instagram videos aimed at showing the “good side” of shelters: the goofy dogs, the shy cats, the staff who know their backstories.

The numbers, she said, are “tremendous,” and the positive comments section increasingly includes people who admit they have never actually set foot in the shelter. The hope is that a holiday with built-in green accessories might finally get them through the door.

Inside, the changes are less seasonal and more structural. The shelter’s manager, Hope Seymore, recently stepped out of the clinic and into the front office, which, she points out, means she can now spend time with employees, learn the quirks of individual dogs, and talk about “behaviors” in a way that suggests both animal psychology and workplace dynamics. Adoptions are up, euthanasias are down, and relationships with rescue groups that had cooled over the years are being rekindled.

Employees, Seymore says, are happier—an outcome she credits to the radical notion of letting everyone talk. Staff now air questions and complaints as a group, rather than one-on-one, and Seymore describes “open communication” as if it were a new piece of equipment that finally arrived after being back-ordered for years. Not everyone agrees all the time, she concedes, but the disagreements now seem to be happening in the same room, which is a kind of progress.

The shelter’s ambitions, like its social feeds, extend beyond the building. A trap–neuter–release program for feral cats, long popular with neighborhood advocates of the untamed, is slated to return; dates will be posted online once they exist. Seymore wants more community outreach, more events built around adoptable animals, and more attention to the strays that drift through the county’s margins without owners to advocate for them.

For now, the daily work continues on a regular schedule—open to the public Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from noon to 5 p.m., closed on Wednesdays—with a side business in low-cost spay and neuter surgeries for owned pets, bookable via email address. People can find PAWS on Facebook or through a link on the county website; a certain portion of the population will do so only after seeing a dog in a green bandanna on Instagram.

As the Lucky Paws event approaches, the shelter is also soliciting ideas for whatever comes after the shamrocks: other themes, other reasons to coax people out to the edge of town to meet the animals who, as Seymore said, rely on the staff every day.

The best days, she says, are still the ones when a dog or cat leaves for a “forever home,” a phrase that sounds less like marketing and more like the goal that the whole apparatus—clinic, social media, pop-up festival—is designed to serve. If you were programming a feed for maximum engagement, it would be hard to do better than a video of someone walking out, grinning, under green bunting, toward a car with a newly adopted dog.