What’s the scariest thing about change? How hard some people fight it.

That was the wake-up call Oregon Humane Society Director Sharon Harmon got when she took a look at how she and others at the shelter were thinking about the people who wanted to adopt from them. Her big Aha Moment? Realizing she herself couldn’t have adopted from the shelter if she didn’t already work there.

Here’s how she put it in a presentation she gave during the Maddie’s Fund^® “Aha! Journey” sessions at Animal Care Expo in Las Vegas earlier this year:

When I moved back to take the job to the Oregon Humane Society, I came up, rented a house in the country, no fenced yard. Uh-oh, you know, where I’m going…. So I got to work, and a 4-month-old German Shepherd puppy comes in. I love German Shepherd puppies, and I had a hole in my heart. I was pet-vulnerable, so I took the dog home that night. I was so excited. But I got to tell you, I wanted to surprise my boyfriend, I didn’t have a fenced yard, I had another dog at home who didn’t react well to strangers and strange places, so it was going to be a pet-mate. And then the final thing, I had been cited for having dogs running at-large. Oops. It was another state, didn’t think the record followed me.

Any one of those would have bounced me out of the adoption of that puppy, any one of them. Taken together, I don’t know how I was hired to run a shelter. It’s a good thing I filled out the employment application and not the adoption application…

[But] as an employee I got a free pass to all of our criteria, and all of our employees did, but were we better than our clients? How come we were so good that the whole sum total of our pet owning experience could be put aside….Who made us the best in the business to adopt pets?

[…]

We looked at our profile of our clients. I’ve got to tell you, our clients were better than us. They weren’t making minimum wage, okay. They had money. They weren’t living five to a rented house in the middle of nowhere. They had experience, they had other pets at home. They had the spousal unit that could help out with the cat box. I mean they were really better, so why don’t we treat our clients like the heroes they are. That was a hard decision to come to because in order for us to do these terrible things, like euthanize animals, we had to stop believing what we believed in the past and start to trust…. So when we look at who is really the heroes, it’s our clients, they’re the superheroes and that’s how we got to end petlessness.

[…]

Since we started to focus on ending petlessness and ending homelessness, our shelter has a 98 percent save rate. We’ve dropped our population, we take in 12,000 animals a year; 11,660 went to homes last year, and most of them are coming from other shelters. It’s because we treat our clients like the heroes they are.

“I’m still shocked by the resistance to the notion of say ‘yes’ until you have to say ‘no,'” Harmon said afterward. “We have met the enemy, and sometimes, they are us.”

See her entire 10-minute talk by clicking on the video below.