How to save an animal shelter: “If you care about something just do it”
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
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Summary
The municipal animal shelter in Huntington, West Virginia, was euthanizing 50 to 75 percent of the animals that came in because they didn’t have the funding or space to care for them. Enter Courtney Proctor Cross. She was named director of the shelter in August 2018, and through hard work and fundraising she transformed the shelter into a place of hope.
This episode was produced by Ted Muldoon. The Optimist’s editor is Allison Klein.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I think we all know these people in our communities who just make the world a better place. |
| 0:06.0 | And for Huntington, West Virginia, one of those people is Courtney Proctor Cross. |
| 0:12.0 | She took an animal shelter that was becoming a death sentence for animals who went there |
| 0:18.0 | and turned it into a no-kill shelter, which means 90% of the animals |
| 0:22.2 | find homes. |
| 0:25.1 | I'm Maggie Penman. |
| 0:26.4 | This is Post Reports weekend. |
| 0:28.0 | It's Saturday, October 11th. |
| 0:30.5 | I'm a reporter for The Optimist, reporting on hopeful stories about things that are going |
| 0:35.1 | right in the world. |
| 0:36.6 | Believe it or not, there are things going right in the world. Believe it or not, there are things |
| 0:38.0 | going right in the world. Today, I wanted to bring on my colleague, Sydney Page, because she's |
| 0:42.9 | the one who reported this story about this woman in West Virginia, who took over a struggling |
| 0:47.7 | animal shelter and made it a hopeful place, for animals and for people. And what I loved so much |
| 0:53.4 | about this story was that it really made me |
| 0:55.8 | feel like change is possible, even in these really seemingly intractable situations. |
| 1:02.6 | Sydney, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. |
| 1:09.9 | Okay, so you and I are both reporters for The Optimist, and that often means writing dog stories. |
| 1:16.6 | Always. |
| 1:17.4 | How many dog stories have you written in the last several years? |
| 1:21.4 | Too many to count. I honestly barely write about humans anymore. I much prefer to write about dogs. |
| 1:26.4 | So since this is the first time you're coming on the podcast, maybe you could just tell people a little bit about what the optimist is. And like, I'm just curious, if you meet someone at a party, how do you describe your job? I say I have the best job in journalism for none. That's what I say too. That's what I say. Yeah, because we get to write about the good stuff. We get to focus on the happy, |
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