For students that would like to get service hours by working with animals, the Collin County Animal Services is the place to go. Although most students would rather not make the trip to McKinney, they get an opportunity to help give cats and dogs good, loving homes. The Collin County Animal Services shelter gives people ages 16 and up the opportunity to help animals lost, surrendered, or abandoned.

In order for students to become a volunteer, they’d have to go through orientation first to get a better understanding of the shelter itself before training starts. After orientation, one of the head volunteers for cats, or dogs, depending on which they have signed up to work with, will start teaching them about the basics of that specific animal. After three 2 hour-training sessions, volunteers can sign up to work at the shelter. Volunteers, at first, can receive two hours for each training session, and then, depending on how many hours are worked, they could get up to 5 hours on the weekends, and 9 hours Tuesday through Friday.

Volunteers make up a lot of the staff at Collin County Animal Services, these volunteers adopt out, and care for the cats and dogs. These volunteers try to find animals that would fit a family the best, as well as help the family understand the animal as much as possible in order to adopt the cat, or dog. They also help to make sure that the animals are healthy, and well cared for, this way they are comfortable enough around people and can find them homes. The shelter does have staff members that work there everyday that helps to clean and care for the animals on a regular basis, but volunteers only come in when they sign up to work Tuesday through Thursday.

Collin County Animal Services lets volunteers work with cats and dogs to help them get adopted, also gives volunteers to attain people skills when coming face to face with adopters, one is not like the other. Adopters can act differently when they don’t get the dog, or cat, that they wanted or just can’t adopt the animal under certain circumstances, like the animal isn’t available for adoption yet, which is usually the main reason that volunteers need people skills in order to know how handle adopters. Volunteers mainly learn how to handle different types of people when adopters come to look  at the animals, this helps the volunteer gains people and talking skills needed to approach a potential adoption.

The Shelter is a great way for those interested in animals to help and save as many animal lives as possible, as well as gain vital life skills for later in the future. For more information about an animal, or adoption registration fees and such, go to www.collincountytx.gov/animal_services/Pages/default.aspx, visit their Facebook page, Collin County Animal Services.