Spec Sample: An Interview-Based Feature
For this spec sample, I am interviewing a shelter director at a mid-size municipal shelter that just pioneered a Fear Free shelter model.
Member spotlight FEATURE
Calming the Chaos: How One Shelter Director Brought Fear Free Principles to a Municipal Shelter… and Changed Everything
When Dana Reyes took the helm at Millbrook Animal Services, the shelter had a 40% stress-related illness rate among its dogs. Three years later, it’s become a model for low-stress care in municipal shelters across the region.
By: Alix Mitchell | Spring 2026
Dana Reyes remembers the dog that changed everything. He was a two-year-old German Shepherd mix named Biscuit, surrendered after his family relocated. By this third day at Millbrook Animal Services, he had stopped eating. By the seventh day, he had developed an stress-induced stomach issues, one of the dozens the shelter logged that quarter. “We were doing everything by the book,” Reyes says. “Kennels were clean, and the staff was caring, yet the animals were still deteriorating in front of us.”
That was in early 2022, when Reyes had just stepped into the Director of Shelter Operations role at Millbrook, a mid-size municipal shelter serving a county of roughly 180,000 residents in the mid-Atlantic region. What she inherited was a facility running on outdated protocols – loud, bright, unrelenting – that prioritized operational throughput over the psychological wellbeing of the animals inside it. What she built over the next three years is now drawing visits from shelter professionals across the state.
“Fear, anxiety, and stress aren’t just welfare concerns – they’re operational ones. A stressed animal is harder to assess harder to adopt out, and more likely to get sick.”
-Dana Reyes, Director of Shelter Operations, Millbrook Animal Services
Reyes encountered Fear Free principles through a continuing education workshop in late 2022 – the same low-stress handling methodology increasingly adopted in veterinary practices. The framework, she says, felt immediately intuitive given her background in animal behavior. Translating these practices into a 60-kennel municipal facility with a rotating volunteer base and a county-controlled budget was a different challenge entirely. “There was no playbook for this at our scale,” she says. “We had to write it ourselves.”
The changes began with the physical environment. Millbrook retrofitted its down wing with sound-absorbing panels along the kennel corridor and replaced the standard ceiling tiles with sound absorbent tile. Both of these efforts reduced ambient noise levels by an estimate 20 decibels during peak hours. Fluorescent overhead lights were swapped for softer, indirect light. Visual barriers – simple frosted panels between kennel runs – gave dogs the ability to opt out of sustained eye contact with neighboring animals. “We started thinking about every design decision from the dog’s point of view,” says Reyes. What does this sound like at their height? What can they see? What can they control?”
Staff training followed. Reyes partnered with a certified dog behavior consultant to deliver a six-week low-stress handling curriculum for all full-time employees, and later integrated a condensed version into the volunteer onboarding process. The curriculum covered body language literacy, approach and restraint techniques, and enrichment protocols tailored to individual stress profiles. Dogs began receiving brief behavioral assessments within 24 hours of intake – not just to inform adoption matching, but to flag early signs of deterioration before they escalated.
“Volunteers were some of our biggest skeptics at first. Then they started noticing that dogs were calmer during their walks. That the animals were actually enjoying the interaction. That changed the conversation.”
-Dana Reyes, Director of Shelter Operations, Millbrook Animal Services
The results have been measurable. Stress-related illness rates among dogs have dropped by more than half since the initiative launched. Average length of stay has decreased by four days – a meaningful figure in a facility where kennel capacity directly affects intake decisions. Live release rates have climbed steadily, reaching 89% in 2025, up from 71% in 2021. Reyes is careful about attribution – “we mad a lot of changes at once,” she says – but points to staff retention as an unexpected downstream benefit. “People stay because the work feels humane again. That matters more than I can quantify.”
Reyes earned her Certified Animal Welfare Administrator (CAWA) credential in 2024, a process she describes as clarifying. “It gave me a framework for thinking about the organization as a system, not just a collection of daily crises,” she says. “I’d recommend it to anyone moving into a leadership role in the animal welfare field.” She now mentors two shelter managers in neighboring counties who are beginning their own low-stress transitions – sharing protocols, fielding calls, and quietly expanding what started as one shelter’s experiment into something that looks increasingly like a regional shift.
As for Biscuit, he was adopted on day eleven by a retired schoolteacher who renamed him Harley. Reyes still has the photo on her office wall. “I don’t keep it there as a feel-good story,” she says. “I keep it there so I remember what the baseline felt like, and why we can’t go back to it.”