{"id":10189,"date":"2016-09-05T08:00:36","date_gmt":"2016-09-05T15:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/new-shelter-manager-has-soft-spot-for-strays\/"},"modified":"2016-09-05T08:00:36","modified_gmt":"2016-09-05T15:00:36","slug":"new-shelter-manager-has-soft-spot-for-strays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/new-shelter-manager-has-soft-spot-for-strays\/","title":{"rendered":"New shelter manager has soft spot for strays"},"content":{"rendered":"

FAIRBANKS<\/strong> \u2014 Growing up in Webster, New Hampshire, in the 1990s, Ariel Cunningham had no brothers or sisters. Her playmates were her family\u2019s pets \u2014 13 dogs and five cats.<\/p>\n

Cunningham said her family bred Irish and English setters and took in strays. As Cunningham tells it, the family took in as many animals as they could \u201cwithout crossing that hoarder line.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe five cats, that was my doing,\u201d the 31-year-old said.<\/p>\n

Now Cunningham is making her living helping strays as the new manager at the Fairbanks North Star Borough Animal Shelter, reported the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Cunningham\u2019s job to make sure the shelter \u2014 which houses lost and forsaken livestock and pets and investigates dog bites \u2014 runs smoothly.<\/p>\n

She is a soft-spoken second lieutenant in the Air Force\u2019s inactive reserves with a doctorate in veterinary medicine, a soft spot for ailing cats and a goal to help as many animals as possible reunite with their owners or be placed in a good home.<\/p>\n

She started in June and is planning no major changes at the shelter, though she would like to improve the website and boost outreach.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m mostly just getting my feet wet,\u201d she said, \u201ctrying to learn the ropes for how everything has been functioning up to this point.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cunningham has lived in Fairbanks for a little more than a year after marrying a member of the local PAWS search and rescue group, a nonprofit group whose volunteers train dogs to locate missing people.<\/p>\n

She came from Anchorage where she was stationed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson following veterinary school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she attended on an Air Force scholarship.<\/p>\n

When she wasn\u2019t studying, Cunningham took care of multiple cats suffering from feline AIDS.<\/p>\n

In the Air Force, Cunningham worked in public health \u2014 the human kind \u2014 supervising programs involving food safety, occupational health, deployment medicine and disease prevention.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was more of a supervisor,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was all of my enlisted airmen that were doing all of the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cunningham missed working with animals. She is replacing Sandy Besser, who retired as shelter manager. Cunningham oversees 18 employees in a job that is mostly administrative; she doesn\u2019t perform veterinary care of the animals. The borough contracts with a local veterinarian for clinical services.<\/p>\n

Cunningham is licensed to care for animals in Wisconsin, she said, but not in Alaska.<\/p>\n

She is more interested in the public heath side of veterinary medicine, though she has experience caring for animals.<\/p>\n

Cunningham studied abroad in Ecuador, vaccinating cattle from foot-and-mouth disease, a severe, highly contagious viral disease of cattle and swine. A few years later, the country was able to eradicate the disease.<\/p>\n

Cunningham also tranquilized a buffalo, an experience she described as exhilarating.<\/p>\n

Some of Cunningham\u2019s favorite animals are cattle and elephants, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think of cattle as large dogs,\u201d she said. \u201cThey can be friendly, curious. They have cool personalities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cunningham hopes to maintain the low rate of animals euthanized at the shelter, about 5 percent, she said.<\/p>\n

As a public health veterinarian, Cunningham is hoping to focus on things like food safety and disease prevention.<\/p>\n

\u201cGrowing up with so many animals, I am sure that it led to my love and my care for animals,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FAIRBANKS \u2014 Growing up in Webster, New Hampshire, in the 1990s, Ariel Cunningham had no brothers or sisters. Her playmates were her family\u2019s pets \u2014 13 dogs and five cats. Cunningham said her family bred Irish and English setters and took in strays. As Cunningham tells it, the family took in as many animals as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":10190,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-10189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10189"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=10189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}