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PONDERAY — It’s not the Panhandle Animal Shelter anymore.

That’s because sheltering is only part of what the Better Together Animal Alliance does, said Executive Director Mandy Evans, adding that the animal alliance had outgrown its name.

BTAA’s name was officially changed Monday to remove “shelter” to reflect the wide range of services provided by the organization. In 2019, the animal alliance helped 8,400 animals, Evans said. Of those, only 2,500 were sheltered there.

BTAA is still the same organization doing the same work, Evans said, but the name now reflects the other services they provide.

“When you look at the amount of work we're doing, as a whole, the sheltering piece of it is rather small,” Evans said.

One of those services include a temporary sheltering program, dubbed “temporary loving care” (TLC) for family pets, which offers emergency short-term boarding to families in need instead of requiring animals to be surrendered to the shelter.

“We've seen a significant increase in the number of pets that require just temporary sheltering,” Evans said. “We have the ability to take these pets and for their owners, board them for a period of time and give them back to their owners; where in the past, that would have been a situation where those pets would have had to be surrendered to the shelter because there was no other option.”

The BTAA also facilitates a home-to-home adoption program that helps pet owners who can no longer take care of their animals find a home for them without having to take the animal to a shelter facility.

In addition, BTAA runs a pet food bank, which gave out 25 tons of dog and cat food in 2020, and the Pets for Life program, which offers a variety of services to local pet owners including vaccinations, spays and neuters, leashes. food and other needs to keep animals with their people.

According to an informational video put out by BTAA, the Pets for Life program helped families with 143 surgeries, 1,491 medical treatments and items including leashes, litter and food.

The animal alliance has been working for years to help prevent owners from having to surrender their animals in the first place instead of creating a punitive system that takes animals away from loving homes, Evans said.

In the past year, more shelters across the country have followed suit as COVID-19 limited their capacity; but for BTAA, the name change is reflective of a lot of long-term work.

“The overall push [in the animal welfare community] is really to support the human animal bond and reduce the unnecessary sheltering of animals,” Evans said. We went from like, 15 shelters using our Home to Home program to over 51 shelters using it by the end of last year.”

Providing support for those cases means there are fewer time-intensive, complicated and expensive cases for the shelter later on, according to a press release from BTAA.

“Thanks to this approach, and because of generous support from the community, the shelter has quadrupled the number of animals assisted in five years, reduced the length of time animals stay in the shelter by 77 percent, and reduced owner-surrendered animals entering the shelter by 33 percent,” according to the release.

More information about BTAA and its programs can be found at bettertogetheranimalalliance.org.