>> Kanab Chamber Member Directory Best Friends Animal Society - Kanab, UT
Under the heading of “who would have thunk it,” surely the success of Best Friends Animal Society has a place of honor.
Who would have ever guessed that a collection of people who shared a profound love for animals, with an equally profound lack of practical knowledge, would be able to create the nation’s largest companion animal sanctuary?
In the past 25 years, Best Friends has become the touchstone for what many in the animal rescue world recognized as a “best-practices” model for such facilities, inspiring people across the country and around the world to work on behalf of homeless pets.
Best Friends has become a Mecca for animal lovers, each year attracting approximately 30,000 visitors who fill local lodging and dining establishments. The society’s animal rescue heroics in natural disasters are well documented. And its widely respected work with dogs is chronicled on the National Geographic Channel television series “DogTown.”
And somewhere along the way, Best Friends become Kane County’s largest employer. Approximately 10 percent of the entire population of Kanab works at Best Friends, which each year sends millions into the local economy.
Founded in 1984, Best Friends works with shelters, rescue groups and members nationwide to promote pet adoption, spay/neuter services, and humane education programs. A key component of Best Friends’ work is operating the nation’s largest no-kill sanctuary for homeless or unwanted animals in southwestern Utah. The society also publishes Best Friends, the nation's largest general-interest animal magazine, with more than 250,000 subscribers.
The sanctuary is located on 3,700 acres at Angel Canyon, approximately five miles north of the town of Kanab, Utah, at the heart of the famous “Golden Circle” of Zion National Park, the Grand Canyon's North Rim, Bryce Canyon National Park, and Lake Powell. The land in and around the town of Kanab is famous as a backdrop for dozens of western movies and television shows, dating back to the 1940’s. Among the many dramas filmed in the area were The Lone Ranger television series, and the movie McKenna's Gold, and The Outlaw Josey Wales.
On any given day, the sanctuary is home to approximately 1,700 animals, most of which are dogs and cats; but the sanctuary also welcomes horses, burros, wild birds, rabbits, goats, farm animals, and an assortment of other creatures. Animals arrive at the sanctuary from throughout the United States and abroad, primarily from shelters that don’t have the resources to keep them and from shelters where they would otherwise be destroyed. Best Friends is a no-kill animal sanctuary, which means that animals, regardless of illness or handicap, can live their lives in peace. Animals are only put down in cases of terminal and/or extremely painful illness—only when compassion requires euthanasia because there is no reasonable alternative.
