Growing & learning with ANIMALS 24-7

Africa Network for Animal Welfare founder Josphat Ngonyo & ANIMALS 24-7 founder Merritt Clifton.
(Beth Clifton photo)

A year and one month after launching, ANIMALS 24-7 has just reached several important milestones.

One major milestone is that the fast-increasing ANIMALS 24-7 international audience recently outgrew the capacity of our original web server. We have now completed an upgrade to a server that can handle as many as 100,000 readers per day. It costs us 10 times as much in monthly use fees, but will allow us to reach 100 times as many people before we’ll need to upgrade again.

And ANIMALS 24-7 is already on target to reach as many people by mid-2015 as we reached in all of 2014––more people than I ever reached in a year previously in 45 years of reporting on animal-related news beats, including 27 years of full-time information service to the humane community.

Bo the dog has been to school much more recently than we have––but he, too, spent a lot of time gazing out the window.

Another ANIMALS 24-7 milestone is that Beth & I just wrote ourselves our first paycheck. Between us, we’re not getting much more than minimum wage, but we don’t need a whole heck of a lot.

Night school

A third milestone is that we have signed up for six weeks of night school, a four-hour round trip away, to learn enough about the ANIMALS 24-7 software to handle most of our technical work ourselves––which we have already been doing for some time now––and become able to do a more efficient & attractive job of it.

I haven’t seen the inside of a classroom since leaving graduate school to focus on committing journalism, 40 years ago. Beth hasn’t been in a classroom since her days as a schoolteacher more than 20 years ago, after six years as a cop and before becoming a vet tech and animal control officer.

Beth Clifton as a Miami Beach mounted police officer, with her heroic horse Raven. who once kept a bad guy at bay.
(Miami Herald photo)

But even if ANIMALS 24-7 keeps growing to the point of needing and becoming able to hire our own full-time geek, we need to know enough about the technical side of web publishing to supervise the work.

Doing whatever it takes

And we are committed to doing whatever it takes to help ANIMALS 24-7 keep growing at maximum capacity, to keep reporting the news of what is really happening in the animal protection community––not just what the big national and international organizations want you to believe––and to keep amplifying the voices of informed reason at a time when many prominent leaders appear to have taken leave of their senses, at the expense of the animals they purport to help.

Planting trees is creating habitat for the future. Building ANIMALS 24-7 is building the humane culture of the future. (Beth Clifton photo)

ANIMALS 24-7 has come this far with your contributions, and needs your continued investment to continue our progress.

Please tell your friends to sign up at www.Animals24-7.com for our free alerts, sent out whenever news is posted, and please donate generously, either through the web link below or simply by sending your check to ANIMALS 24-7 at POB 101, Greenbank, WA 98253.

Thank you!