Saving animals is a lifestyle; and Ruby is ready to recruit you
Ruby Fooks is one of those people you hear about once in a generation. When talking to Ruby, you see she moves a million miles a minute. Because she has to. So let’s start this the Ruby way and dive straight in.
To set the scene, Ruby lives in Butler County, Kentucky. It's an entirely rural area composed of fewer than 13,000 people, nestled along the Green River in the Western Coal Field region of the state. Ruby sat down with us and brought us into her corner of the world — where, as director of Butler County Animal Shelter, she does a lot of good with only a little.
“The county gives us $7,500 a month to cover everything: vetting, payroll, lights, insurance, water ...” Ruby could go on, but honestly, government funding is the least of her focus or concern.
“I'm very frugal. I do it with money we scrape up,” she says humbly. But that scraping requires a ton of hard work.
“Every weekend, every week, we were doing something. I don't care if it was washing a dog, washing a car, baking bread, selling flowers, selling shirts, picking up trash ... we did it all the time, nonstop.”
And somehow, she’s running all of this with the same 24 hours in the day as you and me. I mean, talk about motivation.
When she became shelter director for Friends of Butler County Animals at the end of 2018, it was Ruby and one part-time employee. Today, she leads a team of 12 and oversees both the shelter and a busy spay/neuter clinic.
Or oversees what she calls “two different dumpster fires.” Learning to laugh in the face of adversity is just one tool in Ruby’s toolkit — one built from years of hardship growing up.
Her childhood was marked by instability and uncertainty. Ruby was raised by her grandmother, who instilled in her the “scraping-it-together” mentality.
While she experienced turmoil as a child, “the only thing that was consistent in my life was the animals,” Ruby says. “They were the only place where I felt safe and secure.” Namely, her first dog, Maggie.
Early in her career, Ruby became a veterinary technician and worked in private practice, but pets in shelters consistently stayed top of mind. “The animals in private practice had people who cared about them,” she says. “The shelter animals did not. That is what moved me toward shelter medicine.”
The current president of the Friends of Butler County Animals board, Jeanie Locke, saw something in Ruby. She recognized her talent and encouraged her to take a chance on the work that moved her. She hired Ruby back at the shelter and has remained one of her guiding lights and strongest supporters ever since.
With strong mentors like Jeanie, Ruby took the helm as shelter director and began asking for what she needed. Ruby got sick and tired of having to drive hours to other counties to get the animals at the shelter spayed or neutered. And she wanted to be able to provide those services at a low cost to the pets already in her community. So why not build a clinic herself?
She got quotes from local contractors, who cited budgets that seemed astronomical at the time. And Ruby, being as scrappy as she is, knew she could do better. So she went to locally owned businesses and asked what parts they could donate. She found a window company that donated a $20,000 window package because their other deal fell through. A few of the doors were donated, and most of them work — just a few jams here and there. She figured it out. And she keeps asking: “How can I do more?”
Well, “more” brought her shelter from an estimated 60% save rate (the percentage of pets who leave a shelter alive or are still there waiting for an outcome) to more than 90%. And it cut the average time a dog spends at the shelter down from nine months to just 13 days.
This perspective is exactly what our movement needs right now. Ruby is a leader because she doesn’t wait to be called upon; she sees a problem and jumps in to fix it. When money is tight or there doesn’t seem to be enough hands, she gets creative and resourceful. Now in her early 30s, Ruby is proving to be a real leader for this next generation of animal heroes. And she should probably have been on the 30 under 30 list if they had an animal welfare category. I’m just saying.
Still, Ruby didn’t get here alone, and she is the first to say so. Ruby’s husband and children, too, are a huge part of this work that really is more of a lifestyle. Her children help at the clinic and pitch in during events. In fact, when the family isn’t working, they’re fundraising.
That probably feels natural to Ruby because family is where she first learned how to keep going. Ruby is emotional when she speaks about the grandmother who taught her to work with what she had. She also taught her not to wait for perfection before getting started.
“If you don’t start somewhere,” Ruby says, “you are never going to get anywhere.”
Ruby insists she’s nobody special. That she simply did what needed to be done. But doing what needs to be done with almost no resources or road map is pretty special.
And when asked about the future, Ruby says: “We have to have education. We can make a big dent with spay and neuter. And all the other little things help, but we have to get education in the more rural areas, or we're never going to get anywhere.”
And she’s already dreaming up a program for the schools in her area to get kids interacting with animal services from a young age. Is there anything this woman can’t do?
But what is truly remarkable to me is that Ruby sticks with it. Not everyone can work seven days a week, raise young kids, and maintain a marriage. And that’s OK. But what she’s proving to all of us is that if you start somewhere and stick with it, you can make incredible change in your community.
Whether that’s spaying or neutering two dogs a week or building a new clinic to give access to everyone in your community, it’s still working toward something good, and we should all take pride in that. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but we have to start somewhere. Thank you, Ruby, for reminding us of that.
To support Ruby and Friends of Butler County Animals, visit their website.
-Julie
