When Your Pet Needs a New Home

Photo by Michael Schennum

Joanne Bonicelli changes professions like most people change clothes. The Colorado Springs, Colo., woman worked as an apartment manager, a bookkeeper and a model while she and her husband raised two children. At 39, she returned to college for a nursing degree. In her 40s, she sought advanced education in holistic health and spent several years as a nurse and director in a hospice, introducing patients to aromatherapy, acupuncture, hypnosis and music, art and pet therapy. That was before she became a consultant for a hospital cancer unit’s redesign.

Now comes Bonicelli’s latest transformation: She’s running Safe Place, a nonprofit group that finds new homes for the pets of terminally ill people. The organization, which operates in El Paso and Teller counties in Colorado, is one of only a handful of such programs in the country.

“Every human being has the right to die in peace, however that peace is defined,” says Bonicelli, 56. “For some, peace can’t come when they don’t know what will happen to their pets when they’re gone.”

She first sensed this anguish in patients while working at the hospice a decade ago and promptly set out to persuade community stakeholders to create Safe Place to address the problem. Last year, Bonicelli was recruited to be executive director of the organization she conceptualized.

Bonicelli and her staff of 51 fellow volunteers “place these animals with the same care and tenacity we’d employ if we were placing children,” she says. They interview potential adopters and visit their homes. They take great pains to create an ideal match “in an environment very similar to the one the pet came from.” The volunteers offer the animals temporary housing as well as medical care and behavior modification training that might be needed for a good fit with a new family.

The patients totally control the timing for giving up their pets. “Some want us to take their pet quite early, others keep them with them until literally the final days,” Bonicelli says. A few patients want to help select the new owner, she says, but “because we spend so much time with them talking about their pets and their desires for them, most just trust us to do the right thing by the animal.”

That trust is shared by groups throughout the country that call Safe Place seeking advice for starting similar programs. With good reason: The organization has found homes for more than 350 pets, never once failing to place an animal—though some placements have taken six months.

Bonicelli gives her best to each and every pet and to the person who gave it up. But some animals imprint themselves more deeply than others, like one cattle dog named Sandy that displayed its fear of people by being aggressive toward them.

“I worried so much about this one,” she says. “I wasn’t certain we could turn the dog around.” It took four months with a volunteer trainer to transform the pet. He now lives with two special-needs children.

“The dog has found a new purpose in life,” Bonicelli says, “and the family has a loving pet.”

Bonicelli, too, may have found a new purpose. Running Safe Place and advising those who’d like to start similar programs “is all I need creatively,” she says. “You only get one time around. The obligation is to figure out the talents that allow you to make the most of it. The joy comes from that.”

Sharon L. Peters is a writer in Colorado Springs, Colo.