one thing that people always ask me is what is green mountain animal defenders and what do you guys do and i find it sometimes easy for me to say what we don't do because we are involved with so much  we're not an animal shelter we don't adopt out cats and dogs on the flipside we pretty much do everything else for thirty years we've been advocating for the protection wellbeing of all animals so for us if it's a cat or a dog or a donkey or a crow it doesn't  matter and i think that's what really makes us unique in our state so every year throughout the year different months we focus on what we call our serious six and it's six areas of animal protection we focus on every year at different times throughout the year typically in january and february we focus a lot on companion animals like so early and we fundraise for our spay and neuter program we had a wonderful vegan valentine's day bake sale at merchant's bank on valentine's day in all of the funds raised from that will go towards our spaniel program we also do something called our paws project impost dance for providing all weather shelter and what we do is we work with another local nonprofit and we identify vermont dogs who live primarily outdoors that need full time shelter we provide insulated doghouses to those dogs so we also receive phone calls or e mails from people who have lost a cat or a dog and we try to help to help find a missing dog or cat the next item on our serious six let's call it is wildlife we focus a lot of attention on wildlife in october one of the things that we did not tobar of last year is talk about the local trap in the state and a lot people don't realize that cats and dogs can fall victim to lead culture apps so we try to educate the public on that we also talk to people about human wildlife conflicts and how they can either be avoided or if someone let's say has a family of scum living under their front porch we have a great pool of resources to refer them to that can help them humanely resolve that issue something else we focus on is animals and entertainment in summer is a really busy time for us as far as that particular campaign we do a lot of outreach on church street and with our fair is coming up in vermont we like to talk to people about you know keeping your eyes open for let's see if there's exotic animals at any of our fairs and you know do they have water do they have proper shelter things for people to look for make sure that no animals are being given as prizes because that's not allowed and another fun campaign that we do in the summer is our product and cosmetic testing campaign so we try to educate people on humane alternatives to products that they may use every day not even realize the cruelty that goes behind the testing of the products from shampoos to any kind of cleaning agents there's so many cruelty free options on church street we have a bunch of samples items that our volunteers have used in loved and we share it with the public so number five on our serious six of campaigns that we focus on every year would be from the animals and the benefits of vegetarianism in october of last year we had our walk for farm animals which was so much fun we had volunteers dressed in the chicken costume a cow costume we actually had goats join us this year or last year i'm church street for our walk and basically it's just to raise awareness as to the plight of factory farming and also trying to get people to try you know more of a plant based diet and open their eyes to that some of the goats that we had in our walk for farm animals last year were from the rescue that we were involved with in the spring of last year with a number of goats who were going to be sent for slaughter most of them were babies about twenty and we were contacted to see if we could assist and through our networking our resources we were able to assist in the rescue of all these goats and now they're in a wonderful home romping around the grass bouncing off the barn walls they're just adorable all the funds raised from our walk for farm animals goes towards rescues number six are serious six would be volunteers and interns for a variety of different opportunities so from you know being on the front lines doing outreach and education turk street or whatever other venues or behind the scenes maybe helping out with some graphic design aspects or writing  we have so many different volunteer opportunities for people and those can be found on our website at the animal defenders that are g and there is a volunteer link and a and intern link that you can click on for more information