From the Editors: January 2026

wpadington

For a majority of my young adult life I worked in an animal shelter. I often say that I did so in a previous life, really meaning before I had children, before I joined on with the Reader, etc. But it also truly feels like a totally different lifetime from the one I'm living now.

I'm sure anyone can sympathize with the fact that working in an animal shelter is hard – emotionally, psychologically, physically. But sympathizing with it and living it are two very different things. No one outside of shelter work can truly understand that sinking anxiety that comes with watching a car pull into the parking lot and not knowing what is going to happen next.

It could be a lovely family looking for a pet or a girl scout troop with a truckload of donations, but it could also be a dog with fur so matted it can hardly walk, a feral cat closed precariously into a suitcase, a red-faced, potentially violent man to whom the animal cruelty officers just paid a visit, the fifth litter of kittens to come through the door that day, a wild mink in a live trap someone thinks is a ferret, any number of terrified animals being brought into an unfamiliar place – and the deeply understood knowledge that there will never, ever be enough homes for all of them. All of these are possibilities when a car simply pulls into the parking lot, and all of them happen, very literally, every single day. Being a shelter worker is existing in a state of constant stress and anxiety, while also having to provide love, cleanliness, and care to thousands of animals every year. The lows are very low; the highs, when they happen, are sustaining.

It is, in a way, akin to living in the United States of America right now.

It is existing in a very similar state of vigilance, of constantly living on the anxious brink of what might happen next, of feeling empathetically exhausted from all of the cruelty and sadness and injustice. It is balancing that barrage of negativity with the human need for joy, for achieving a win, for celebration, that is so hard to strike, both in the animal shelter industry and in America.

Enter our annual Best of Erie contest.

This issue always feels like a breath of fresh air, much like our annual 40 Under 40 issue (if you've noticed, we parodied that yearly cover with adoptable dogs this month), a chance to celebrate some wins, to throw a spotlight on the people, places, and things that you love so much about Erie. It's so refreshing to send out our congratulations to all the winners every year and it is exactly this kind of news that gives us the stamina to get through the harder stuff.

In an interview within this issue with Ruth Thompson, the director of the ANNA shelter, she mentions that animal shelter work is just as much about forming and maintaining relationships with people as it is working with animals – that you can't have one without the other and that we're truly all in this together.

In terms of a microcosm, that feels deeply accurate.

With the constant stream of terror coming through our newsfeeds, it can feel easiest to disconnect, to draw inward, to block it out for the protection of our own mental health. But what will truly get us through it all is community.

And that community starts here – with the people, places, and things in Erie that make us who we are – by allowing their successes to become our community's successes and to let those wins sustain us.