Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelly Thyssen.
Kelly, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I started as an Animal Control officer in 2005. Throughout my career I had noticed a great lack of quality training for Animal Control Officers (ACOs) and Animal Welfare Professionals in general. In 2014 I created Humane Educators of Texas with a mission to provide quality, interactive training for ACOs, Law Enforcement, and all Animal Welfare Professionals. I retired from Animal Control in 2018 and opened our brick and mortar location here in Hutto where we have a classroom and a small clinic area for students to train in. Since 2018, my business partner and I have travelled the country as well as all over the state of Texas training thousands of professionals!
In 2020 I felt a calling to become more involved in improving the mental health training and resources for Animal Welfare Professionals, so in 2021 I became a Trained Peer and in 2023 co-founded the non-profit Humane H.E.L.P. Through this organization, we provide training to those who would like to be come trained peers as well as provide a peer support network to Animal Welfare Professionals in need.
Both of these organizations are geared toward raising the standard of Animal Control and bettering the lives of the professionals doing this incredibly hard job.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has been a road of ups and downs. I split ways with my original business partner shortly after starting the company and then had to find a new person to partner with me to grow the business. Thankfully we both have incredibly supportive families who backed us 100% when the time came to quit our full time jobs, take a pay cut, and run this business full time in 2018. Covid had a huge impact on us as well. We closed our facility for 10 weeks during the height of the pandemic and didn’t recover to full time teaching until 2021 because government agencies had greatly reduced travel and training. Finances were hard, and there were many times we had to forego paying ourselves just to keep the business up and running.
But since 2021 we have steadily grown and now have 5 additional instructors, all with very unique law enforcement and animal welfare backgrounds, who work for us. We also were able to hire a part time employee to help handle our day to day office needs so that we can travel more.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Amongst the Animal Welfare Profession, we are known for our fun, interactive, and informative courses. We offer over 30 different classes. We have built a reputation across the nation as people who actively pursue personal and professional growth while also pushing the profession forward by questioning the status quo. I am most proud of the reputation we have built in this state but also with organizations all across this country. We are active with our state animal control association as well as the national animal control association. We speak at animal control and law enforcement conferences throughout the year while also maintaining our regular training schedules. Some of the classes I am most proud to teach is our Pet CPR and 1st Aid courses because these are some of the few classes that we teach members of the public. This class is a fun but informative class geared toward pet parents, pet professionals, and anyone wanting to help animals during an emergency. There are only a handful of pet CPR instructors actively teaching in Central Texas!
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
Passion and integrity. I have a great passion for this profession and I want to see it grow and new standards be set. Integrity is at the core of what we do. We have the duty to not only teach the laws that pertain to Animal Control and Animal Law Enforcement, but we have a duty to encourage hard conversations when agencies are not following the laws so that we can, together, move away from the “dog catcher” image and give our communities trained, passionate, professional animal first responders.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.humaneeducatorsoftexas.com
- Other: https://www.humanehelp.org
