Most students know Eugene Dial as the vice president of student affairs and enrollment services. He can be seen at most campus events wearing a smile and chatting up students and faculty alike. But few know of his love for animals and his extra-curricular activities with the Lafourche Society of Animals Inc., which raises funds to support the soon-to-be-built Lafourche animal shelter.”I would characterize myself as a health and safety lover,” Dial said. “My love for animals is because if you don’t properly care for and manage the pet population, you can have some serious health consequences for people.”

Dial is coordinating an advisory committee to design and build Lafourche Parish’s first ever animal shelter. It will be located next to Thibodaux High School and is being built by students. He has spent the last year researching and learning about animal shelters and how to run them.

“We went out and looked at shelters all across the southern part of the state, and then we got on the Internet and did a lot of research,” Dial said, standing next to stacks of research material he has gathered over last year. “This has taught me how you operate a shelter and how you build it, things like that.”

According to Dial, a shelter should be easy to clean and make it easy to feed and care for animals. He also said safety, for both the animals and the caretakers, is a large factor in designing a shelter.

Dial said a shelter should not be a place where animals are to be brought just to be killed. He said the objective of any shelter should be to provide a temporary holding facility until lost animals can be reunited with their owners.

“If you can’t reunite them with their owner, you need to identify the pets that are adoptable,” Dial said. “Then you get advertisement out so people who are going to care for pets will know where to find a pet that they know is adoptable and healthy. The goal is to get every single adoptable animal adopted.”

Animals that are not adoptable include the sick and severely injured. Dial said some adult feral cats have never interacted with humans and will never be able to. He said the animals that are not adoptable have to be put to sleep.

“You don’t want to turn them back loose on the street, but you don’t want them to spend months and months or years and years in a shelter,” Dial said. “You are going to have situations when you are going to have to put an animal down.”

Dial said he has always had a love for animals and believes pets are a great way to teach children about responsibility. He owned several dogs while growing up and is the current owner of two Labrador/chow mixes. He even feeds two cats that have stayed outside of his office window for years. The cats were spayed and neutered by funds raised by the Student Government Association several years ago.

“I just feed those two because those are the SGA cats,” Dial said. “Fluffy is the black one, and Prissy is the striped one.”

Dial said he sees his work with animals as just his way of helping the community as a whole and hopes others can do their part also.

“The big thing is that the pet population is something that people can do something about,” Dial said. “Humans have a choice to do the decent and humane thing. We can walk away from it and ignore it, but I have decided to not walk away from it.