Amy Dumas, better known to WWE fans as Lita, achieved one of her career highlights this week, and it had nothing to do with sports entertainment.
Lita has been volunteering for the past several months at the Moore County (N.C.) Animal Center. On Thursday, the former Women's Champion went with the center's manager, Julie Bryant, and assistant manager, Jerry Bodner, to a public forum of the Moore County Board of Health, in an effort to secure more funding for the center. They succeeded.
The shelter will soon be allocated several hundred dollars more each month to fund education, adoption and treatment initiatives. The long-term goal, Lita said, is to increase both the adoption rate and the awareness of the pet overpopulation problem so that the center can become one of the few country-run no-kill shelters in the U.S.
At the meeting, Lita said she showed the board members the WWE Confidential segment about the shelter, broadcast in February, as well as a recent article on WWE.com, to prove that employees at the shelter are working hard.
Board members, Lita said, "were satisfied that we were doing the most that we could do."
One of the board members is a veterinarian, which helped, Lita said.
She added that increasing the public's awareness of animal-related issues is a gradual process, but Thursday's meeting was a "good big step" in the right direction as she starts to prepare to return to the WWE ring.
"People have been slowly starting to notice the hard work of this particular shelter," Lita said.
There are other examples besides Thursday's Board of Health meeting.
Lita's local newspaper has recently printed stories about the shelter, and a local senior citizen donated his entire baseball-card collection -- more than 165,000 cards -- which will be auctioned to raise money.
Also, a woman who works at an animal shelter in the U.K. read the recent article on WWE.com about Lita and contacted the shelter about the possibility of working together. Lita said that's a step in the right direction, as animal shelters are all dealing with the same problem, which they may be able to solve more efficiently by working together.
For information or to make a donation:
Moore County Animal Center
P.O. Box 279
Carthage, NC 28327