I would characterize myself as a health and safety lover. 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.

All four groups came back and said they understood the need to eliminate smoking, but there had to be some compromise. There are a lot of people on campus who might have felt differently.

The big thing is that the pet population is something that people can do something about. 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.

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. You are going to have situations when you are going to have to put an animal down.

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. This has taught me how you operate a shelter and how you build it, things like that.

While growing up, on the news every night was the war in Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement. We were all talking about what was happening when Kennedy got killed and King got killed. The whole Watergate thing with Nixon was big.