I’ve never seen an animal shelter anything like the Silicon Valley Humane Society. For one thing, the building is striking, a sprawling $27 million facility that was nine years in the making, and it was carefully designed to be unlike any other animal shelter. The building looks like a modern airport terminal, it is bright and sprawling and quiet.

The  dogs all have private rooms, soothing music is piped in and the windows are covered in blues so the dogs don’t see one another and bar. The shelter is pioneering a scores of community programs that are advancing the notion of a shelter that does a lot more than rescue, house and protect animals. The center offers training and education programs and is a community animal facility, not just a shelter. I’ll write more about this in the coming days. I was excited to see it, it is radically different from any other shelter I have seen.