I just got off the phone with Betsy Saul. She runs PetFinder.com, the famed destination where rescue pets and their prospective owners meet and fall in love…online.

If you’re like me, you worship people who run such effective, socially responsible businesses. How better to make your fortune than by securing the right to say your enterprise is responsible for a full 65% of pet adoptions in the US?

Betsy started PetFinder with little more than a concept and a graduate degree in…tree planting? (Really.) I guess that qualifies her as a true idealist, a mandatory designation for anyone willing to leap headlong into the Byzantine world of shelter policies and procedures.

Her initial naiveté on the intricacies of shelter politics was likely a major benefit, given that I can’t imagine anyone intensely familiar with the haphazard humane services system would willingly subject themselves to this kind of water torture. It just goes to prove that entrepreneurship is for the deviant (that’s a compliment, Betsy—I swear) and that the paradox holds: most effective change often comes from the outside.

Today, Betsy was driving her car around her new hometown—Tampa, Florida. She and I had gotten together so I could interview her for an informative article on hurricane preparedness I’m writing for The Miami Herald.

Her interest in the subject was obvious as she lamented the fact that her livestock rescues would have to remain at her most recent home in New Jersey until she could find a place safely inland from her current residence. But I subsequently learned that her dedication to disaster relief predates her move to Hurricane Central by about two years.

Flinging other responsibilities aside, Betsy traveled in an RV with her semi-retired parents after Katrina wreaked its havoc on New Orleans and its environs. PetFinder was among the first organized responders to deal with some of the catastrophe’s most pressing pet practicalities. It established a database depicting pets in the hopes of reuniting them with their lost owners, securing huge donations from Merial and others in order to manage it in record time.

While PetFinder’s achievement was understandably overshadowed by the sad realities of a natural disaster, it became clear that this upstart organization was more than just an adoption site. Its commitment to across-the-board pet welfare issues and entrenchment within the society of rescue-minded pet people had given it legs to carry more ambitious projects.

Betsy sagely split the organization in two, establishing the not-for-profit PetFinder.com Foundation to run alongside its money-making big sister. This enabled donations and for-profit trickle-downs to finance major community efforts like those undertaken after Katrina, while the original was sold to Animal Planet to help finance its staggering growth.

“A victim of our own success,” she quips. In spite of the sale, I don’t see Betsy slowing down anytime soon. In fact, I was surprised when she confessed to stopping her car on the side of the road during our conversation. But I’ll bet that doesn’t happen often.