UCAPS seeking volunteers, hoping to raise awareness
The Union County Animal Protection Society’s new Adoption Center has been up and running for just under a month now, and volunteer Angelica Wurth said it is meeting expectations.
“There’s peaks and valleys,” Wurth said. “Any business takes some time to ramp up, but we’ve had a lot of people paying attention and following us. We’ve had a lot of people stop by.”
The Adoption Center opened its doors on Jan. 6 after nine months of preparation. Located at 727 E. Main, the facility houses some of both the most vulnerable and most adoptable pets that UCAPS would otherwise house at the shelter at 1000 Sunset Road.
“So far, from a cat standpoint, I think we’re up to eight [adopted so far]. That’s pretty good for cats because cats don’t go that fast,” Wurth said. “Our two first dogs got adopted, and now we’ve got two others. They’re small dogs still, and one is pregnant.”
One of the hopes in creating the Adoption Center was to create a more accessible UCAPS facility to raise awareness about UCAPS’s mission and challenges for El Dorado residents.
To that end, two Volunteer Open Houses will be held at the Adoption Center this week. Wurth said UCAPS staff and volunteers will talk to the community about the different volunteer opportunities available at UCAPS, which, Wurth noted, are more extensive than one might think.
“We’re going to talk about all the roles. We’re just finishing our volunteer program and how it’s going to work,” she said. “We’re going to present the different roles people can take on as a volunteer and how scheduling is going to work.”
One challenge facing the Adoption Center right now is a lack of volunteers, making the facility’s hours short. Wurth said the Adoption Center is a sort of experiment, that, if successful, UCAPS hopes to replicate in other areas of Union County.
“I think that continuing to do transport (where animals are transported for adoption to other states); the Adoption Center; spay days (lowcost opportunities for local residents to have their pets spayed or neutered); and TNR (trap-neuter-return), we’ll do what we want to alleviate the shelter’s overcrowding, to educate the community about being a good pet parent,” Wurth said. “I think that four-pronged approach will really help us, and once we get established here, we do want to expand and take it to the rest of the county.”
UCAPS will also restart its trap-neuter-return (TNR) program for El Dorado’s stray cat population, which this year the City of El Dorado is helping to fund, this month since kitten season will start in the spring. Wurth said she hopes they catch around 20 cats to be spayed or neutered at this event, and she has an overall goal of TNR-ing at least 100 cats this year.
“Kitten season is around the corner, so we want to do an event in February and then we’ll do more in March, April, May because that’s when kittens are being born,” Wurth said. “Especially now that we did get that money from the City of El Dorado, that’s really going to be helpful.”
The Adoption Center is currently open Mondays and Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Saturdays from noon to 3 p.m.; and Sundays from 1 to 3 p.m. With more volunteers, they could be open more often, Wurth said.
“We need to be a little bit more visible,” Wurth said. “We have a lot of people that want to drop off donations and come by when we’re not open, so that’s why we need volunteers.”
UCAPS’s Volunteer Open Houses will be held tomorrow, starting at 6:30 p.m. and Saturday, starting at 3 p.m. The meetings are expected to last about an hour each.
To learn more about the Adoption Center, visit fb.me/ucapsadoptioncenter.
Caitlan Butler can be reached at 870-862-6611 or cbutler@eldoradonews.com.