Valley animal shelters get ‘slammed’ with lost pets
If you’ve recently lost a pet and live in Maricopa County, that pup or kitty may have been picked up by Animal Care and Control.
Maricopa County animal shelters are “slammed” with stray pets, and officials on Wednesday said they hope owners will look for them there.
Animal control picked up 100 lost and stray animals with no identification over the holidays, putting the population at nearly 900 animals between the county’s two facilities, said Jose Miguel Santiago, a Maricopa County Animal Care and Control spokesman.
“There are people out there that could be desperately looking for their pet and don’t know where to start,” Santiago said.
Shelters have to hold animals for four days before they can be placed up for adoption, and all the animals brought in are ones without any positive form of identification, Santiago said. Normally, if animal-control officers find a microchip or dog license, the pet is delivered right back home, never visiting a shelter.
The two facilities are located at 2500 S. 27th Ave., in Phoenix, and 2630 W. Rio Salado Parkway, in Mesa. Most of the animals are at the county’s west Phoenix facility, Santiago said, but people who are missing pets are encouraged to look at both.
Because the shelters have leftover holiday funding, they are adopting out “bully breeds,” like pit bulls, for free, Santiago said.
“With our crews already out on calls again, things are looking quite bad here at the shelter for us,” he said.