America’s animal shelters are overwhelmed. Pets – and staff – are at breaking point
Monday mornings at the Mendocino Coast Humane Society, the northern California animal shelter where I work part-time, are chaotic.
The frenzied beeping of anesthesia monitoring equipment echoes as I dodge Coco, one of the resident shelter cats with a penchant for ankles, and tiptoe down a freshly mopped hallway with a bleachy smell that makes my eyes water.
A man in worn flannel and workboots waits at the front counter, face drawn; his elderly catahoula dog is waiting in the back seat of his car for an 11am euthanasia appointment. Somewhere in the clinic, a newly spayed dog is howling as she wakes.
I say good morning to Sierra, one of our animal care workers. Her partner, Michael, is tugging off his waders in the supply closet after hosing down our 26 kennels, hands rough from constant immersion in water. I swing open the door to the office, where the executive director, Judy Martin, is on the phone negotiating a transfer of 12 puppies from Covelo, a hamlet 77 miles east of us that has a growing dog overpopulation problem.
“Covelo has at least two roaming dog packs,” she says after hanging up, “running through people’s yards and killing pets. It’s only a matter of time before it’s a child.”
Last year, rescuers found a pair of
Covelo litters under a decaying trailer. Two of the puppies were dead, rotting under piles of their living siblings. This was not the first time.
Coco, for example, came from Point Arena, a city an hour to the south of us, towards the far end of our service area. She was brought in with “a string hanging out of her rectum” which proved to be her intestines. Vet staff initially thought they might need to euthanize her due to the complexity of her case and the resources available, but she proved so sweet that they took a chance, tacking her intestines in place.
Last year, we took in 694 animals, from animal cruelty cases to unwanted litters, and we are drowning. We hear that animal care and control is telling people to leave found animals where they are because they don’t have the capacity to handle them. Those people turn to us or Inland Valley Humane Society, a foster-based rescue that is similarly inundated. As closed admission shelters, we can decide to turn animals away if we lack space, even though we strive to prevent it, knowing what may happen to those we do not accept.
The list of people waiting to surrender animals is always growing.
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It is workers such as Sierra and Michael who make our services possible. They’re the unseen, unheralded heroes of animal sheltering across the country, a workforce on the frontlines of a pet overpopulation crisis that has been steadily building over the last four years.
Getting people to understand that crisis sometimes feels impossible. Most members of the public are only interested in one thing: euthanasia.
In 2023, 690,000 dogs and cats were euthanized in shelters across the US. For many members of the public, this calls to mind healthy, adoptable animals euthanized for space in open admission (so-called “kill”) shelters – those required to accept all animals, even if there’s no room. But shelters also have to cope with owner-requested euthanasias, behavioral problems and animals who are so sick or injured that a gentle death is the most positive outcome.
The issue we and many other shelters are facing is this: after a record low of 5.5 million in 2020, animal intakes are slowly increasing, and they aren’t leaving – in 2023, 6.5 million animals entered, and only a little over 6 million left. Animals are lingering for weeks, months and sometimes years in the shelter. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of animals waiting to get out of shelters increased by 177,000.
For us, these numbers have faces, such as Sophie (intake 8/11/22), Asia (4/14/23), and Annie (4/21/23). We’re also being hit by the tight job market, which makes it hard to hire and retain personnel, creating even more strain for staff: more animals, fewer people.
While the media popularized the idea of the “pandemic puppy”, dogs adopted by white-collar workers trapped at home only to be discarded as soon as the world reopened, the truth of what’s happening in animal welfare is more complicated. It’s gotten harder to access and afford vet care, while emergency extensions of the social safety net, including increased Snap benefits, expansions to Medicaid,