Hitting the road
Shelter taking its adoptable animals, services to community
The Animal Rescue League of Berks County is hitting the road with a mobile pet adoption unit and clinic that will provide vaccines and microchips to communities in the county.
The ARL on Saturday unveiled its new mobile unit, a 26-foot-long 2024 Ford E450. It has 18 built-in cages on board and 14 of those have a divider that can be removed to create seven large cages, said José Joel Delgado-Rivera, the ARL’s chief communications officer. The remaining four smaller cages will be used for kittens, rabbits or guinea pigs.
The vehicle also features a sink, refrigerator for vaccines, exam table, scale, air conditioning and heater.
It cost $204,591 and was outfitted by Magnum Mobile Specialty Vehicles in Phoenix, Ariz. The largest portion of the financing was provided by a $75,000 grant from Petco Love, a nonprofit animal welfare charity that started in 1999 as the Petco Foundation. The visual graphics wrap was done by Dark Side Vinyl Graphix & Signs in Spring Township.
The rest of the bill was covered by other donors, Delgado-Rivera said Monday.
“We plan to utilize the van to simultaneously bring our low-cost and subsidized veterinary care to underserved communities throughout the county and be present at community and ARL-organized events to facilitate adoptions of pets in the field,” Ashley Mikulsky, ARL CEO, said in a statement Monday.
The ARL said it is typically present at more than 50 community events in a year and it will now bring the unit to each of those events. A schedule of where the mobile adoption and clinic unit will appear will be posted at www.berksarl.org.
“Our investment in the Animal Rescue League of Berks County is part of more than $15 million in investments recently announced by Petco Love to power local organizations across the country as part of our commitment to create
a future in which no pet is unnecessarily euthanized,” Susanne Kogut, president of Petco Love, said in the release.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the vehicle was held Saturday in front of the Petco store in the Exeter Commons shopping center in Exeter Township.