The Nacogdoches animal shelter has been forced to close several times in the past few weeks, overwhelmed by the number of animals being brought to the facility.
In one day, shelter employees closed early in order to euthanize 47 animals and free up space. The following morning, 59 new animals were taken in within the first two hours.
Christy Wooten/The Daily Sentinel |
Amber, a curly coated golden retreiver mix, was found as a stray and has been at the shelter for a month waiting for a new home. As long as the animals are healthy and there is room, the shelter prefers to keep them up for adoption rather than euthanize the animals. Yet, when they are full of adoptable animals, the ones that have been there the longest are the first to be euthanized.
|
|
Historically, the local animal shelter takes in between 5,000 and 6,000 animals every year. Of those, only about 1,000 are adopted.
"As bad as we want to adopt every one of them, you look at the numbers and it just doesn't match up," Tommy Wheeler, city health and environmental officer, said. "And the only thing that can fix this is that people just need to be responsible with their animals."
Animals need to be spayed or neutered in order to keep the animal population down, and the need for euthanasia minimalized.
A series of articles will give readers a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to keep an animal shelter operating and the difficult job that shelter workers and animal control officers face daily.
With only five full-time staff members, the shelter relies on volunteers and community service workers to keep the operation running as smoothly as possible.
Days are long and tiring and filled with non-stop activities of cleaning cages, feeding and watering animals, taking animal cruelty calls, answering telephone inquiries and complaints, testing animals and administering medications, adopting and euthanizing ... the list goes on.
We begin the periodic series with a first-person account by Sentinel summer intern Lauren Drinkard of what it's like working side-by-side with shelter employees. A video of her experiences can be seen at www.dailysentinel.com
Over the next few months, articles will address various aspects of shelter operations, the costs involved in providing animal shelter services, legal aspects of pet ownership within the city and the problems workers encounter daily.
We will explore options for solutions to pet overpopulation issues and give readers a somewhat graphic yet deeply emotional view of euthanasia.
If the answer to ending the vicious cycle of overpopulation and euthanasia is to spay and neuter pets, as Wheeler said, then our goal in this series is to make a community understand that.
