NJ Department of Health survey of shelters
OK @bramzzoinks you are officially my MOL hero for starting this thread! One of the problems in my opinion is the lack of conveniently located shelters. I have some insider knowledge from a lifetime of volunteering at shelters both here in NJ and in NYC. To increase adoptions before we had a shelter and after it closed I did adoption events at Petco, Petsmart and at our local Zen Pets at its former location.
Convenience Matters! Parents, couples, and individuals frequently admit that they were thinking about adoption or that their child was asking for a pet or that there wife misses their cat that died last year. Faced with a big pair of kitten eyes, or the wise sad eyes of a special needs cat or the big goofy stare of a senior dog who still has that special something to offer, an adoption often occurs. Because we were there in front of them.
But not often enough. Adoption events occur on Saturdays and then that animal goes to someone's foster home if he is lucky but he won't have a chance to make that eye contact for another week and so goes his life.
If you are a rescue you are limited to the number of animals that you can rescue based on the limitations set by your town, often the same town that does not even have a shelter such as South Orange. Orange, Irvington, West Caldwell, Caldwell, Cedar Grove, Glen Ridge, Verona and Milbrun or that has a pound that is open only an hour or so a day, such as East Orange or West Orange or Livingston by appointment. And that is just Essex County.
A responsible rescuer with a couple of cats over her current limit is being taken to court and asked to surrender them or find them immediate homes. It is an affluent town with no shelter. So will she find another rescue to take them? Who can do it without risking the same problem. So far none of them that I know of can help her, including me. We rarely can find fosters.
We will not need overburdened rescues if we have enough shelters to house them.
And believe me when I say, that we can no longer use the argument that they are mostly from out of state. My FB page is flooded with requests from rescues who are holding local dogs. And it goes without saying that is the as bad or worse with local cats. The general public has no idea how frequently animals are surrendered by their owners.
TNVR is a beginning for cats and I applaud my town of South Orange for making this compassionate choice but there is so much more to be done. In a few weeks I will be losing my friend's rescue Furry Hearts to Union. Their store Puppy Love was able to help both Maplewood and South Orange and worked with my rescue to save many animals but they are moving and we will have lost yet another facility that was able to give temporary shelter to a cat or dog while we scrambled for a solution with no one subsidizing.
I am hoping our Senator Cory Booker will renew his dream of building a No Kill Shelter. We wait for Montclair to rebuild their shelter damaged by fire. Rescues and foster homes will struggle to fill the gap but we can not make up the difference. We can not all hope that St. Hubert's, an excellent organization can save them all. Just look at the numbers. Time to be part of the solution.
Morganna said:
OK @bramzzoinks you are officially my MOL hero for starting this thread! One of the problems in my opinion is the lack of conveniently located shelters. I have some insider knowledge from a lifetime of volunteering at shelters both here in NJ and in NYC. To increase adoptions before we had a shelter and after it closed I did adoption events at Petco, Petsmart and at our local Zen Pets at its former location.
Convenience Matters! Parents, couples, and individuals frequently admit that they were thinking about adoption or that their child was asking for a pet or that there wife misses their cat that died last year. Faced with a big pair of kitten eyes, or the wise sad eyes of a special needs cat or the big goofy stare of a senior dog who still has that special something to offer, an adoption often occurs. Because we were there in front of them.
But not often enough. Adoption events occur on Saturdays and then that animal goes to someone's foster home if he is lucky but he won't have a chance to make that eye contact for another week and so goes his life.
If you are a rescue you are limited to the number of animals that you can rescue based on the limitations set by your town, often the same town that does not even have a shelter such as South Orange. Orange, Irvington, West Caldwell, Caldwell, Cedar Grove, Glen Ridge, Verona and Milbrun or that has a pound that is open only an hour or so a day, such as East Orange or West Orange or Livingston by appointment. And that is just Essex County.
A responsible rescuer with a couple of cats over her current limit is being taken to court and asked to surrender them or find them immediate homes. It is an affluent town with no shelter. So will she find another rescue to take them? Who can do it without risking the same problem. So far none of them that I know of can help her, including me. We rarely can find fosters.
We will not need overburdened rescues if we have enough shelters to house them.
And believe me when I say, that we can no longer use the argument that they are mostly from out of state. My FB page is flooded with requests from rescues who are holding local dogs. And it goes without saying that is the as bad or worse with local cats. The general public has no idea how frequently animals are surrendered by their owners.
TNVR is a beginning for cats and I applaud my town of South Orange for making this compassionate choice but there is so much more to be done. In a few weeks I will be losing my friend's rescue Furry Hearts to Union. Their store Puppy Love was able to help both Maplewood and South Orange and worked with my rescue to save many animals but they are moving and we will have lost yet another facility that was able to give temporary shelter to a cat or dog while we scrambled for a solution with no one subsidizing.
I am hoping our Senator Cory Booker will renew his dream of building a No Kill Shelter. We wait for Montclair to rebuild their shelter damaged by fire. Rescues and foster homes will struggle to fill the gap but we can not make up the difference. We can not all hope that St. Hubert's, an excellent organization can save them all. Just look at the numbers. Time to be part of the solution.
A big thanks to both bramzzoinks and morganna for their posts. They have said it best. But I know that if we dedicate ourselves to saving the lives of our adoptable pets, we can make huge strides in improving on these numbers. And that dedication should start at home and it should start with those of us who love animals asking our towns to stand up for the lives of our animals.
I've lost count of the people I've met in our community who have adopted shelter animals. So the support is there. But for all of the animals saved by St. Hubert's, the sad fact is that there are many more who never even get the chance to be adopted.
It just doesn't have to be this way. If we only do our part by taking care of our own animals, we can make all the difference.
I just learned of this and I'm going to check it out. It appears to have a Petco sponsorship.
ShelterMe.tv.
ShelterMe.com – which enables anyone to create and share profiles of shelter pets to help increase adoptions. Shelter Me works closely with other animal welfare organizations to organize effective spay-neuter and humane education programs and helps develop and implement life-saving projects directly at animal shelters. Follow ShelterMeTV on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Contact Shelter Me at info@shelterme.tv.
Here is a sample episode of shelterme.tv
https://shelterme.tv/episodes/episode-1/
“Shelter Me: Hope & Redemption” is hosted by Katherine Heigl and features female prisoners that train shelter dogs to become service animals. We also see a story about two U.S. veterans that begin healing from PTSD after they are paired up with shelter dogs and we experience the journey of two stray dogs who go from the streets to becoming beloved family pets."
An Animal Shelter whose goal it is to find loving homes for its animals is such a natural fit for our two towns.
It is important to keep the discussion alive so a solution may be explored.
Thank you for posting these statistics and articles that outline some of the main issues/concerns we are facing.
A big issue with local shelters is that a lot of the dogs are pits or pit mixes. Many of these are happy, stable, loving animals. But even when potential adopters are familiar with how loving and faithful these dogs can be they are still shy about adopting them. With towns threatening breed bans, and with homeowners insurance often refusing to write policies if the homeowner has a pit or pit mix, these animals will continue to languish in pounds, or be euthanized when they cannot find homes and become destabilized from extended periods of sitting in a cage.
Even if the shelter on 298 Walton were to be reopened, it might not make much of a dent in Essex County's grim euthanasia statistics. In order to keep the peace with the neighbors, it would be necessary to restrict the number of dogs hosted at the site, and I don't know how many cats the shelter could accommodate. For me, however, it's a question of "better to light one candle than to curse the darkness." Soma could help reduce these numbers by reopening the shelter, and that's the humane thing to do.
spontaneous said:
A big issue with local shelters is that a lot of the dogs are pits or pit mixes. Many of these are happy, stable, loving animals. But even when potential adopters are familiar with how loving and faithful these dogs can be they are still shy about adopting them. With towns threatening breed bans, and with homeowners insurance often refusing to write policies if the homeowner has a pit or pit mix, these animals will continue to languish in pounds, or be euthanized when they cannot find homes and become destabilized from extended periods of sitting in a cage.
The Pit-bull rescue organizations need to do some serious public relations work with the towns and insurance companies. And serious legal penalties need to be enforced against those who train their Pits and Pit mixes to fight. If they were not trained to fight, there would be no behavioral issues with these dogs.
Morganna said:
Here is a sample episode of shelterme.tv
https://shelterme.tv/episodes/episode-1/
“Shelter Me: Hope & Redemption” is hosted by Katherine Heigl and features female prisoners that train shelter dogs to become service animals. We also see a story about two U.S. veterans that begin healing from PTSD after they are paired up with shelter dogs and we experience the journey of two stray dogs who go from the streets to becoming beloved family pets."
This has always been a dream of mine to have shelter dogs trained to contribute in a way that either provides the money for their care, or makes people see their contribution as worthy of their care and support. So happy to see this come to pass! Maybe St. Hubert's could do something like this in this area.
Has anything more been mentioned about the proposed Canoe Brook Rd. shelter? I haven't seen any news articles about it.
I agree about that often Pit & Pit mixes getting seem to get banned for no good reason. I have yet to experience an aggressive Pit or Pit mix. I have experienced quite a few aggressive Poodle & Poodle mixes though, which in my area is probably more related to the owners than the dogs.
I am curious how many of the euthanized animals were aggressive, had behavorial issues, or were suffering from affliction or illness. What actions did the former shelter take to deal with those types of dogs?
I was once a volunteer for an animal shelter in another state and found the experience very fulfilling. They accepted anyone who wanted to volunteer as long as you completed a week of initial training. We could enter the shelter website with our volunteer employee IDs, and schedule ourselves into openings at our own convenience. The schedule was specific and covered cleaning, exercise, PR/promotion, and I believe even administrative tasks. We could instantly see what area needed help. If a local shelter is opened in this area, I would love to volunteer again.
I thought this would be wonderful for a public screening. Then I found this link to a live stream.
https://smile.amazon.com/Redemption-Michael-Sayers/dp/B01DCHL0JW/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1470842473&sr=8-1&keywords=REDEMPTION+the+story+of+the+no+kill
Please stop by Associated Humane Society in Newark and adopt a pet! They are full and the new manager is asking rescues to pull, but every rescue that I know of is full.
Montclair is struggling with 2 rooms after the fire.
Furry Hearts has some wonderful critters at Puppy Love, which is moving after Labor Day, so they could definitely use adopters.
Here is one such beauty and Beauty is her name.
Article from Patch on Alex Caprio shelter statistics. (West Orange pound.) The article emphasizes as well the fact that more animals are killed in this county than anywhere else in the state.
http://www.onenewspage.com/n/US/759s602bj/Life-Death-and-Adoption-West-Orange-Animal-Shelter.htm
I like the positive attitude of this successful shelter director in Virginia. It was shared by Animal Observer and has a few practical solutions. It will take a great deal of effort to move our state away from killing for space but I'm convinced it is a goal that everyone supports. Every time that I use the words No Kill, Shelter someone asks about a suffering animal or an aggressive animal, so I'm trying to move people towards the position of a refusal to kill for space. I'm interested in sharing articles on this topic as I find them and I thought this thread was a great place to explore the topic.
###a href="https://www.facebook.com/NJ-Animal-Observer-615854605129237/?ref=nf"###
###/a###
-Animal-Observer-615854605129237/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED&fref=nf">NJ Animal Observer
1 hr ·
The Executive Director of Virginia's Lynchburg Humane Society, which is a no kill animal control shelter, explains how it became no kill and other facilities can as well. The organization's specific goals, fact based decisions, and reaching out to the public explain why this shelter is so successful.
"I recognize this statement will make people in this field upset. They think they have no choice and that their hands are tied. There are many great workers out there in the tren...ches who really don’t have choices. But this community and the leaders of the organizations/counties do have choices. They can stop blaming the public, making excuses; they can take killing out of the tool box and find other resources instead. But they need resources to stop and the biggest resource is the public’s support."
"How did Lynchburg go No Kill? We stopped taking in feral cats in general and instead offer free spay/neuter for community cats. We encourage people who find healthy stray adult cats to leave them alone because 66 percent of the cats will find their way back home if left to do so. Only 2 percent to 4 percent will find their way back home in a shelter. Some might think this is cruel and dangerous for the cats, but when the top reason cats are dying in the U.S. is shelters, statistics say traditional shelters can be more dangerous.
We changed our attitudes at LHS and saw the community as a partner and trusted them and hold them in high regard. We believe most people are good, and we don’t set policy on the few irresponsible ones out there who won’t do the right thing.
We work with our city and animal control; we have a vibrant foster program and adoption specials; we celebrate every pet who goes home. We advertise and help owners with their problems by offering free food, behavior assistance and re-homing services. And, yes, we do ask owners to wait to surrender their pets, not just because we are full but because we want to help them solve their own problem, though we can be there immediately for those citizens who have emergencies and can’t wait."
Another Patch article following up the review of West Orange. This one is on East Orange.
http://www.onenewspage.com/n/US/759s601dx/Life-Death-and-Adoption-East-Orange-Animal-Shelter.htm
OK, just had to share this. Think of how a shelter could be a green energy source. I think I saw a version of this in Thunderdome.
http://blog.vetdepot.com/can-our-pets-poop-power-our-world-perhaps
Rentals
Featured Events
-
Go "Back to the '70s" with The Maplewood Glee Club and Special Guests from CHS
May 19, 2024 at 4:00pm
Advertisement
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2016/07/see_where_in_nj_more_pets_are_euthanized_than_adop.html
"...Essex County was the only northern New Jersey county to report more animals were euthanized than adopted. There 2,148 animals – including 1,524 cats and 614 dogs – were euthanized compared to the 1,984 animals that were adopted...."
http://www.state.nj.us/health/cd/documents/animaldisp15.pdf
Impounded Redeemed Adopted Euthanized
Dogs Cats Other Dogs Cats Other Dogs Cats Other Dogs Cats Other
ESSEX 2,911 4,250 148 644 48 1 779 1,172 33 614 1,524 10