Employees of American animal shelters are talking about how hard it is for them to take care of all the new animals. The shelters are full of animals, and the people who work there are afraid of what this means for the animals’ health and long lives.
Michael and Sierra work at the California Mendocino Coast Humane Society. They have talked about what it’s like to work at an animal rescue during this very troubled time. They talked about the huge number of animals that have been taken to shelters and the many animals that have died on the streets.
They said that they had to take in almost 700 animals last year because people were hurting them. They also said that animal control is telling a lot of people in the area to leave any animals they find where they found them because there aren’t enough homes to take them in.
People don’t realize how bad the situation is or how hard it is for these places to keep up, according to experts. There were almost 700,000 cats put to sleep in shelters in the United States last year.
The problems come up when you think about the choices animal shelters have to make. When they are full, no-kill shelters often have to turn animals away. Kill shelters, on the other hand, have to take in more animals and then decide which animal to kill to make room.
The news said that a lot of this might be due to the “pandemic puppy,” which was a trend during the pandemic in which people adopted pets but then gave them back to those in need or took them to a shelter when things got better. In the past few years, the number of animals in shelters has gone down, but now it’s going up again.
Experts say that shelter workers can’t do it for the money because the average yearly salary of a shelter worker is less than $30,000, and shelter workers say that they are on the front lines of helping people.