Champ Needs You To Make His Stay Less Stressful

For the past several years we have had a contract to operate the city’s animal shelter. While this gave us the opportunity to help as many animals as possible, it also led to chronic overcrowding. The facilities that the city provided had some major problems that made it difficult to ensure the comfort and health of the animals in our care. To start with, it was too small to handle the number of strays in the city, which led to chronic overcrowding. It was located twenty feet from a busy railroad near a crossing which meant that trains passed by throughout the day and night with their horns blaring which was very unsettling to the animals. The way the building was constructed, there was no feasible way to heat and cool the kennels and because of the design of the open kennel drains, it was difficult to properly sanitize and prevent the spread of germs. 

After multiple attempts to persuade the city to build a new facility or make the needed upgrades to the existing one, we finally realized that they were not going to follow through with either and we needed to make the needed changes ourselves. As a result, we made the decision not to renew our contract and to relocate our facilities to a better location. 

Since then we have turned a steel building on one of the board member’s property into a shelter that is more in line with what we envision for our animals. This has been a lot of work over the past few months, but we are now in the new facilities and are already seeing the benefits. 

All of our animals are now all in air conditioned and heated buildings. They don’t have to hear the sound of a loud train horn multiple times a day nor feel it rattle the walls of the building as it passes within a few feet of the building. Now that we are not under contract with the city, we have the flexibility to avoid overcrowding. 

At this time there are over 130 animals in our care and we are working hard to take the best care of them and to find them homes of their own. Even during this difficult transition time, we have still managed to adopt out 10 dogs, 13 puppies, 4 cats, and 13 kittens and we have 29 adopted cats and dogs that will be leaving on transport this coming week. 

We still have plenty to do in order to get everything set up like we need it, but we are so much happier and so are the animals in our care. Our next goal is to build multiple play yards with shade tarps so the animals can get adequate exercise and fresh air every day. We have plenty of land available for this purpose but will need funds to purchase fencing as well as shade tarps and support posts.