Animal shelter bracing for a tough August

The Pima Animal Care Center had an extraordinarily busy July 4th weekend and is bracing for a rough August.

The holiday is normally a busy one for PACC, but it also said that it’s experienced unusually high intake over the last year and a half. That is happening at shelters across the country.

PACC brought in fewer dogs over the holiday weekend than it sent out to new homes and back to old homes in the case of lost dogs. PACC Director Monica Dangler said that’s in part because of a successful social media campaign to encourage people in the area to adopt, foster or pick up a lost dog as soon as possible.

But she said the shelter has had more dogs than it has room for in recent weeks, but the boom in stray pets didn’t start then.

"The mask mandate was done, and it seemed like all of a sudden, the water faucets were turned on, and we started seeing huge numbers of stray pets coming in," Dangler said.

And she said it’s not pandemic puppies finding their way back to the shelter now that lockdown’s over.

Staying home through the pandemic meant people weren’t seeing the stray dogs that were out, so they weren’t taking them to PACC. They also were able to keep a better eye on their dogs and now, more are getting out.

And money has become a bigger issue as the cost of having a pet increases with everything else.

"We're taking in more dogs than we took in in 2019, but the bigger problem is the amount of adoptions has dramatically slowed," Dangler said.

She also said it’s a huge help for people to foster dogs, even for a couple of weeks, and encourages anyone not going out of town or going back to school to consider adopting a dog in August.