Alberta pet shelters seeing more and more pets abandoned at their doors | 24CA News
More and extra pets are being deserted at pet shelters round Calgary in acts that might face authorized penalties.
Monday morning at round 8 a.m., a cat was discovered exterior the door of the Alberta Animal Rescue Crew Society (AARCS) facility in a crate with meals and water.
“It’s not very often that that happens here, thankfully. So it’s always a bit of a surprise,” AARCS stakeholder relations supervisor Rachel Cote stated.
CCTV video confirmed a person dropping off the cat at round 11:15 p.m. on Sunday night time.
Video footage additionally confirmed a person open the door to the AARCS Edmonton location and throw a cat contained in the lobby on Saturday.
Cote stated whereas AARCS isn’t an open-intake facility, they’ve seen a tripling of demand of their by-appointment providers lately.
“In 2019, we had approximately 275 requests for dogs. In 2023 we had over 900, so a pretty significant increase. And unfortunately, we can’t help them all,” she stated.
“We are accepting animals right now.
“We do have the space and we have been kind of making space where we need to, but we’re also stretched pretty, pretty thin.”
The Calgary Humane Society hasn’t been untouched by abandonments, with a cat left beneath a litter field with a rock on high simply final week.
It can be beneath excessive demand proper now, to the purpose of getting a wait listing for his or her open admission providers.
“I’ve never seen levels like this (for) demand. It’s unsustainable,” Brad Nichols, the Humane Society’s director of operations and enforcement, stated.
“Shelters across Canada are seeing huge demand on their services… For what reason? I couldn’t tell you for absolutely certain. But it does seem to be an excess of animals that are unable to be kept by their owners.”
Abandoning an animal will be prosecuted beneath the Animal Protection Act and Criminal Code, with fines as much as $20,000, a lifetime ban on proudly owning animals and the potential for jail time.
“Our abandonment numbers on investigations is up significantly — I think it’s about 10 per cent year over year. So we’ll typically see it’s just over 100 a year,” Nichols stated.
Both Cote and Nichols stated affordability is probably going driving the abandonments. But there might be different causes.
“I think it’s really just trying to figure out what that person was thinking ultimately and kind of what’s going on in their life that made them get to that point,” Cote stated.
Nichols suggests taking the “lengthy” dedication of proudly owning a pet severely earlier than taking the plunge.
“Abandonment is not an alternative to surrender.”
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