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At the shelter in Union, the cages are all full.
"Luckily, kitten season is beginning to wind down," said Karen Tudor, director. "But puppy season is just beginning, and our puppy room is already full."
In the adult dog area, it's more of the same - all of the cages are full, some even shared by two dogs.
"I'd say at least 75 percent of these dogs are lost or abandoned pets," said Tudor, explaining that truly feral dogs are very rare. "We get many feral cats, but not dogs."
On the cat side of the shelter, cats that have been taken in are waiting in cages for their turn in the quarantine room, where they will receive the necessary shots and care to make them available for adoption.
"Right now, the cat quarantine room is full," said Tudor, explaining as soon as space opens in the kitty room, the cats in the quarantine room will move there and the ones in cages lining the hall will take their spots in quarantine.
Across the hall in the dog isolation room, it's much the same story.
"Every day right now we are operating close to full capacity," said Tudor.
In a meeting room that also serves as an employee break area, the staff is strategizing how to make room for the animals they know will be brought in. They don't know it in the sense that people have called ahead to make arrangements, said Tudor. They know because it's what happens every day - like the sun rising.
"We just know we'll probably get at least three to four big dogs today," Tudor remarked.
"That's why we have daily decisions that have to be made. We can go from having two come in to having 67 animals come in in a single day."
That actually happened once, she said. Back in 2002, there were 67 dogs and cats brought to the shelter in a single day.
"Our most recent high in a single day has been in the low 40s, but a normal day is more like 12 to 15 animals coming in with maybe three or four going out, either because they were returned to their original owner or through adoption.
"It's fairly unpredictable, and also difficult to staff for," said Tudor. "And these are only the ones that are being brought into the shelter. How many more others are out there still - contributing to future number being brought in because they haven't been spayed or neutered and they're having litter after litter."
70,000 Animals Off the Streets
Since the Franklin County Humane Society shelter was established with private funds in 1994, some 70,000 animals have been taken off the streets and countless litters prevented from multiplying that number because all of the animals adopted from the shelter are spayed and neutered, said Tudor.
"The shelter is like the Little Dutch Boy with a finger in the dike," she said. "We prevent a flood of unwanted pets by taking them in.
"With us spaying and neutering all of these animals, we are holding back the dam - if we let go, the dam with break and the pet population will explode again."
To anyone who thinks she's exaggerating, Tudor posed this scenario.
"Think about if those 70,000 animals were back on the streets, and breeding," she said, noting a female dog can average six puppies to a litter twice a year and a cat, four kittens per litter, 2 1/2 times a year.
"Franklin County would be crawling, literally, with dogs and cats," she stressed. "Town and Country has a deer problem - that would be nothing compared to what we would have on our hands."
Eric Park, who was president of the Franklin County Humane Society back in 1994 when the nonprofit was finally able to build a physical shelter, remembers just that type of scenario.
"The first month the shelter was open, we took in 500 animals," he said. "The rabies problem was really bad . . .kids were getting bit by dogs on playgrounds.
"It wasn't just an animal control problem, it was a human health problem . . . Opening the shelter was a quality of life issue as much for the people of Franklin County as it was for the pets and animals."
The Humane Society's current president, John Stoltz, DVM, who owns Washington Veterinary Clinic and has been on the Humane Society's board for more than 20 years, remembers that time as well and fears for the safety of Franklin County residents if it returned.
"We could easily have big packs of dogs getting together, roaming neighborhoods, which is a danger. I can remember a story from a few years ago of a young boy being mauled by a pack of dogs," said Stoltz. "Just five or six dogs running together can start to bring down a farmer's livestock.
"I can remember stories of 10 to 15 dogs in a pack that were getting into hog pens and chasing cows so much that farmers . . . had to get their guns and start hunting them (the dogs)."
Stoltz said when dogs are left to live on the streets and fend for their own food, they revert to feral dogs.
"They become more like wolves than dogs because they're trying to survive," he said.
And that's just one component of what the community would look like if the Humane Society shelter was gone, said Stoltz.
"Logically, we would expect to see an increase in the number of car accidents because people would be trying to avoid hitting stray animals," he said.
"With more strays increasing the animals population density, that would increase the spread of disease - rabies, Lyme disease, ringworm, toxoplasmosis . . . "
Right now, rabies is becoming more prevalent in wild species of animals, Tudor pointed out.
"It's only a matter of time before Franklin County has a rabid dog or cat - or human."
'House of Cards'
The Humane Society is in the same boat so many people are today - too many expenses, not enough funds.
Donations and fundraising efforts are off despite significant efforts, and the shelter has had two years of extraordinary operating shortfalls.
While there have been some physical improvements made to the shelter in that time, Tudor is quick to point out that those were direct donations from people to make those specific improvements - like the new play yard patio and cat condo windows.
"No money was spent from the general fund for those," said Tudor. "People came to us and said they wanted to donate specifically for those projects. That wasn't the shelter deciding that's how the money should be spent."
Right now the financial situation at the shelter is very precarious, said Tudor, who describes the operating system as a "house of cards."
"It's a structure that works when we have positive results - animals that are returned to their owners, adopted or given to a rescue group," she said.
When the structure doesn't work - more animals are coming in than going out and not enough funds are being given to care for them, "that's when the house of cards will fall down."
That could be as soon as two or three years, said Tudor.
"Right now if nothing changes, we will run out of backup funds within the next year and a half to three years," she said. "The little money we have, we had hoped to use as seed money to build a new shelter, but that seed money is slipping away. Meanwhile, our building is crumbling, the money isn't coming in to keep us going, our house of cards will fall down and the cities and the county will be on their own to handle this problem.
"Animal control will become a much larger part of every city's and the county's budget," she remarked.
It's hard for many people to imagine what the community would be like without the shelter, Tudor understands.
"The problem is the absence of a problem," she remarked.
With the shelter taking some 4,000 animals off the streets of Franklin County every year, preventing them from breeding and multiplying, people don't see a problem, Tudor explained.
What's the Solution?
The Humane Society board and staff see the solution to the financial problem very clearly - every city and the county needs to pay its fair share.
"The shelter can't be funded with only donations," said Tudor. "We need all of the various communities to step up and fund all of the animals that are coming in to us from their areas."
Right now, St. Clair is the only city in Franklin County that pays for the animals brought in by its officers and people who say the animal was found in St. Clair, said Tudor. Other cities pay for the animals brought in by officers, but not by "Good Samaritans" who find the animals in their city limits.
"If everyone would do their share, we could keep costs down," said Tudor.
The shelter also is suggesting there be a higher registration fee for unsterilized animals, citation fees for abuse and neglect, and a countywide rabies registration with an annual fee of $4.
"There is a misconception right now that we want a 'rabies tax' to pay for the animals," said Tudor. "We have suggested to the county that we need better legislation to require all animals have the rabies vaccination. This would be a self-funded mandate."
The rabies concerns are real, Stoltz stressed.
"If a person is exposed to rabies - say he or she is bitten by a dog or cat with rabies - we have to stimulate their immune system to neutralize the virus with a series of injections or they will start to show signs, and once they show signs, it will most likely lead to death.
"The incubation period could be as short as five days," he noted. "The virus travels up the nerves to the brain, so the time depends on where a person is bitten, how long it takes to travel from there to the brain."
From Negative to Positive
As hard and ongoing as the fight to keep the Humane Society shelter going, Tudor and the others say they won't give in. They've seen too much progress to just throw in the towel now.
"Back in 1999," said Tudor, "we had only a 32 percent success rate for our dogs. That means 32 percent were either returned to their owners, were adopted or given to another rescue group.
"Last year it was a 78 percent success rate, and so far this year, it's 91 percent.
"For cats, it's similar. Back in 1999, we had a 21.4 percent success rate, and last year we ended at over 40 percent.
"This year, so far, we're at 83 percent," she said, proudly.
That's a result of a major price break the shelter had earlier this year for people adopting more than one cat or kitten. It cost the shelter money, but it gave the animals homes and all of the animals were spayed or neutered.
"If you let the population grow out of control, nobody can manage it," said Tudor. "You have to reduce the numbers by being proactive, by spaying and neutering."
For more information on the Humane Society shelter, people can call 636-583-4300. The shelter is located at 1222 W. Main St. in Union, across from Union High School.
