ANTIGO — Around the beginning of October, construction on a building housing eight new dog kennels is expected to be completed at the Langlade County Humane Society.
According to Humane Society Manager Theresa Michels, the building, constructed through community donations, will likely be reserved for dogs that are ready for adoption, while strays and surrenders recently checked in will be kept in existing kennel areas.
Michels and others at the Humane Society will welcome the added space given the excess of pets they are boarding, which includes around 70 cats and — more problematically at the moment — 30 dogs.
Robert Zoretich, the president of the Humane Society’s board of directors who has been involved with the organization now for 11 years, said the organization has never cared for so many canines at one time.
“We’ve had as many cats before — as many as 90 — but this is the most dogs we’ve ever had,” Zoretich said, who went on to explain possible reasons for the uptick in canine surrenders to the shelter. “We have a lot of bigger dogs, and sometimes they’re a little harder to care for when you have a family. Cost of food is something too where some people might leave a dog stray. We’re coming off of COVID and people’s lives change.
“Those are a couple reasons, but also, when people are looking for an animal, they kind of want it right away and don’t want to wait, and when vets are so busy and it takes them a while to get them spayed or neutered, that makes it harder because they might pass us up and go somewhere else.”
Michels said the Humane Society is receiving “one call per day, if not more” from pet owners looking to drop off additional animals. All the requests are currently being turned down.
“Our capacity is 16 dogs, and we have double that — we have 30. So sometimes we do have up to 16 dogs, but never had we doubled our capacity,” said Michels. “People just can’t afford it because the food’s gone up — it’s just the economy in general. But from what I understand, Forest, Lincoln, Oneida, and all the other shelters are full too, so they’re not taking any either.”
Representatives from pet shelters in nearby communities said this is indeed the case, including Amanda Haydon, the director of the Oneida County Humane Society.
“Pretty much for the last two years, we have been fighting being at capacity for dogs,” Haydon said. “Now, we’re falling into being at capacity for cats just coming into late summer, early fall. Just the last two days, we’ve had about 20 cat intakes and about 5 dog intakes, which is a lot for a tiny little shelter like this.”
At the Lincoln County Humane Society, meanwhile, an overload of cats already has overtaken the shelter, according to Liz Friedenfels, who has managed it for the past 17 years.
“We have capacity comfortably for around 60ish cats and about 10 dogs. We’re kind of hovering around that number of dogs, and then we have a number that are waiting to come in too,” Friedenfels said. “But we have around 100 cats right now and then probably an additional 40 to 50 waiting to come in, and we should be housing far less than that. What seems to kind of happen is we’re kind of treading water and then all of a sudden we have somebody that has 20 cats to bring in. So it can get very crowded very quickly.”
Friedenfels said Lincoln County residents wishing to drop off animals are put on a wait list — and do wait, given the lack of other options.
“We have people that are on our wait list that will call back just to say, ‘Hey, I called two weeks ago — how long is the wait list?’” she said. “They keep following up because there’s just kind of no end in sight at this point and we’ve heard that every shelter is very full. We do it where we only take animals from our county to kind of limit that, and we do get calls from other counties probably daily as well.”
Perhaps most worryingly, she said, is the fact that the Lincoln County Humane Society houses an average of roughly 30 more cats each year.
“Every year that’s increasing, so with the projected numbers, if we keep getting this increase like that, in 10 years, we’re going to have an extra 300 cats a year when we’re already full, so it’s kind of a scary thing because I think unfortunately, money is tight for a lot of people, so spaying and neutering may not be the thing they’re most focused on if they have issues paying for groceries or things like that. Then the shelters are hit harder because there’s just not enough homes for all the animals coming in,” Friedenfels said.
Leaders at animal shelters across the United States apparently are facing similarly overwhelming intake numbers, and seem to believe a dropoff in adopters is part of the cause.
In early June, April Huntsman, the director of animal welfare at Adopt-A-Pet, an organization that advertises pets in need of homes at thousands of shelters around the country, co-hosted a webinar called “Where have all the dog adopters gone?”
“We went out to the masses and…just directly on our site every time a different shelter or rescue logged in, we asked this question: ‘Are you experiencing fewer dog adoptions than the last two years?’ What you can see is, overwhelmingly, most organizations said yes — 81 percent, four out of five, said yes,” said Huntsman of the survey results, before going on to list the largest reasons those shelter-runners believed fewer people are adopting (the top three responses were the poor state of the economy, the decline in general adoption interest, and weight and breed restrictions set by landlords, respectively).
Friedenfels and Zoretich were nevertheless upbeat about their shelters’ futures, with both thanking supporters who have continued to back their donation and fundraiser-driven organizations.
“We just keep going,” Zoretich said. “People are supportive. People also can get involved to help us, whether it’s fundraising, volunteering, being on our board, being a member. We have membership meetings quarterly. We have board meetings every month. And we’ve got a lot of people that donate time, but we definitely need more people and younger people to get involved.”
The Langlade County Humane Society’s next fundraiser is this Saturday from 4:30-7:30 p.m. at Bula’s Barn (W11915 Highland Rd. next to the Riverview Golf Course). The event, called “Petals for Paws,” will allow the Humane Society to raise money through raffles, a silent auction, and a variety of food and drinks.
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