Local pet shelters are over capacity

Written by: Alexis Suarez

South Bend animal shelters have recently spiked coming into 2024. 2023 was already overwhelmed due to breeding but my question is, Does weather play a part in this?

Jackie Baur, 23 February 2023 WSBT

I contacted a few shelters in South Bend for answers. I had many questions come to mind, Is it from people breeding? Does certain seasons have worse conditions? And I got my answers.

I received my first response from Sarah Stanton, she is the outreach coordinator for the SB Humane Society. I had asked her those very questions and we discussed our ideal on it she said: “During the summer is when we see a rise  in number of dogs we take it, it tends to be larger dogs and lots of puppies due to that being the most popular time of breeding.”

From those answers, I continued down my path to investigate why it's grown so much over the past year. I then got a response from Genny Brown, a different outreach coordinator from a different South Bend shelter. She had told me that lots of animals they have gotten over the last 2 years has been “Definitely, during the summer and or spring, we have hit our capacity during those times before and it's sad to see all the animals brought in due to it. We get lots of kittens and puppies from those if the person can’t make a profit out of it.”  

I wanted some different answers now from a different type of shelter person. I wanted to see if I could get the same type of responses if I continued my research with others, and finally, someone from Pet Refugee in South Bend got back to me.

Janet Graham, the executive director of Pet Refuge had told me even more information about it. When asked about the weather playing a part of it she said, “Not a lot, when it's dangerously cold or hot there will be an increase in shelters that serve as animal control facilities and also from calls of concerned community members.”

She had continued by saying that “In 2023 alone, shelters across the country saw an increase of over 245000 animals and it was mostly due to poor economy.”

With that information, It helped me understand that yes weather can play a huge part in this. There are lots of reasons on why they have grown, and with that I hope there´s a decrease for the year 2024.