When I’m walking my dog, I often ask other dog owners about their animals. In the last couple of years, many people have told me that their adopted pets came from other states.
I found out that dogs are frequently brought here by animal welfare organizations, such as H.O.P.E. Safehouse in Racine. It doesn't actually have a shelter building. It relies on volunteers like Tina Moodhart to provide foster homes until dogs can be adopted. She and her husband have a kennel in their heated garage.
“As we accumulated more dogs it was harder and harder to acclimate a large number of puppies into the house at one time so when we built this building he put up indoor outdoor runs for me, he saved this corner for me,” Moodhart says.
I visited Moodhart at her home in rural Racine County last month, shortly after she agreed to foster a litter of eight brown and black puppies. They came from an overcrowded shelter in Kentucky.
“The vets, people at H.O.P.E. who've rescued a lot of dogs, nobody can figure out what breed these are. We think they're about 10 or 11 weeks old, and I think they're going to be medium-sized puppies,” she says.
When the dogs arrived, Moodhart says they were malnourished, and sick -- with worms. But now, they're healthy, spunky, and ready for adoption.
If the puppies hadn't been rescued from the Kentucky shelter they would have been put down, because it had no space for them. That's according to Lynn Nielsen, a director of H.O.P.E. Safehouse.
“They had an unusual amount of puppies that had been brought in, and it's difficult enough to euthanize big dogs, adult dogs, but they were talking about euthanizing every puppy that came in because there was no space left,” Nielsen says.
The puppies I met were among nearly 100 dogs that H.O.P.E. recently took off the Kentucky shelter's hands. The shelter had emailed rescue groups, asking if any could relieve the crowding. They arrived in Racine in two shipments -- on a cramped cargo van.
“They are literally crammed into these cages and it's certainly not a comfortable ride, but if there's space to get two more dogs in a carrier instead of comfort space for one, that means we just saved two more lives,” she says.
H.O.P.E. frequently accepts dogs from the South. Nielsen says there's an animal overpopulation problem there, because it’s less common for people to spay or neuter their pets.
The Wisconsin Humane Society in Milwaukee also takes in dogs from other states, some in the South, and makes them available for adoption here. But their ride in a specially designed van is decidedly more comfortable.
“That vehicle is amazing really. It has closed circuit video so the driver and the passenger can actually monitor the dogs who are sitting in the back in a temperature controlled designed kennel system. They have water, toys, lullaby music.”
That’s Natalie Zielinski of the Humane Society. She says the van is run by PetsMart Charities. The vehicle circulates throughout the country, picking up dogs from crowded shelters. It drops off new animals at the Humane Society a few times a week, helping to meet the need for pets.
“Here in Milwaukee we actually have hundreds of families looking for animals to adopt,” Zielinski says.
In the three years since the van program started, the Humane Society has helped 9,000 dogs from other states find new homes here. But Zielinski says if the agency was ever too crowded to house local pets, it would decline deliveries from other states.
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