Animal Shelters Overflowing With Pets Hit Hard by the Recession

Hattie Alton holds up a tiny kitten at the Oxford-Lafayette Humane Society. The shelter, like most in the state, is overflowing with animals, many given up by owners who can no longer afford them.

As family budgets get tighter in Mississippi, more people are cutting out a big expense – the family pet. And as MPB’s Cari Gervin discovered, local animal shelters are struggling to handle the intake.

Walking around the Oxford-Lafayette Humane Society, Hattie Alton points to cage after cage:

“Owner surrender, owner surrender, owner surrender.”

It’s a grim sight.

“This is a full-blooded bulldog, male. He’s a year old. He’s used to being with a family and kids, and you know – so he’s having a little bit of stress being in here.”

The dog is a dead ringer for Bully, the Mississippi State mascot. Alton says the cost of feeding such a big dog was probably too much in these tough times.

“That’s what most of these big dogs are, owner surrenders.”

But owner surrenders of all sizes of pets are up at shelters across the state, as the economy forces families to make tough decisions.

Like in DeSoto County, which has the state’s highest foreclosure rate? The county’s animal shelter is seeing seven times the number of owner surrenders from last year. Seven times.

Intake at the Corinth-Alcorn County Humane Society has only tripled. But donations are down so much that if the shelter doesn’t get emergency funding from local government, it will close its doors.

“Our euthanasia bill last month was $3200.”

That’s Keith Mays, in Corinth. He says that the more animals that are dropped off, the more animals are put to sleep.

And that’s the sad truth about most of these family pets – they won’t find a new family to care for them. It just isn’t possible, says Debra Boswell at the Mississippi Animal Rescue League in Jackson.

“You can only go as far as your donations go. And if you’re only adopting 6 to 8 animals a day, why would you warehouse a hundred? You know, today’s 100-surplus, and then tomorrow’s 100-surplus, and then by the end of the week, you’ve got 500 animals you’re trying to house.”

Boswell says the one sure way to cut down on the number of euthanized animals is to spay and neuter your pets. And for those with little money to spare, most shelters have low-cost surgeries available.

For MPB News, I’m Cari Gervin in Oxford.