A post written by Deb Conner went viral on March 26, regarding Daviess County Animal Control’s “code red” status. Conner’s post was shared 3,600 times across the midwest, claiming that the local animal shelter was out of kennel space. Due, in part, to the popularity of that post, Daviess County Animal Control Director Ashley Thompson said adoption numbers have gone through the roof.
However, Thompson said the shelter isn’t full — rather, the shelter promotes adoption awareness when animals are close to being euthanized, which was the case when the March 26 Facebook post got so much attention.
“The dogs were close to being euthanized. They’d been here around three to four months,” Thompson said. “They need to find a place to go. We just can’t keep them here forever. But it doesn’t mean we’re full.”
Even with space available at the shelter, Thompson said that when the public sees a code red post, the initial response is to run to the animal shelter and save the animals at risk of being euthanized, which can be a problem for these animals in the long run.
“It causes a lot of action at the shelter over a couple of dogs. We have a lot of people who want to adopt a dog, but then they don’t really want to care for that dog and take care of it,” Thompson said. “They just wanted to save them. When animals get adopted, we want it to be their last home. We want people to adopt who want to treat these animals as part of their family.”
Thompson said people oppose the euthanizing process because they don’t believe the animals should lose their lives because they weren’t adopted. However, there are many factors that go into euthanizing an animal — the shelter being government-regulated is just one of them.
“We don’t really have a time limit for euthanizing them, but we have to start pushing to get them out of here,” Thompson said. “We put it out there for a reason. We could never be a no-kill at an open-admission shelter. We have to take everything that comes to the door. If the animals are aggressive toward humans, we have to euthanize them.”
People from all across the country have reached out to Daviess County Animal Control to adopt animals, but Thompson said most of them can’t make the trip to Owensboro to fulfill the adoption process. An adoption fee of $100 has turned some local people away from adopting, but Thompson said the fee covers surgeries the animal had, as well as vaccines and any and all medical treatment it underwent while in the shelter’s care.
“That’s a pretty good package deal you’re getting there,” Thompson said.
Right now, around 70 percent of unadopted dogs at the shelter are pit bulls or pit mixes, Thompson said. A high amount of pit bulls at animal shelters isn’t necessarily unusual, Thompson said, but a lot of those dogs are pretty well-behaved and trained, while others were likely abandoned as puppies and struggle with human interaction.
“The amount of pit bulls we have here — it’s unreal,” Thompson said. “It’s almost always pit bulls or pit mixes that get euthanized. They’re overbred and there’s an overabundance of them.”
