Courtesy of the City of Fort Worth
What happens when a stray, stranded, or lost pet is found wandering the city? It’s delivered to Fort Worth Animal Shelter, where it receives care and medical attention.
But the shelter may not be able to accommodate all of them for long.
With approximately 2,800 animals entering the facility in April and May due to people moving, summer break, and other circumstances, the Fort Worth Animal Shelter is becoming dangerously overcrowded.
“This is something that we see every year around spring,” says Dr. Tim Morton, Code Compliance assistant director overseeing Fort Worth’s Animal Care & Control Services. “We have to work extra hard to ensure we’re finding positive homes and positive outcomes for the animals that come into our care, and we ask for the community’s help in doing that.”
As a municipal facility, the City of Fort Worth’s animal shelter is mandated to accept any animal surrendered as well as stray pets. Before the new North Animal Campus opened in late April, the existing shelter was housing between 500 and 600 animals on any given day in a facility originally designed to only accommodate around 300.
“It was designed many years ago when we had a different way of sheltering animals,” Morton says. “It was more of a holding facility rather than something focused on the animals’ enrichment and well-being.”
While the development of the new campus has relieved some of the pressure of finding homes for the animals, the number of pets currently housed in Fort Worth Animal Shelter’s four facilities, including the Chuck and Brenda Silcox Animal Care and Adoption Center and the two PetSmart Adoption Centers, continues to grow daily.
The shelter is home to an array of animals, including dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, and the occasional pygmy goat. All pets who enter the shelter are spayed or neutered, microchipped, and have received their first round of vaccinations. The shelter is dependent on the support of the surrounding community, and adoption fees continued to be waived to address the overcapacity concern.
Even if an individual is unable to adopt, the Fort Worth Animal Shelter says people can make a huge difference by fostering a pet, especially older, medium, and large animals who have a more difficult time finding homes.
“We have a lot of great folks supporting us, but we need more people to foster these pets until they can find their forever home,” Morton says. “We have a need for foster families to take them in, spend a little bit of time with them, socialize them, and enjoy them because they’re a lot of fun.”
The City of Fort Worth’s animal shelter has taken great strides in the past few years, having emerged from a live release rate of about 30% to running around 97% today.
“Great things are happening in the City of Fort Worth from an animal welfare standpoint,” Morton says. “We have an amazing staff that works really hard to provide the care these animals deserve”
For more information on adoptable pets, fostering, or volunteering, visit Fort Worth Animal Shelter’s website.
