'It's quite overwhelming.' Pet and Wildlife Rescue centre puts pause on surrendered pets

Full pet and wildlife rescue centre Chatham-Kent’s pet and wildlife rescue centre is “bursting at the seams”. CTV Windsor’s Chris Campbell has the story.

An influx of animals inside Pet and Wildlife Rescue (PAWR) in Chatham-Kent has forced the organization to temporarily stop accepting surrendered pets.

"It's a little bit unusual," said Myriam Armstrong, operations manager at PAWR. "And we're kind of caught in a perfect storm right now."

Armstrong said the service will continue to take in strays because of its contract with the Municipality of Chatham-Kent, but said their Chatham facility is "bursting at the seams."

Armstrong explained, "We have more animals than usual. Animals are staying longer than usual. Adoptions are slower and also every single supply has gone up in price and vetting has gone up in price."

Officials suspect the overflow is due to the pandemic adoption boom cooling along with the fall weather, suggesting inflation is also forcing people to give up their pets.

"We're pretty much the unofficial stray cat capital of Ontario. We have so many cats that all shelters and rescues reach out to us in a winter because they know we still have a lot of cats and they may not, so we do work with them to transfer as many as we can," Armstrong said.

Mean time, staff continue to explore transfer options between networks of 60 other facilities as far away as Quebec to mitigate overcrowding.

"It's quite overwhelming. The animals come in droves and they don't stop," said animal control officer Chris LeClair.

"They come in quicker than they go out. That limits our ability to continue to take them in, quite honestly." LeClair continued, "It's quite concerning and usually by this time of the year the numbers are down and we see the decline and we're just not seeing that right now."

On Friday the shelter had 331 various animals at their Chatham location. The majority being cats along with several dogs, rabbits and other small animals.

LeClair told CTV News, "We are seeing a lot of animals not getting reclaimed. That is a concern too. Dogs in particular, they're also coming in not getting reclaimed and so then of course we're inheriting them, trying to find them new homes and that's been difficult as well."

Leclair said, "I don't know if it's had anything to do with COVID and the mass adoptions during that period of time, we haven't quite made the correlation of that, but it's definitely unusual."

Armstrong encouraged people to spay and neuter their pets, to consider adopting an animal or telling others that pets are available noting PAWR’s current fundraiser, "Under One Roof" is another way residents can help. "Every pet owner out there knows that pets are not cheap. So multiply your one cat by about 300 and the math is self explanatory."

Armstrong added, "Pausing surrenders until we can catch up, we need some adoptions to go through," she said. "We also need the time to get those animals to the vet and ready for adoption. So unfortunately, we can only do so much with the space that we have here."