Forsyth County, N.C. (WGHP) — There are too many dogs and not enough staff members at the Forsyth County Animal Shelter.
The county took over the facility on April 1 after it ended a contract with the Forsyth Humane Society.
The director says she still needs to hire about five staff members to help. On top of that, they are at capacity for the number of dogs currently being held. In just a few weeks, the shelter moved about 80 animals into foster and adopted homes, but the surrenders and strays just keep coming in.
It’s a problem the county is currently facing and the same one the Forsyth Humane Society faced when it ran that facility.
“The difference being from now til then, we had a very strong network partner…not only the network partners, but the most instrumental piece was the foster program. When you get that many animals coming in, when you can place them into foster care and move them through the system, it allows you not to need space every day,” said Mark Neff, the president and CEO of the Humane Society.
Neff says even though they have separated from the county, they will still work together. Each Monday, they pick up and take the dogs they can from the shelter.
“With what we have for kennel capacity and our foster program, we continue to reach out to them…throughout the week to let them know what we have the capacity to pull,” Neff said.
Since separating, the humane society has started to take in owner surrenders.
“That is one way we can impact the numbers going to that shelter…reducing the number of owner surrenders that end up there, which is why we are doing it here,” Neff said.
The problem is that both the shelter and the humane society are only taking animal surrenders from a waitlist because the intake numbers are too high. So the humane society has partnered with an Adopt-a-Pet program to advertise their dogs online while waiting for an intake appointment to get them re-homed quicker.
“Our mission has not changed much. It’s still to reduce the euthanasia at that location as much as we can,” Neff said.
