Star Tribune
Minnesota shelters, rescues see flood of pets in pandemic aftermath
A flood of surrendered pets is overwhelming Minnesota’s shelters and dog rescues, filling up kennels and foster homes at a time when fewer people are opting to adopt a new furry friend.
Shelter workers and rescue volunteers say the reason seems to be a combination of people who obtained dogs for companionship during the COVID-19 pandemic and are now returning them, and those struggling with evictions and inflation for whom pets have become a burden.
“It’s a national phenomenon,” said Caroline Hairfield, director of Minneapolis Animal Care and Control (MACC), an open admission shelter that takes in every animal that comes in. “When you’re having to choose between the roof over your head and your family and your pet … it’s just sad.”
Hairfield said there have been 312 owner surrenders at MACC so far this year, compared with 230 during the first five months of 2019, the last year before the pandemic — amounting to a 36% increase.
In a statement, officials with the national Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) disputed the notion that the increased number of animals in shelters is being driven by owner surrenders and fewer would-be adopters.
“Multiple factors are converging simultaneously to impact shelters’ capacity for care, including staffing and veterinarian shortages and an increasing proportion of animals with greater medical and behavior needs,” said Christa Chadwick, the ASPCA’s vice president of shelter services. “Higher intake combined with flat animal outcome numbers means that space in shelters for animals is shrinking.”
Several local rescues beg to differ.
“It’s right now the roughest time we’ve ever been in,” said Sara Romdenne, founder and director of UnbreakaBull, a small Minneapolis rescue that helps pit bulls find homes. “This is really bad — I don’t know how sustainable it is anymore.”
Romdenne, who started the rescue in 2018, now has 60 dogs in foster homes, twice the usual number. She said that many “amazing” dogs are remaining in those homes for six months or more before getting adopted.
Kathy DuVall, founder and director of operations for Anoka-based FaerieLand Rescue Inc., said she’s getting three to five phone calls daily from people wanting to surrender dogs; she used to get five per week. Her rescue specializes in German Shepherds and corgis.
“A lot of it is, ‘I don’t have time for the dog,’ or ‘I’m moving to an apartment and I can’t take the dog,’ ” said DuVall, whose rescue gets animals from Texas, Kentucky and the Dakotas as well as Minnesota. Many people can’t commit to the training their dog needs, she said, or failed to research the breed before they brought the dog home.
DuVall said she’s had six dogs returned to her in the past 18 months, compared with just a handful of returns in the dozen years before that. She’s seen an uptick in people dumping their dogs somewhere rather than taking them to a shelter, something she said typically didn’t happen before.
Fewer adopters
Some animal advocates point to another aspect of the problem: Nearly everyone who wanted a dog in the past few years got one, slowing the stream of potential adopters to a trickle.
At the Tri-County Humane Society in St. Cloud, executive director Vicki Davis said she hasn’t seen an increase in the number of animals surrendered. But over the past few months, the number of weekly adoptions has slowed from about 100 down to 70 or 80.
“We just haven’t had a lot of adoptions and the wait list [to bring in a dog for surrender] has gotten a little longer,” Davis said.
There are more large-breed dogs at the shelter lately, which might not match up with what many adopters are seeking, she said.
The Animal Humane Society (AHS) closed its St. Paul shelter in mid-2020 and shuttered its three locations temporarily this spring due to canine influenza, making their data difficult to interpret, a spokesperson said.
Dr. Graham Brayshaw, head vet for AHS, said there’s more demand for a place to surrender pets than the shelter can meet. But the biggest factor is a lack of veterinary technicians, he said, which greatly limits the number of pets the nonprofit can help.
As wait times to surrender at AHS have increased, there’s been an uptick in animals brought to MACC and St. Paul Animal Control, he said. In addition, he said the average length of animals’ stay at AHS has increased due to fewer people looking to adopt.
Brayshaw said that demand may have slowed due to many people getting pandemic pets. But he pointed to the possibility that generational differences — such as fewer millennials owning homes — might also be having an impact on the number of adoptions.
‘Puppy explosion’
Though several sources said they chalked up the influx of dog surrenders to people returning dogs since the pandemic ended, not everyone in dog rescue circles backs that theory.
Safe Hands, a Minneapolis-based rescue that gets 95% of its adoptable animals from rural Kentucky, has taken in fewer animals lately. But that’s due to a lack of foster homes, not lowered demand for places to surrender animals, officials said.
There’s a “puppy explosion” going on in Kentucky, said Lynne Bengtson, Safe Hands’ founder and executive director, with puppies comprising 80% of intakes.
“The shelters down here [in Kentucky] are seeing more surrenders than they ever have,” Bengtson said. But she believes the influx is mostly due to the shutdown of spay and neuter clinics, and the limitations placed on vets’ offices during the pandemic.
Many veterinarians were busy during the pandemic with treating newly acquired pets and restricted by the government to performing only life-saving operations. Spaying and neutering mostly stopped, she said.
Kathie Anstett, chief operations officer at Safe Hands, also pointed to the “economy and the cost of everything” as a cause.
Megan Ehlert, adoption coordinator at Underdog Rescue in St. Louis Park, said she’s getting more online surrender applications and emails from shelters with too many dogs. Many of the surrendered dogs are less than 3 years old, supporting the idea that they were acquired during the pandemic and that something has changed for their families, she said.
She’s also hearing about people giving up their dogs due to housing changes and financial issues, she said. “Both of those situations are just truly heartbreaking because you know they have that bond and that relationship with the pet,” she said.
Ehlert emphasized the emotional toll on rescue volunteers, who constantly get emails from southern shelters with 10 to 25 photos of needy dogs attached. Underdog “just can’t help them all,” she said, and it’s contributing to a high burnout rate.
Some rescues, like UnbreakaBull, have had to go on an intake hold, temporarily saying “no” to new dogs until numbers decrease. Donations are also down, Romdenne said.
“I cry about it a lot,” she said. “I want to help dogs, but we’re getting to the point where we’re not going to be able to anymore. When the money runs out, what else do you do?”
Star Tribune
Palestinian officials say an Israeli strike on a school-turned-shelter in northern Gaza killed 15
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — An Israeli strike on a school sheltering the displaced in northern Gaza on Thursday killed at least 15 people, including five children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The Israeli military said the strike targeted dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants who had gathered at the Abu Hussein school in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp in northern Gaza where Israel has been waging a major air and ground operation for more than a week.
Fares Abu Hamza, head of the ministry’s emergency unit in northern Gaza, confirmed the toll and said dozens of people were wounded. He said the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was struggling to treat the casualties.
“Many women and children are in critical condition,” he said.
The Israeli military said it targeted a command center run by both militant groups inside the school. It provided a list of around a dozen names of people it identified as militants who were present when the strike was called in. It was not immediately possible to verify the names.
Israel has repeatedly struck tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza. The Israeli military says it carries out precise strikes on militants and tries to avoid harming civilians, but its strikes often kill women and children.
Hamas-led militants triggered the war when they stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. Some 100 captives are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants but says women and children make up a little more than half of the fatalities.
Twin Amur tigers born at Como Zoo in August now have names — Marisa and Maks.
Two long-time volunteers who have worked with zookeepers to care for and teach the public about the zoo’s big cats came up with the names, the first to be born at the St. Paul zoo in more than 40 years.
Marisa, a name that the volunteers found to mean “spirited and tenacious,” call that a perfect reflection of her personality. The name also carries special significance for the Como Zoo community, as it honors a retired zookeeper of the same name who was instrumental in the care of large cats during her 43 years at the zoo, Como Zoo and Conservatory Director Michelle Furrer said.
The male cub has been named Maks, which is associated with meanings like “the greatest” or “strength and leadership.” The volunteers felt this was an apt description of the male cub’s confident demeanor and growing sense of leadership, Furrer said.
“Marisa and Maks aren’t just names; they’re a fun reminder of the passion and care that keep us committed to protecting wildlife every day,” Furrer said.
The newborns and their first-time mother, 7-year-old Bernadette, remain off view to allow for more bonding time, zoo officials said. The cubs’ father, 11-year-old Tsar, has been a Como resident since February 2019 and remains on view.
Fewer than 500 Amur tigers — also known as Siberian tigers — remain in the wild as they face critical threats from habitat loss, poaching and human-wildlife conflict, the zoo said.
Much of the wood waste in the metro area is sent to a processing site near Pig’s Eye Lake in St. Paul, where it is stored before being burned to produce energy at the St. Paul Cogeneration plant downtown.
Cogeneration provides power to about half of downtown and was originally built to manage elm-tree waste in response to Dutch elm disease. The plant burns approximately 240,000 tons of wood each year, according to Michael Auger, senior vice president of District Energy in St. Paul.
Jim Calkins, a certified landscape horticulturalist who has been involved in discussions about the problem, said he thinks using wood for energy is the most logical solution.
“The issue is, we don’t have enough facilities to be able to handle that, at least in the Twin Cities,” Calkins said. “So there has to be dollars to support transportation to get the wood to those places, or in some cases, to upgrade some of those facilities such that they are able to burn wood.”
Plans are in place to convert Koda Energy in Shakopee to burn ash wood, which could potentially handle around 40,000 tons of wood waste, but that would take around two years to establish, according to Klapperich.
In some areas of the state, cities have resorted to burning excess wood waste because they felt they had no other option. Open burning wood releases a lot of carbon into the air, Klapperich said.
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