Southern Nevada shelters dealing with massive influx of animals

By Heidi Kyser

Published June 13, 2023 at 7:55 AM PDT

The publicly funded animal control and sheltering system in Southern Nevada has struggled for as long as anyone can remember. Chronically underfunded, it's the subject of periodic disease outbreaks, overcrowding, and mismanagement accusations.

Now, like many shelters across the country, Southern Nevada’s two publicly funded shelters, the Animal Foundation (formerly known as Lied Animal Shelter) and Henderson Animal Shelter, are dealing with a massive influx of animals. In May alone, the Animal Foundation took in almost 2,000 pets.

Is the solution more money? The Animal Foundation gets about $4.7 million from Clark County, Las Vegas and North Las Vegas. By comparison, a similarly sized shelter in San Antonio receives about $16 million. And Henderson spends about $2 million on its shelter. That amount hasn’t changed for 8 years.

Hillarie Grey, CEO of the Animal Foundation, told State of Nevada that the organization is preparing a proposal for increased funding. She expects to present it to Clark County in the near future. Grey says the shelter has moved to a system of "managed intakes," focused on connecting lost pets with their owners in order to make room for animals being brought in by municipal animal control agencies.

Grey says, "What we've come up with, and what we're going to brief to the county about next week is ... a pet support call center, so that we have live people you can reach out to if you find a lost pet in your neighborhood, if you've fallen on hard times and are thinking that you need to surrender a pet, so that we can triage those and intervene."

But Nevada Current Senior Reporter Dana Gentry, who's been reporting on animal welfare in Southern Nevada for many years, contends that the problem isn't inadequate funding alone; it's also management. Local rescues are doing the best they can, Gentry argues, but public shelters aren't helping the situation when they limit the number of animals they take in and offer no spay and neuter services.

"If you are an owner seeking to turn in your pet, you can make an appointment (at the Animal Foundation) for October right now," Gentry says. "Anybody who is seeking in to turn in a pet because of a change in a living circumstance is not going to have the luxury of waiting until October, and that animal unfortunately, will likely end up on the streets."

Utah-based pet advocacy organization Best Friends Animal Society has taken an active role in the situation at the Animal Foundation. Michelle Dosson, Best Friends' executive director for Salt Lake City and the Mountain West Region, says the group has started an "embed" program in Las Vegas, where experts in sheltering best practices work on-site and offer recommendations for improvements to processes.

"We have one full-time staff member embedded at the Animal Foundation. They are operating as operations director, so everything that is shelter operations-related. We also have had one full-time temporary assistant to that person," Dosson says. "Those two are working alongside the TAF staff, who are really hard-working, to implement new programs."

Best Friends' annual report on the state of U.S. animal shelters showed a year-over-year increase in Nevada's intakes and a decrease in its save rate, the percentage of animals adopted or fostered out of the total number taken in. Lori Heeren's experience reflects the reality of those statistics. Heeren, who is executive director of the Nevada SPCA, says the number of unwanted animals making their way to no-kill rescues like hers — including the overflow from the two public shelters — is overwhelming.

"It has been really been exponential for us, the number of people contacting us to turn in their animals," Heeren says. "The calls have increased probably 40 percent daily. It's really a different situation now, because of the current economic crisis."

Heeren, Dosson, and Grey say the solution must include not only additional funding for shelters, but also public awareness and education, and improved access to resources, such as veterinary care, for pet owners.

RESOURCES

Guests: Hillarie Grey, CEO, The Animal Foundation; Dana Gentry, senior reporter, Nevada Current; Michelle Dosson, executive director, Salt Lake City and Mountain West Region, Best Friends Animal Society; Lori Heeren, executive director, Nevada SPCA