San Martin – The holidays are tough on pets. Their owners travel
a lot, there are a lot of strangers around and for some reason, the
season inspires people to show their animals the door.
San Martin – The holidays are tough on pets. Their owners travel a lot, there are a lot of strangers around and for some reason, the season inspires people to show their animals the door.
“We get many bizarre stories,” said Christine Benninger, president of Humane Society Silicon Valley. “The standard story is that people are traveling and can’t find boarding room.”
Shelters around the county report the same phenomenon. Sue Padgett, shelter clerk at the Friends of San Martin Animal Shelter, said there are many reasons for holiday surrenders. In addition to travel and company, she said, shorter days and the wet, muddy weather of winter can take the fun out of owning a dog.
“It’s an especially difficult time of year for the staff,” Padgett said. “We have more surrenders and so many people coming in are looking for puppies and kittens. It tells you how disposable companion animals are in our society.”
The San Martin shelter is very overcrowded. There are about 60 dogs crammed into 24 kennels and about 100 cats in a space meant for 80. On top of that, the shelter relies on foster care for kittens and animals too sick to be in the general population.
Benninger said the holiday season is a good time for people to adopt.
“Many people have more free time in December,” she said. “It’s great time to bring new animals into the home because you’re going to be home.”
But it’s also a difficult time of the year to adopt, and shelters don’t allow people to pick up animals as gifts unless the recipient is present.
“Much like you wouldn’t want your parents to pick out your wife, we don’t do adoptions as gifts,” Benninger said. “Many of our owner surrenders got the animal as a gift.”
The highest incidence of owner surrenders in San Martin last year was in January, right after the holidays. State law requires that shelters house animals for five days. Friends of San Martin will hold any animal that it considers adoptable indefinitely.
But fluctuations in state law are putting pressures on shelters and changing the animal control landscape in Santa Clara County. Historically, shelters were required to keep animals for 72 hours, but a state mandate in 2000 extended that time to five days, or six for shelters closed on weekends.
The law was challenged in court and shelters argued successfully that the state mandate was unlawful because it was unfunded and placed a financial burden on county shelters. But Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reinstated the law this year. Municipalities have applied for reimbursements from the state, but it’s not clear if there’s room for animals shelters in the state’s budget.
Since the law changed, the Human Society has severed its relationship with North County cities and now relies on donations and user fees for funding.
“In order to accommodate more animals and avoid large amounts of euthanasia you need a lot more shelter space,” Benninger said. To cut costs, the Human Society no longer takes animals from San Jose and its suburbs. In response, North County cities have begun constructing their own shelters.
The City of San Jose Animal Care Shelter opened in October. Spokesperson Julie St. Gregory said that the $18-million, 50,00 square-foot shelter is the largest on the west coast. In its first month of operation, it took in 468 dogs and 1,156 cats.
Gregory said that owner surrenders have slowed since the opening, but that adoptions are also down.
“We’ve been getting fewer animals, but we’ve also had fewer visitors in December,” she said.
The San Jose shelter is run in partnership with Los Gatos, Saratoga, Milpitas and Cupertino. A shelter for the towns of Santa Clara, Campbell and Monte Sereno is scheduled to open in the spring of 2006.
Peggy Young, veterinarian at Friends of San Martin, said that South County is in need of a large shelter, and not just because San Martin Airport Expansion plans call for a runway that will pass through the existing building.
Neither Gilroy nor Morgan Hill has an animal shelter so all of the strays in South County that wind up in a shelter land in San Martin. Each city’s police department has a few cages to house dogs that are eventually taken to San Martin, but there are no facilities for cats in either town.
“We need a much larger facility,” Young said. “Gilroy and Morgan Hill don’t have the size to open a shelter. The cost of opening one is very expensive.”
About 50 percent of the shelter’s animals leave alive, a figure Young says is excellent for an animal control shelter, especially one so crowded. The Humane Society, which is much larger and not at capacity, also houses adoptable pets indefinitely and puts down only 28 percent of its animals.
“Just last week we adopted a 12-year-old lab mix that was here for four months,” Benninger said. “We cheered went she left.”
Young said Gilroy’s lack of shelter space causes people to leave animals on the street rather than take the time to find and drive to the shelters in San Martin and Santa Clara.
Pet owner Kim Schmidt, who lives in Gilroy with her family and dog, two cats and several hermit crabs, said while shopping in Petsmart Thursday that she often sees stray dogs wandering around her neighborhood.
“I’ve seen four big dogs roaming around my yard in the last week,” she said. “I’ve called the police before about stray animals and they say ‘we don’t do that.’ People are leery about catching animals because they don’t know what they can do with them.”
People can deliver animals to the San Martin Shelter or the Humane Society, but shelters prefer to see people walking out with animals.
“”We really encourage people to come to the shelter because we have the best companions,” Benninger said. “A good animal is one that has a personality and fits your lifestyle. It doesn’t matter if the dog has long hair or short hair, or if the cat has black fur or is a calico. We get a lot of pure-breds surrendered because the match wasn’t right.”
