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My dog Chihiro was born in Arkansas. It might have been a bit of a head-scratcher how a young puppy made it across several states in order to be adopted from a shelter in the Washington, DC area before she turned four months old. I wasn’t perplexed, however, because before I even found my dog I was already familiar with the concept of rescue transport.
When I lived in Baltimore I roomed for a while with a friend who loves Dachshunds. She adores the breed so much that she’s very active with the Coast to Coast Dachshund rescue group. One of the tasks that she performs for them is to volunteer as one of the drivers for the Baltimore-to-Philadelphia leg.
Many rural animal shelters have serious overcrowding problems and can’t help but sometimes have to put pets down. Larger rescues from across the country, be they located in urban areas or not, that might have more space or a larger network of foster families, will often get in touch with these shelters to take on additional animals for which smaller shelters don’t have room.
In the past larger shelters may have just done this for their smaller counterparts a few hours’ drive away. Thanks to the internet, rescue groups can get in touch with each other from all over the country, and sometimes pets will be sent hundreds of miles to their new location.
Volunteers make up a huge part of this effort; they’ll sign up to take on the transported animals for their local leg of the trip. That’s what my friend did, and I’m sure that’s how Chihiro made it out from Arkansas, in the hands of multiple kind volunteers.
Now the ASPCA has joined the movement, in a move that will surely nationalize this already common practice. On May 10 of this year, the ASPCA posted a press release on its website announcing the launch of its Animal Relocation Initiative.
However, the ASPCA isn’t exactly in the shelter business. We won’t see the company using its much more vast (than the average rescue) resources to move pets out of any random overcrowded shelter. The Animal Relocation Initiative is designed to aid pets that have been displaced by natural disasters.
The program began this spring when 46 dogs were moved from shelters in eastern Arkansas to free space for animals that had been made homeless by flooding. At the time of the press release similar efforts had since been made to help dogs and cats affected by the tornados in Georgia and South Carolina and the flooding in Mississippi.
From the press release:
“Our new program is all about supply and demand,” said Sandy Monterose, the ASPCA’s senior director of community outreach. “We will be exporting animals—-safely, efficiently and humanely-—from crowded shelters to regions where space is available. In this case, moving current shelter animals out of the affected area increases the ability of local organizations to help animals that need to be rescued or sheltered until they can be reunited with their families.”
Local shelters and rescues, almost always nonprofit, often are overwhelmed just by the needs of their pets just on a day to day basis. When confronted by such terrible natural disasters, it’s often nearly impossible for such groups to scrape together the resources they need to help animals in such situations, though thankfully they often receive additional support from their community (when it can) and from national organizations like the ASPCA. How wonderful that the ASPCA is now stepping up its efforts.
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