The Everett Animal Shelter is suffering under the weight of a chronic crisis. The facility is too small to hold the dozens of animals that come in every single day. Because there is no room to house them, healthy dogs and cats are euthanized every week.
This sad fact is no fault of the shelter’s. The facility is overcrowded because it is the only city-funded shelter in Snohomish County. The shelter doesn’t turn away animals. The shelter does everything in its power to get the dogs and cats adopted. But the sheer numbers – 10,000 animals came through the shelter’s doors in 2005, in a facility designed to handle 3,500 a year – means healthy animals are put down.
The Everett City Council has appointed a panel of three council members to investigate solutions. Currently, several municipalities, from Stanwood to Mukilteo, contract with Everett for the shelter services. Everett also contracts with Snohomish County for all of the unincorporated areas.
The key to finding a solution logically lies with the biggest players – Snohomish County and Everett. The overcrowding at the Everett shelter is a regional crisis and the solution also needs to be regional. The City Council’s new panel should invite county government representatives to join them in searching for a solution.
A sensible, long-term answer is to have Snohomish County run an animal shelter at a site that would allow a much larger facility. Everett and all the other cities could then contract with the county. This is the model of the King County Animal Shelter, which contracts with all its municipalities except Seattle.
The shelter situation is a crisis now, and the county’s projected growth adds to the urgency for a solution. The problem can’t be ignored or put off. All those people moving here bring their pets with them. Which brings us to the other party that must take responsibility for being part of the solution: Pet owners.
The Everett shelter is overcrowded because too many people are willing to dump their pets for disturbingly shallow reasons. People who work and volunteer at shelters can rattle off dozens of examples that make heads spin and hearts break. Too many people still don’t get their animals spayed or neutered. And way too many people don’t bother to license their pets, depriving cities and the county of needed funding. Too many people want a trendy, designer dog, and never contemplate adopting a shelter dog (of which many are purebreds).
We are a society that considers our pets part of the family. Yet, an estimated 4 million to 6 million shelter cats and dogs are euthanized each year in the United States. Let’s work together – pet owners, cities and the county – with our brains and hearts, to find a way to solve this crisis.
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