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City animal shelters are true lifesavers for some animals, but not others. Of the 3,094 animals surrendered at the local city animal shelter or caught by animal control officers, 324 were reclaimed by owners and 337 were adopted. The remaining 2,433 were euthanized. This number represents about 80% of those brought to the city pound. So even some of the stories below meant only temporary reprieve from a death sentence.

While several residents choose to surrender their pets to the shelter, others take a different approach. Shelter officers related the following stories:

A woman was driving on the highway when she saw a pickup stop and let two dogs out for what she thought was a break. Once the dogs were out of the pickup, it left without the pets. The woman took the dogs and brought them to the shelter.
A local couple was driving one afternoon and noticed a box on the side of the road. They saw a puppy poke its head up out of the box, so they stopped and found four other puppies inside. The couple brought the puppies to the shelter.
The shelter supervisor's dog was barking and when she went to check on the disturbance, she found two mixed breed puppies on her property. She was able to coax one puppy into her vehicle, but could not catch the other. Although she brought him to the shelter, he was later euthanized. Not long after, she found his running mate dead on the side of the road, hit by a vehicle.
A worker came to work at the shelter one morning and found a dog chained to the front gate. “He looked like he had been there all night,” she said.
A woman saw someone dump a dog out of their vehicle at the local mall. The woman took the dog to her home and notified animal control. The woman volunteered to keep the dog if the owners wanted it back or called the shelter looking for it. “Nobody ever called about the dog,” the shelter worker said. “They just pushed it out of the car and left.”
A shelter worker was called to the wastewater treatment plant when construction workers discovered a mother dog and litter of puppies in a large plastic bin, dumped on the back of the plant’s property. “They had to call me because the mama dog was trying to bite the workers,” she said.

Many of us who have rural property can relate to those awful stories. I can’t tell you the number of dogs and cats that have been dumped on our property over the years. It is heartbreaking.

The dumping has happened at our place in town as well. I was drawn to my back door by puppy whimperings late one very cold winter night. We had a young puppy at the time, but she was safe inside the house. Someone had dropped a little puppy over the fence. It was shivering and whimpering at my back door.

It was an inconvenience to us to have to find it a home, but I was thankful that they did try to leave it somewhere they knew it would be taken care of, rather than put the little thing in jeopardy. Ironically, these folks sometimes think they are doing a good deed by dumping them on someone that will handle the problem.