FORT SMITH -- The city animal shelter is being overwhelmed with stray and unwanted cats and dogs, and pet advocates have asked city officials to take action to help reduce their reproduction.
More than 100 people attended a town-hall-style meeting Tuesday held by Fort Smith city directors. The topic was crowding in the Hope Humane Society shelter in Fort Smith and the lack of a city policy to deal with the overpopulation of dogs and cats within the city.
Storm Nolan, vice president of the Hope Humane Society, said that as of Aug. 31 there were 622 dogs and cats in the shelter, which has a capacity for 300. Fort Smith animal control officers take all the dogs and cats they capture to the shelter.
"It's a city problem," Nolan said. "It's not just a Humane Society problem."
The problem exists, he said, because not enough pet owners spay and neuter their dogs and cats, which produce litters of unwanted puppies and kittens.
City Administrator Carl Geffken said people at the meeting seemed to favor the city providing incentives to spay and neuter to help control the pet population.
"I do not think mandatory spay and neutering is something the city as a whole would want," he said, however.
A 2011 Citizens' Animal Services Task Force came to a similar conclusion. One of task force's recommendations was to encourage but not mandate the spay and neutering of pets.
Paul Lemke, who owns Arkansas Pet Service, an animal cremation business in Gentry, criticized the city's lack of an animal population control policy.
Nolan told city directors that he believes the best solution would be to implement a dog licensing and/or mandatory micro-chipping program. Stray dogs with microchips that are picked up could be identified and sent back to their owners instead of to the shelter.
Licenses for spayed or neutered dogs could cost little or nothing, he suggested, but owners of an unaltered dog could pay an annual fee that would cost a little more than the cost of spaying or neutering the animal.
The 2011 task force study concluded that pet licensing would not be feasible.
"A licensing program is deemed administratively costly and burdensome offering low initial compliance and waning compliance over time," it said.
City Director Keith Lau said he favored some ordinance to reduce pet overpopulation but was concerned about how to pay for it and how to make the public comply with it.
City Director Tracy Pennartz said she would like to see the matter addressed by the city's Animal Services Advisory Board, and for the board to make a recommendation to city directors on what direction to take.
A member of that board, Sam Terry, told directors that cities across the country have passed laws to control pet populations and directors could tailor them to meet Fort Smith's needs.
"We don't have to re-invent the wheel," Terry said. "We just have to come up with something that works for us."
Geffken said whatever policy directors decide on would be a long-term solution. In the short term, the Hope Humane Society will be left to deal with its crisis.
Hope Humane Society's interim executive director Raina Rodgers said space is a problem in the shelter. There are not enough kennels to hold all the animals. Workers have had to confine animals in pet crates and wire cages in hallways, meeting rooms, bathrooms and anywhere there is a space to hold them.
She said the shelter, which is under contract with Fort Smith, can take in only the animals hauled in by city animal control officers and those that are strays and abandoned. Animals pour into the shelter at a rate of two to 10 a day.
The shelter has had a no-kill policy since April 2016, according to its website. Rodgers said the Hope Humane Society will stick to that policy as long as it can.
But money is tight, she said. It costs about $100,000 a month to feed and care for the animals, pay the staff and pay for utilities. Under a contract with the city, the shelter receives about $20,000 a month from the city's sanitation fund, leaving the Hope Humane Society to raise the other $80,000 a month through donations.
The goal of the Hope Humane Society is to adopt out the animals it takes in. It sends many of them to other parts of the country where spay and neutering laws have reduced the number of mostly dogs available for adoption. She said the shelter does not export cats because they are more easily adopted locally.
Rodgers said First Presbyterian Church of Fort Smith has donated $10,000 to match the $10,000 of shelter money used to hire an airplane to fly 50 to 60 dogs to Oregon later this month for adoption.
The Hope Humane Society also has sent plane loads of dogs to Michigan, Missouri and Oklahoma for adoption as part of its Fetch Fido a Flight program, Rodgers said, and is developing a relationship with entities in Colorado to take dogs there for adoption.
NW News on 09/09/2018