Pets Need You: Help Pets During COVID-19 Preparation & Response

We need your help now to ensure that support and resources are available to shelter or community pets and their people. Pima Animal Care Center is taking action to prepare for any possible impact from COVID-19 and you are a critical part. Will you join our efforts to secure shelter resources and continue saving pets and helping their people?

Find out how you can help in the following message from Kristen Hassen, Director of Animal Services at Pima Animal Care Center.

COVID-19 Response at Pima Animal Care Center

Our main focus at this point is on reducing the overall number of animals housed at the shelter. The most likely impact is that intake of pets will increase while adoptions will slow, which is a predictable pattern that occurs any time people feel uncertain. Because PACC operates at or near capacity, reducing intake and maintaining outcomes is essential to avoid overcrowding in the shelter.

What we are working on now, and how you can help:

Seeking Monetary Donations: Making a donation to Friends of PACC ensures that we are able to support our foster and outreach programming, and emergency boarding for families in crisis due to COVID-19. Our goal is $10,000 for the purchase of supplies and to cover boarding needs. Make your gift now by clicking the button below and choosing Greatest Need in the project menu.

Gathering Supplies: We are most in need of large crates, large exercise pens, and pet food to support our current and emergency foster caregivers. Items can be purchased from our Amazon Wishlist and shipped directly to the shelter using the button below.

Recruiting Emergency Fosters: If you want to prepare to help should space become an issue, click here to register as an emergency foster. We are creating a list of people who can be called on to foster if we reach critical capacity over the next 30 days. We provide vet care and supplies in addition to helping you get your pet adopted outside of the shelter.

Reducing non-urgent intake: About 40% of the pets who enter PACC are given up by their owners. We will be asking owners who are not facing an immediate crisis to hold their pets for up to four weeks and, if they are able, to surrender at a later date. For any pet owners who need to surrender immediately, we will still take their pets at their scheduled intake time. For questions and scheduling please call the Pet Support Hotline at 520-724-7222.

Asking stray finders to foster: We will continue to ask people bringing in strays if they are able to temporarily foster their found pet and try to get the pet back home. This is something we do now and it helps get pets home much more quickly, without having to endure the stress of the shelter. If you have lost your pet or taken in a found pet please create a report by clicking here.

Adoption events: We will continue to hold reduced-fee adoption events to help reduce the population of pets in the shelter. The biggest thing that makes these events successful is YOU! Sign up to be an adoption counselor volunteer and help people find their new best friends!

Transport: We are planning another Wings of Rescue flight transport for 3/15/20 and this organization has offered to do more regular flights to other shelters as long as we need them. You can volunteer to get pets ready or even drive them to the airport. There is nothing better than seeing 100 or more PACC pets leaving for their new homes. The best part about this program is that almost every pet is adopted within a few days of landing in their destination!

Community preparedness: One thing you can do now is to make plans for your pets in case someone in your home falls ill. You can stock up on two extra weeks of pet supplies and identify a pet sitter who can help out if at any point you need to be hospitalized. We should all be planning to shelter pets in place if needed.

Shelter preparedness: We have increased orders on all of our daily supplies and we are reviewing our continuity of operations plan in case we experience any operational disruptions. We are fortunate that controlling disease transmission is familiar to our staff and volunteers and our diligence in caring for ourselves by using good hygiene will also help our pets. There is currently no concern that animals can contract this illness. However, there is a possibility the live virus could live on the fur of a pet, just like it can on any object. This makes it important to wash our hands between handling animals and to frequently clean the surfaces in the shelter, especially in the public areas.

The Importance of Community

We are working on a comprehensive contingency plan and will update the public as plans change and evolve. Our team is well-versed in handling community challenges and disease control and is working hard for the safety of all the pets and people in our community.

It’s more important now than ever that we come together to support the pets and people in our community and it’s in times like these that we see the greatest acts of compassion and kindness. Thank you for fostering, volunteering, or making a gift to sustain our life-saving work.  

Additional Information on COVID-19

Read Pima Animal Care Center’s official press release on COVID-19 and the shelter’s preparations by clicking here.

For information about the local impact of COVID-19 on humans and guidance for keeping yourself and others healthy, please follow this dedicated page on the Pima County Health Department website.

If you are an older adult or in a high-risk group for contracting this illness, considering suspending or modifying your volunteer activities to avoid crowds and follow guidelines recommended by the CDC.

When it comes to pets in our shelter, we are working closely with our national animal sheltering community and are participating in daily discussions to stay up-to-date on possible animal shelter impacts. Animal Sheltering magazine recently released a COVID-19 tool kit, which is a helpful read for those of us working and volunteering in the shelter.