our pets: CLEAR THE SHELTER
Taking You
Home
WPCAS’s Clear the Shelter event builds
on last year’s success
BY TYLER MASK
A
t 4:33 p.m. Melvin, a brindle Labrador mix, went to his
furever home, ending the Weatherford Parker County
Animal Shelter’s Clear the Shelter event in August.
To celebrate, the last pet was cheered on as he and
his new owners ran past shelter staff and volunteers to the
song “Who Let the Dogs Out”.
In 2014, 34 shelters in North Texas participated in
the highly successful event, WPCAS Director of Animal
Services Dustin Deel said. This year Clear the Shelter went
national, with 27 different metropolitan areas joining in
everywhere from New York to California.
“There were over 400 shelters in the United States that
actually participated,” Deel said. “Irving is the one that got
it started. They did it multiple years in a row. We jumped
on [last year] and then tried to help educate and get some
more shelters to come on board with it. That’s what really
made it such a big event.”
Met with great success during WPCAS inaugural year,
the shelter pulled in animals from Azle toward the end of
the day after adopting all 80 of its pets.
Although not all of Azle’s pets found homes and the
remaining ones had to go back, WPCAS found homes for
an additional 23 animals.
Last month the shelter partnered with Azle again and
found homes for 140 animals, completely clearing out the
shelter. Even sweeter, no pets had to go back to Azle. The
adoption breakdown consisted of 79 dogs, 60 cats and one
donkey.
But with all these animals going out in one day, the
return rate has to be high, right? Wrong.
“[The return rate] is very low,” Deel said. Last year we
had one animal returned out of 103 animals, this year we
have only had two returned so far. [The return rate] was
less than 1 percent last year and we are looking at about
pretty much the same this year,” Deel said.
On why the percentage is so low, Deel said education
plays a key role.
“Some of our volunteers had hesitations [last year] with
just giving animals away because we did a fee-waived
adoption,” Deel said “The thought was [there may be]
people that shouldn’t be adopting, who don’t necessarily
qualify to adopt, and then we’re going to turn around and
give them [a pet] for free. So, what we did is we set up an
education table.”
The adoption fees were waived only if potential pet
owners went through the brief class, which hit on topics
such as keeping animals on heart worm preventative, how
much it really costs to own a pet and other basics.
At the end of the WPCAS’s fiscal year in September,
Deel’s current estimates put the shelter’s live release rate at
approximately 93 percent for the entire year. The remaining seven percent “really consists of animals that are too
aggressive to adopt or just down right sick [or] injured,”
Deel said. But if it weren’t for Clear the Shelter, the numbers wouldn’t be as high.
“It has drastically hel