- Nearly 10,000 cats and dogs found themselves in Midland and Odessa animal shelters last year.

Some had just gotten away from their owners, but many, way too many, were abandoned to fend for themselves.

Many of those end up at local animal shelters.

both Midland and Odessa animal control officials work with many local humane groups to find homes for the strays, but there are too many animals and not enough willing adopters.

So what happens to the thousands of dogs and cats who find themselves in animal shelters?

I'm Becky Ferguson, and this is One Question.

(dramatic music) What happens to the thousands of dogs and cats who find themselves in animal shelters?

This week, we spoke with directors of both the Midland and Odessa animal shelters, and a volunteer for a local humane group to learn more about animal control in the Basin.

Welcome, Captain Jerry Harvell.

In addition to your other duties, you are also overseeing animal control in Odessa, and I'm interested in knowing, are stray animals a growing problem in Odessa?

- It's mainly a problem of animal owners, or people get animals, or they leave the area.

Like say, if you have an old boom, and then they leave and they just leave the animals.

Or some people, they get tired of their animals.

They just dump them, and then they're out there in the wild, and they become like wild animals, and get sick, and get treated bad.

And so it's a definitely a problem.

- Why is it a growing problem, do you think?

- Like I said, it could be because of fluctuation of employment, it could be an educational issue, and we're working on that with PSAs and things like that in our animal control field, managers working on like dog houses, helping people to get doghouses, helping people understand why, and what you should do with your animal, 'cause some people don't know, or maybe they don't have the money, and sometimes they'll find donations from, I think the humane society has helped with doghouses before and things like that.

- How many animals are handled by animal control here in Odessa in the course of a year?

- It looks like, around dogs and cats, around 3,500, but that's with if we intake all the animals all the time, it would be even bigger, I think.

And that's because we also have the County, and we deal with the County.

The County uses our facility, which is a relatively small, around 76 kennels.

So it's a juggling act trying to find volunteers to take pre-adoption animals, like animals we expect to adopt to someone, and to try to have more area to put animals into, so we don't have an overcrowding issue, because if we overcrowd, then that ends up animals die that way too.

People don't want you to ever euthanize, but you if you stuff your shelter also, what will happen is it can only hold so much, and if you put too many in there, especially when you bring in animals from the outside that you're trying to isolate a little bit.

And I don't know if you know, but distemper can shed up to six weeks.

That means we can bring in a dog that looks completely healthy, and it already had distemper, and no amount of vaccines that we give them or anything's gonna change that.

So you bring him in, you think they're going to be good, and then you bring him over to get adopted, and we can't keep him six weeks, and somebody adopts him, sometimes that happens, or it infects the shelter, because maybe they're at the whatever.

It's not always six weeks, but up to six weeks.

So we can test everything, and not know, and have- - Until it's too late.

- Until it's too late.

And that's where we have some of these problems in the shelter, where we'll bring them from outside, we'll have them there, they look healthy, and then they're not.

- So y'all handle, in the course of a year, like 3,500 animals.

How many of those are y'all able to adopt out?

- Right now, we're around 65% of saving animals' lives, and that includes returned to owner, or whatever.

That's not where we want to be.

The chief's policy right now is save as many as we can save, that's his directive to me.

And so we're trying to bring other ideas into the mix.

We've got Best Friends Animal Society that we're working with.

I don't know if they're gonna embed, but they are still working with us about ways to save animals, to do, I think, PSAs.

It'll speed us up in our process of learning is what we're trying to do, 'cause they've done it for shelters all over Texas, and I say all over, several places in Texas and all over the country.

- How does the adoption program work in Odessa?

- They go up there and they can look at the animals, and if they find one they like we'll show them around, we'll tell them about them, we'll try to educate them now, better than the old days, where maybe what size yard do you have?

Do you really want a big, big dog?

Maybe you want a smaller dog, or maybe a big dog's good for you, I don't know, but we look at that.

We look at do they realize how much they're gonna have to pay attention to the animal?

Things like that, so hopefully they don't get adopted to somebody that's gonna end up just releasing the dog, or bringing it back to the shelter, and then you're like, well, what do we do with the dog now?

And so then we have to try to figure it out again.

- What should citizens do to help with animal control in Odessa?

- Well, the biggest thing is please don't dump your animals.

If somebody is doing that is just out in the County, it's not good for the animal.

You think, well, it's better than taking them to a shelter where they might euthanize them, so they take them out in the County and they dump him, well, then they live a wild, pretty rough life out there in the cold, heat, coyotes, and whatever you want, out there getting sick.

Distemper's an ugly disease, it mimics rabies.

It looks a lot like rabies if it goes far enough.

You don't want to put an animal in those sorts of situations, and that's what you're doing.

And especially if the animal has been a pet, if I put my dog out in the wild, he would have fun for awhile, but he really wouldn't know how to protect himself.

- Fend for himself.

- And then it would hurt his feelings, I think, in a way, because I know when I get mad at him and get onto him, he seems incensed about it.

So if you were to come at him, I'm afraid he might get upset or angry, he might even bite you.

I don't know.

So you're really putting the dog or the cat into a very bad environment.

'Cause they're domesticated, they're not supposed to be out.

- Well, I understand y'all are about to get a new animal shelter.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and why you needed one?

- Well, the old shelter is old, and it doesn't have good ventilation, it has evaporative cooling.

So when you wash kennels down, you're getting more and more of that.

You've got hard water deposit on everything.

So disease can get into the hard water deposits, and it's hard to get out.

You can clean and clean and it is what it is.

Now, it's very clean, but it wasn't developed for that.

It was developed to, we had a bad rabies issue in the past, and it was built, designed, I believe, by vets, if I remember correctly, when I was out there last time, and it was made to get strays, if people don't pick them up, put them down and move on.

That's what it was.

And that was to stop the epidemic of rabies, and things that could really hurt people.

And so that old shelter has been transformed about 10 years ago into we're trying to save the lives of the animals, and then we're looking at it in a different way, because the world has changed and that's what we're in, plus it's the right thing to do.

And so we're changing, but the shelter is still the shelter, it has drainage issues.

It has all sorts of issues.

- Tell us about the new shelter, what will be different?

- It has separate rooms, and the ventilation system works real well, where it will keep the room separate, where if you had some kind of virus or disease in one of the rooms, it doesn't necessarily get passed onto the other rooms, and so you can contain it, and plus it's gonna be regular air conditioning.

It's not gonna be evaporative cooling anymore, so you don't have all that moisture in the air you don't need, and it'll be regulated at the proper levels and all that stuff.

And you'll have some areas for cats to play, you'll have areas for our dogs to play.

Now we take them out of the little corral and run them around, but it's gonna be safer.

There's places that folks will be able to meet the animal that they, and I say animal, 'cause I don't know if it's cat or dog, or maybe you can meet and greet the animal, and see what you think.

Is it too jumpy for you?

Is it too hyper?

Is it not lively enough?

I don't know.

You can throw a Kong or a ball to it or something and then maybe see how you get along with the animal.

- Is there anything you'd like to add?

- Please take care of your animals, spay and neuter your animals.

We have plenty of animals out there without having to breed animals.

Now, if you're a business and that's what you do, I'm not talking to that, I'm just saying just breeding animals to breed animals is not necessarily the best, or if the animal gets out and breeds on its own, and then you have a vicious cycle that continues, and then you have more animals than people need, and you try to ship them off to other areas, like we've had rescues come in, and thank the rescues out there that take them to places like Colorado and California, and places that don't have as many animals.

And so they'll sometimes take a lot of our excess animals and they'll go and quarantine them for a while, and then they ship them somewhere.

And my mission is to save, and our people's mission is to save as many animals as possible.

- Thank you so much, Captain Harvell.

- Thank you, ma'am, it was a pleasure.

- We're visiting with Terra Acox of the Midland Humane Coalition.

Thanks for joining us.

And I want to talk about why do we need a Midland Humane Society when we have an animal control service?

- Well, animal control has kind of a dual purpose.

So in addition to taking in strays that people don't want, they also have to control the population of pest animals.

So they're not solely focused on what Midland Humane Coalition would be focused on, which is finding homes for adoptable animals.

- And how do y'all go about that?

- We work really closely with the City of Midland actually, and they help us kind of identify who is the best candidate for adoption.

And we're just in constant contact with them to bring those animals out of the kill shelter and into a no-kill situation.

- So tell me about the steps.

So you go and you retrieve the animal, then what do you do?

- First, they go to a foster home, because we have to make sure that they don't have a disease that they could spread to other animals in the shelter, and they go through sort of a quarantine period, and then we get them into the vet, where they can get their shots, spayed and neutered, and then we bring them to PetSmart.

That's just kind of where they live as a temporary home.

And we spend a lot of time working with the local stations, the local newspaper.

The best place to start would be our Facebook page or our website, because we keep biographies of all the animals, and then you can see pictures, and kind of find out about their personality, and then you can give us a call.

COVID's kind of throwing everything up in the air.

We used to have a lot of people come in person and just sort of browse, but lately, because we're trying to monitor who comes in, keep everybody safe, we kind of encourage people to either call us and set up an appointment, or just kind of make a decision before they come in, who they want to meet.

- And when you say, come to us, you all have an arrangement with PetSmart?

- Yes, it's a really unique arrangement.

I think, I don't know if we're still the only one in the country, but that was something that our founders worked very hard to establish, because that kind of gives us an edge over some other rescues.

Not that we're in competition, but it was a drawback of the rescues here is finding a facility where people can come in person.

So we have that advantage of being inside PetSmart, and it also helps us help other rescues in the area, because we do work in tandem with them.

- Tell me a little bit about the founding of the organization and why it was founded.

- So back in 2010, our founder, Susie Hitchcock-Hall, she worked with Lou Ann Morgan and Paul O'Neil.

They all just saw this huge need in our community.

They saw rescues operating and not working together, and they saw the shortcomings of a city facility and saw that they could step in and do something differently.

So through Susie's research, that's kind of how she found out about these opportunities to work with PetSmart, and PetSmart is a nationally known brand, so that really helps us out, because at the time were the only pet store you could go to that is a national chain in Midland.

So getting us in those doors, where there's a lot of foot traffic, people can come in and actually see these pets that are in need of adoption rather than a pet store, where you really don't know where those animals come from.

These are animals that we know are from Midland, who are homeless, who are friendly, who are very good candidates for adopting.

And just being in PetSmart really helped up the visibility of the animals in need in Midland.

- And so what is the goal of your organization?

- Our goal is to find homes for healthy adoptable pets, and hopefully end euthanasia in Midland.

- How are you coming on that?

- We're doing our best.

We've actually done a great job since our founding of finding homes for over 6,000 adoptable pets, and over 9,000 in conjunction with other rescues in Midland.

- Wow.

Do you feel like y'all have reduced the need for euthanasia?

- Absolutely, the year of our founding, 4,000 animals were euthanized in Midland.

So those numbers have definitely been affected just by having us in existence.

- Is there anything you'd like to add?

- Adopt, don't shop, and spay and neuter your pets.

Always spay and neuter, it's so important to control the unwanted pet population.

No unwanted pet would exist without a person who didn't do the responsible thing.

Are there other pet owner responsibilities you'd like to talk about?

- Yes, definitely.

Always get your pets vaccinated.

That is so important, and that's why we see such a problem in Midland and Odessa, is people not vaccinating, and distemper and parvo, especially, are treatable, but they're very expensive.

And if the animal goes through such suffering, if they're not vaccinated against those totally preventable diseases.

- Are there problems with animal control that are unique to Midland and Odessa?

- There are States that have a shortage of adoptable animals, and we actually work with rescues out of state to get some of our unwanted pets into the homes of people who do want them.

So I do think that there is a stark difference between maybe West Texas in general and other States, and how they handle unwanted pets or how they handle companion pets in general, just responsibility, and I think also it might have to do with housing in Midland and Odessa.

Just the cost for so many years was so high and that allowed places that rent to people to be more selective and maybe stricter about what pets are allowed.

And that might contribute to why we see so many pit bulls.

So unwanted pit bulls, pit bulls we can't home.

- Because they're released?

- Because they're not allowed in a lot of apartments.

Yeah.

And landlords are fully within their rights to not allow certain breeds.

Yes, we've actually adopted more cats than ever over this past year.

Usually we have a real problem finding homes for cats, and we are easily able to rehome dogs, but this last year, it's sort of flipped.

- And why is that?

- I'd be guessing if I said, but maybe people being home more, or feeling lonely.

If you work remotely and you don't get to see your coworkers every day, that would be my guess.

You want someone there to keep you company.

It seems kind of to go hand in hand, I think.

- I'm visiting with Leah Lewis, who is the animal services manager for the City of Midland, and we're talking today about animal control issues in the City of Midland.

And I'm curious how many animals does the city handle, if that's the right word, in the period of, let's say, a month?

- If you take the yearly average for 2018, 2019, and 2020, it's approximately 6,500 animals a year.

- And are those animals that you all pick up, or are they animals that folks bring to you?

- Both, they're either impounded in the field, or they're brought in over the counter.

- What changes, if any, will occur because of the new facility that you all are moving into?

- The new facility is a wonderful foundation for so many opportunities.

This current facility was designed to be a temporary holding facility, where the new facility is gonna be an adoption facility.

We have all the key components to help minimize sickness and disease, the HVAC system, the flooring, the drains, they have indoor outdoor access for the dogs.

All the rooms have natural lighting, and we have get to know courtyards, meet and greet rooms.

It's amazing.

- It's gonna be a world of difference.

- A lot to look forward to.

- So meet and greet, and get to know you rooms; this is for the adopted dog and the potential person adopting the dog?

- Yes, ma'am, it's for a potential adopters.

They can have the opportunity to interact with an animal of their choice, or if they'd like, they can also bring in maybe a dog of their own that they already have and then do a meet and greet to see how they get along with a new animal.

- What are the issues facing animal control in Midland?

- I think Midland is unique in the sense we have a lot of transient workforce.

So a lot of people come to the area for work and they're looking for companionship, so they adopt an animal or rescue an animal, and then once their work is complete, and they have to return back home, that animal often gets abandoned, or returned back to a shelter or a rescue.

- Are there more or fewer stray animals or feral cats now than there have been in past years?

- It's really hard to say, because 2020 was such a challenging year with the pandemic.

In 2019, we impounded over 7,000 animals, and in 2020, it was over 5,000.

So just based off of those numbers, you would think there's a decrease.

However, when you consider, we were closed to the public for an extended period of time, and then by appointment only, I don't think that's an accurate reflection of where the numbers truly are.

- Okay, tell me what's involved in adopting an animal.

Do they people come here, or do they go to PetSmart or how does that work?

- Both.

We adopt out here at the facility, and then they can also adapt out at PetSmart.

And then there's a lot of local rescues that offer adoptions as well.

- In my neighborhood, there are lots and lots of cats that don't appear to have owners and that doesn't seem to be something that I had observed in the past.

Do we have a growing feral cat population?

- We do have a feral cat population in the area, and there are options available for in the event you observe feral cats in your community.

There is a pilot program through the Midland cat wranglers, and you can utilize traps through them and then go through the TNR program.

Or if you're interested in having those cats removed from the area, animal services will provide you with a live animal trap, and then once the animal is confined, we'll bring it here to the facility.

- What is TNR?

- Trap, neuter, release or return.

Trap, neuter, return.

- So spell that out a little bit.

- So trap, neuter, return or release is when you set a live animal trap, and then that animal is trapped, it's taken in for sterilization, so spay or neuter, it's ear tipped, so that indicates the animal has been sterilized and rabies vaccinated, and then it's returned to the area it was caught.

- Does the animal shelter provide spaying and neutering services?

- They provide a $70 voucher to put towards the cost of the sterilization.

So for owned animals, the requirement is you have to provide proof of rabies and city license prior to the voucher being issued.

And then once the voucher is issued, you have a two week window to get that done at the vet of your choice.

For the TNR program, we'd provide a $70 voucher, and the rabies vaccination requirement in advance has been waived, just because it is sometimes challenging to catch a feral cat more than once.

So that can be done at the time of sterilization.

- Let's talk about responsible pet ownership.

What would you like to share with folks?

- It's important that when you take in an animal or adopt it, you understand that it's a lifelong commitment.

There's gonna be unexpected expenses, moves, and other things that come along with it, and it's important that you make a decision to keep that animal for the full duration.

Also, responsible pet ownership, there's so much that that entails.

It's keeping that animal up to date on vaccinations, there's preventative care, there's the unexpected vet visits, sickness, wellness visits, it's keeping that animal confined, it's making sure it's well socialized.

There's just a lot that goes into being a responsible pet owner.

- Do you all work with other organizations here in Midland related to pets?

- Yes, ma'am.

We have a placement partner program, so we work with local rescues, out of state rescues.

We work with various organizations, and we we want to continue to build that avenue and work with as many as we possibly can.

- Midland is not a no-kill facility, is that right?

Is that something that we're working towards?

- We are an open intake facility, so what that means is we accept any animal from our jurisdiction, regardless of age, temperament, health, we accept every animal that crosses our doorstep.

So it is something that, yes, we strive to euthanize as few animals as possible, but in order to achieve a no-kill status, we really need the community's support and help with responsible pet ownership.

- How do folks go about adopting an animal?

- We're currently open to the public, so if anyone's interested, they're welcome to come in during business hours, do a walkthrough.

If there's an animal that they're interested in, they can visit with it on the adoption pad, and if they feel it's a good fit for their family, then we'll move forward with the adoption.

- Are folks more interested in adopting puppies and kittens or mature dogs and cats?

- Usually the puppies and kittens are first to be adopted out.

We do have families from time to time looking for that middle-aged or older animal.

'cause they know, typically, those are a little bit harder to place, but usually kittens and puppies are the first to go.

- Approximately 35% of dogs and cats were put down in Midland and Odessa last year.

That's significantly better than in years past, because of diligent efforts on the parts of both animal control officials and volunteers to control the animal population and to promote adoption.

That's distressing to consider, but local shelters are committed to reducing the numbers.

How?

Through aggressively promoting adoption, with the help of a number of rescue groups and dozens of volunteers who foster pets, promote adoption on television and social media, and in Midland through an arrangement with PetSmart.

Both cities are stepping up their efforts to save animals both are building, or in the process of building, new animal control facilities, which will accommodate more animals and provide a greater atmosphere for potential pet owners to visit and get to know before adoption.

But both cities and their humane groups plead for help from citizens.

It is worth repeating their pleas.

Their message, adopt, vaccinate, spay and neuter.

Those actions will save animals lives.

We each have a part to play.

Check show notes at OneQuestion@BasinPBS.org, for more information and resources.

Our painting today is by Fred Troller, a Swiss American who lived from 1930 to 2002.

He helped popularize a minimalist type of graphic style known as Swiss New Typography in the United States in the 1960s.

This style was in contrast to the decorative and ornamental graphic design trends at the time.

The Swiss aesthetic was influenced by the Bauhaus school of the 1920s, and focused on stark bold typefaces in primary colors.

Troller was born in Zurich in 1930.

In addition to painting, he worked in movie production, graphic design, and commercial art.

His clients included Exxon, General Electric, IBM, Westinghouse, and American Airlines.

He also enjoyed a long career as an educator.

He taught and lectured at many major design schools, including Cooper Union, the School of Visual Arts, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

His works were represented at Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York.

This painting is from Baker Schorr Fine Art Gallery in Midland.

Finally, thank you for joining us for One Question.

We will be back each Saturday at 04:30 PM, where we will answer the questions you want to know from the people who know.

Other ways to watch One Question include Basin PBS Facebook, Passport, and YouTube.

If you have a question, send it to us at OneQuestion@BasinPBS.org.

I'm Becky Ferguson, good night.

(upbeat music)