After back-to-back hurricanes, animal shelters are ‘in crisis’

The silence that filled her animal shelter after it began flooding unnerved Pam Harris.

As water infiltrated the room, employees had no time to speak as they grabbed nearly 100 dogs and cats and loaded them into trucks. The dogs, typically barking or whining, made no noise as the water rose around their beds at the facility in Erwin, Tennessee, in September.

“That’s how you knew how terrified they were,” said Harris, assistant director of the Unicoi County Animal Shelter.

She had no choice but to find her animals new homes at shelters across the country or with foster families after flooding from Hurricane Milton destroyed her facility.

Weeks after back-to-back hurricanes swept through the Southeast, many shelters and rescues destroyed in the storms are in a similar situation - forced to send their animals to new locations across the country, with little control over what will happen to them. Many of the facilities on the receiving end are struggling to keep up with the influx, while hundreds of other pets that were abandoned during Hurricanes Helene and Milton remain homeless.

The fallout has exacerbated overcrowding in shelters nationwide, making many facilities busier than they have been in years. Staff members who work to limit animal diseases, spay and neuter pets to prevent them from reproducing at will and help stray animals find homes say they are overwhelmed.

“Animal sheltering right now is in crisis,” Mirah Horowitz, founder of Lucky Dog Animal Rescue in Arlington, Virginia, told The Washington Post.

Many animal shelters were overcrowded before this year’s hurricane season - an issue Horowitz said was partly caused by the increased price of veterinary care and the growing trend of shelters refusing to euthanize their animals.

Before hurricanes, shelters that expect to be affected send some of their animals to other facilities to make room for abandoned and injured pets. Afterward, shelters call on the public and national rescue organizations to donate supplies - food, blankets, kennels, water - so they can care for their new animals.

After pets have stayed at a shelter for a few weeks or months, they often need to find a new home or a shelter that isn’t at maximum capacity. Some shelters euthanize pets to make space for new animals.

Furry Friends, a no-kill shelter in Florida, hoped to avoid animal deaths by busing dozens of pets at a shelter impacted by Hurricane Helene to shelters in the Northeast and Midwest.

As Hurricane Milton loomed two weeks later, Furry Friends barricaded many of its own pets at its 27-acre Palm City facility, outside Milton’s expected landfall near Tampa Bay. But the shelter didn’t foresee the tornadoes that hit South Florida hours before Milton’s landfall.

Strong winds destroyed windows at Furry Friends’s facility, tumbled a building designed for veterinarian services on its side and caused power lines to fall. Dogs in urgent need of walks the following morning dodged glass, metal and building parts.

Employees loaded dogs and cats into vans to take to Furry Friends’s other shelter in Jupiter, Florida, about 20 miles southeast. They planted pet cages on the floor in what’s usually a meeting room. They placed other animals on buses to northern states

“We went from being the helper organization to being the shelter that really needed the help,” said Jess Grand, the shelter’s chief of staff.

To take in abandoned animals from Milton, Furry Friends rented a former racing track for dogs in West Palm Beach while their Palm City facility is being rebuilt. They set up kennels, purchased washing and drying machines and created makeshift veterinary care areas.

Other shelters have helped by taking in more animals than their buildings were designed to fit.

After Hurricane Helene struck Asheville, North Carolina, in September, Amanda Peck, the shelter manager at Hope for Brevard in Melbourne, Florida, volunteered to care for cats from the area. She thought she would receive about 70 - a bit more than shelters typically send her after hurricanes. But when overcrowded shelters asked her to take 147 cats, Peck said she couldn’t say no.

“It just becomes for you: Who do you leave behind?” said Peck, 32. “So that’s not an option. The option is just to save as many as we can.”

Peck was sheltering 156 cats before the new litter arrived in early October. Her rescue’s floors were covered with gray, black, yellow and blue crates, most of which featured a strip of tape that listed the cat’s name. She turned meeting rooms into homes for cats.

Peck said she’s paying about $25,000 out-of-pocket for veterinary care that involves neutering and spaying, microchipping and vaccinating the cats. She said food, litter and garbage bags for the cats have cost about $1,000 per week.

About 20 of the new cats have been selected for adoption, Peck said.

“We’ll keep all of them until we get them to where they have to be,” she said.

Shelters like Peck’s have been crucial, especially after some buildings were demolished from the hurricanes, like the Unicoi County Animal Shelter.

Employees didn’t have enough kennels for all their pets when they evacuated them from flooding, so they placed multiple dogs in the same cage “praying that they just didn’t fight,” Harris said. The power went out that morning, and Harris said she would’ve missed a black Australian Shepherd, Chili Flake, in his kennel, if she didn’t see his white teeth.

In five trucks and a trailer, employees took the pets to a local supermarket and a hardware store that agreed to temporarily house them. Harris and her staff called neighbors, other shelters and national organizations for help, and dozens of their animals were fostered. The Humane Society of the United States, one of a few national nonprofits that assists animals after disasters, later relocated some of the pets.

Harris, 41, said about four feet of flood and sewer water had engulfed her shelter. She’s raising money for repairs, which she expects to cost about $350,000.

But even after losing her workplace, Harris’s work of finding pets homes was far from over. When she visited her shelter the day after the floods, Harris said, a box of four abandoned kittens sat amid mud and water on the destroyed front porch.