Texas Border Business
Edinburg, TX — For many months, we’ve been telling our supporters that our cages are filling faster than we are able to provide lifesaving outcomes.
We have gone to our municipal partners and asked them to help us reduce the intake of animals by providing progressive animal control field services.
We have hired new staff to help community members find ways to keep their pets at home. We’ve added low-cost vaccines and a community pet food pantry. We’ve eliminated barriers to adoption and lost pet reclaim. We’ve partnered with national funders to help increase the number of animals leaving on transport.
But it’s just not enough. And we aren’t the only ones.
In the News:
Across the state of Texas and across the country, animal shelters are seeing a dramatic rise in intake, bringing many back to intake levels that hadn’t been seen since before the pandemic began. Most noticeably in the the southern US, with a dramatic rise in intake comes an equally dramatic rise in disease. PVAS is no exception. Distemper, prevented with a readily available vaccine, is endemic to the RGV, and we’ve spent thousands of additional dollars this year attempting to prevent the disease in the shelter.
To complicate matters, shelters are finding it just as difficult as other businesses to hire staff. With a tight budget that doesn’t allow for increases in wages, PVAS has struggled to fill positions. We currently have more than a dozen open positions in just our animal care staff.
With few people to care for the animals and a climbing population, we’re seeing our lifesaving trends reverse, a truly devastating movement backward for the organization, staff and for the Rio Grande Valley.
We need our community to step up and to do it now. Here’s a few ways to help:
· Adopt, Foster, Volunteer, Donate: Visit us at www.pvastx.org to find out how you can get involved in the shelter.
· Don’t call Animal Control unless it is an emergency! The shelter is full. Animals that we had the capacity to save just a few months ago are now at risk of euthanasia. Conditions are crowded. We are working to get animals out, but we have to stem the flow of animals in.
· If you find a pet, use the resources provided at www.pvastx.org/foundpets to help get that animal back home again.
· If you can no longer keep your pet, use the resources provided at www.pvastx.org/rehome to rehome the animal yourself. The shelter is a last resort and should be used for emergencies only.
· Contact your municipal representatives. Communicate to them that animal welfare is important to your community, and you want them to look at progressive methods of animal control.
