Even with the COVID-19 pandemic dominating much of last year, it did not have an adverse impact on the number of adoptions at the Poplar Bluff Animal Shelter.
The city shelter saw 263 dogs and 152 cats adopted in 2020, compared to just 15 dogs and four cats that were put down.
“The adoptions have been fairly steady,” said Daniel St. Lawrence, an animal control officer for the city of Poplar Bluff. “The pandemic hasn’t really affected us. We get a lot of shelter traffic throughout the year.”
Between those numbers and the number of dogs and cats released last year, the city animal shelter has no-kill status for the fifth consecutive year. But St. Lawrence would still like to see an even higher percentage of animals that stray and are picked up returned to their original owners.
“The majority of the dogs that we pick up in Poplar Bluff have no identification on them, so we strictly rely on social media (to locate their owners),” St. Lawrence said. “All dogs in the city are required to have a city dog license — and to get a city dog license, you must have a rabies vaccination from a licensed veterinarian. Even if they just wrote the name on their collar with a magic marker or something, that’d be better than nothing. And a lot of dog owners don’t want them back, so they don’t claim them.”
Having said that, St. Lawrence said it is a “really good feeling” when the shelter is able to reunite a lost pet with its owner.
“There are a lot of times people send us a message on Facebook, thanking us again for reuniting them (with their pet),” St. Lawrence said. “We’ve had people in the shelter that have broke down in tears because they found their animals. We’ve actually had people drive down from the Fredericktown area to pick up a dog that ended up in Poplar Bluff.”
It also pleases St. Lawrence to see animals find new homes. One story from last year stands out to St. Lawrence of a dog the shelter received from a local man who was a diabetic and could no longer care for the dog after he moved to a new residence.
“We’d been to his residence on a few occasions — he lived in very poor living conditions and had (ultimately) moved to (public) housing,” St. Lawrence said. “I had also worked a (separate) case where a dog had attacked another person’s dog in Poplar Bluff and (the owners) eventually lost that dog.”
St. Lawrence said the owners visited the shelter several times looking for a new pet and they finally spotted the diabetic man’s former dog and ultimately adopted it.
“This dog didn’t want to go to anybody at all, it just stayed in the back of the kennel and it was just heartbreaking,” St. Lawrence said. “We could get in there and pet it, and there was one volunteer that could get the dog to run and play — but the dog just missed its owner.
“But last week, we received a message on Facebook with a picture saying that (the dog) is adjusting well. The dog looks so happy — he was smiling. It gives you hope. We get dogs that we don’t know all the circumstances that they go through and we try to give them love, encouragement and support — and some training even — to where they’re adoptable.”
St. Lawrence said those happy endings — be they adoptions or returning a lost pet to its former owner — give him a wonderful feeling.
“We see a lot of bad with our job and (it) is rewarding to see an animal get home,” St. Lawrence said. “It kind of gives us a purpose.”