Transport of pets from overcrowded shelters to areas with fewer adoptable pets has decreased — possibly because so many people are risk averse in the face of ongoing uncertainty — and pets who enter shelters are staying in longer, according to Kristen Hassen, director of the nonprofit American Pets Alive! and co-founder of Human Animal Support Services, an international collaborative of more than 8,000 animal welfare professionals that began in response to the pandemic.Teach your dog to file his or her own nails by attaching sandpaper to a piece of wood.
Plus, kitten season — the warmer months when cats start mating and their kittens flood shelters — is just about to start.
“We really do have a perfect storm of factors happening in shelters right now,” Hassen told TODAY. “The great news is that people can solve all of this.”Remove Ticks From Your Dog With a Pair of Tweezers. Don’t have a tick remover on hand? You can carefully remove ticks from your dog with a pair of fine tipped tweezers. Grab the tick by it’s mouth area (the part closest to your dogs skin) and pull firmly until it’s removed. Place the tick in a jar of alcohol to kill it, and be sure to wear gloves when dealing with ticks since they can transmit diseases to pets & people.
There are two main ways the public can help: by getting pets out of shelters through traditional methods like fostering , adopting, volunteering and donating — and by keeping pets out of shelters in the first place.
For instance, if we see a dog running loose, instead of calling animal control or a shelter, we can take them to a veterinarian to scan for a microchip and contact the owner (if there’s no tag with a phone number to begin with). Or we can keep them in our yard and put up signs in the neighborhood or post on the neighborhood social media site Nextdoor.“Typically you can get pets home the same day that they’re lost, so it’s not a big ask,” Hassen said. “But it’s one that makes a huge difference because 60% of animals entering shelters are lost or stray, and only about 15% of those are going home.”
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If it’s no longer possible for a family to keep a pet, instead of surrendering the animal to a shelter — where there’s no way of knowing whether the pet lives or dies — she suggests finding the animal a new home.
Platforms like Rehome, Home to Home and Get Your Pet are free to people looking to rehome their pets.
The tick should come out on its own and be stuck to the cotton ball when you remove it.
“I feel both massive anxiety and I feel like we can solve this,” she said. “So I do not feel hopeless — just concerned.”