The LifeLine Community Animal Center is holding a year-long campaign for senior and long-stay animals.
Families can adopt long-term animals from the LifeLine shelter for free in this event, which aims to reduce the number of animals that are more than about 10 years old or have stayed in the shelter for over 55 days for cats and 35 days for dogs.
“We’re trying to find animals a forever home and some of these cats have been here for a while and don’t know what a home’s like, so we’re trying to give them that experience,” Tacie Mark, a LifeLine employee said.
Brianna Johnson, also a LifeLine employee, said many people adopt puppies and kittens first, while the other animals are overlooked.
“People sometimes tend to shy away when it costs money, especially because medical bills are so high right now,” Johnson said. “Our animals are fully medically cleared before they leave.”
LifeLine addresses the worry of cost with a supportive system; even if the animals have a pre-existing condition, they will cover some of the medical costs.
“I don’t think seniors and long-stay animals have any more medical issues than young ones usually,” Donna Mitchell, a volunteer, said. “That could be a misperception that causes people to choose younger pups.”
Mitchell said senior dogs often get ignored in the shelters because people come in looking for a young and energetic puppy. She believes senior dogs have a lot of love to give and, oftentimes, are better behaved.
“I adopted a senior dog from Lifeline many years ago and she was very very sick, she was 12 years old,” Mitchell said. “She was the oldest dog in the shelter and we adopted her. We got her the right medicines. We took good care of her, and we fell in love with her. She lived another three and a half years with us, so we were really lucky.”
At LifeLine, there’s no euthanasia, which allows them to take in animals from kill shelters without any risk if they don’t get adopted.
“A lot of our animals are getting adopted out which means since we are privately owned, we pull from DeKalb and Fulton,” Johnson said. “We’ve opened up a lot of kennels and cages for animals that would have possibly been on the euthanasia list had this event not happened.”
Shanice Munroe, another employee, said that Lifeline has a program for longer-stay animals to work as farm animals.
“If [feral animals] are here for a long time we’ll turn them into farm animals so they’ll be able to be outside but they’ll be working on killing rodents, mice, bugs and stuff like that,” Munroe said. “They can roam free but get fed and get the care that they need.”
Mark said the community around the shelter has had a positive response to this event.
“I’ve seen [the community] give feedback on how they like how we’re clean, hands-on with the animals, and we’ll do whatever we gotta do to help them find their forever pet,” Mark said.
Oakley Sutherland, who is planning to adopt a cat from LifeLine, has seen employees work hard to get many animals out of the shelter and into a home. The dedication she has seen from them is part of what drew her in.
“I have been interested in [getting] a cat for a long time,” Sutherland said. “I think that knowing that [LifeLine is] so interested in making sure that all these cats go to the right home, and that they’re willing to send the cats out for free it just shows me that they’re in tight quarters and they need more love.”
Sutherland believes that events like this showed her that this Lifeline Center needed to adopt out more animals.
”We do tend to have events throughout the year like lower cost adoptions, free adoptions, sponsored adoptions, things like that,” Johnson said. “Also, people can come in at any point in the year and pick an animal. They can say ‘I want to sponsor this animal,’ which means that they pay the adoption fee so that that animal is free to whoever goes to adopt it.”
Overall, the LifeLine Community Animal Center works year-round to place long-stay and senior animals in homes with events like free adoption.
“[Senior animals] just deserve to live out their older years in a home, not in the shelter,” Mitchell said. “So I love when they highlight the seniors and do the free adoptions because it gets them more attention than they normally get.”
