The clock is ticking: Amid overcrowding concerns, ACCT Philly is paying people to foster dogs and cats

In the small, windowless office of ACCT Philly‘s executive director Sarah Barnett, a big, gray-snouted pit mix is jockeying for attention.

“You’re ridiculous,” Barnett says, leaning down and scratching the dog behind her ears. “You’re ridiculous.”

The dog’s name is Dynasty, and she’s sweet but snufflingly relentless in her pursuit of affection.

“It cracks me up because this is the difference fostering makes,” says Barnett, who’s been fostering Dynasty since the 10-year-old dog was surrendered at the end of May.

“I remember the first time I saw her,” Barnett says. “She was kind of moping and she lay there and she had these nails that were so long, just horrible.”

Dynasty’s humans loved her, but they could no longer afford her medical care on top of their own.

“She was hospitalized three times for pneumonia. A donor fell in love and paid for it; she’d be dead otherwise,” Barnett says. “Long story short, now she thinks she owns the world.”

This is the kind of transformation ACCT hopes for all its charges, but it’s become harder and harder due to severe overcrowding that puts stress on the animals, and stretches the overworked staff thin.

That’s why through Tuesday, July 23, ACCT is holding a fostering drive in an ambitious effort to place 50 cats and 25 dogs — a single day’s worth of intake — into homes. As an extra incentive, and an indication of ACCT’s desperation, volunteers are being offered money to foster an animal for a month — $100 per cat, or $200 per dog — culminating with a big adoption event in August.

Not only will fostering improve the animals’ quality life, lowering their stress and making them more adoptable, but, Barnett says, it will also do something bigger — save the lives of dogs slated for euthanasia.

“Unfortunately, with the surge in intake over the couple of years, we’ve started to euthanize again for space,” Barnett says. “We want to extend those dogs, meaning we want to give them extra time as much as possible. We can only do that if we have the space.”

The post-pandemic spike in surrenders

The idea for the fostering drive came about last Tuesday, when ACCT received an unusually high number of animals — 52 cats, 30 dogs and a bird.

“We were all really stunned,” Barnett says. “We thought, honestly, that we’d already kind of gotten past those days. We didn’t realize it was going to get worse.”

Like a lot of shelters across the country, ACCT saw a boom in adoptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were stuck in their homes, and then another boom in surrenders as economic pressures and requirements to return to the office squeezed owners’ time and finances.

Since then, ACCT has been experiencing severe overcrowding, due in part to their status as an open-ntake shelter, meaning they’re contractually obligated to accept any animal that comes through their doors.

“In a perfect world, we would have 90 dogs,” Barnett says. “Today we have 145.”

That means less time and space for the dogs, many of whom are already distressed when they come into the shelter.

“The dogs, especially dogs who’ve been in homes before, they don’t know what to do here,” Barnett says. “We had a dog the other day who came in, he was 16 years old, the owners loved him. And they were heartbroken, but they were dealing with health issues as well. And they had tried everything with his health issues as well. And they said they just couldn’t keep him.”

It’s a common story in Philadelphia, where financial pressures have forced a number of owners to give up their pets — and especially at ACCT, which, as the city’s only open-intake shelter, serves as a triage point for the city’s unwanted or abandoned animals.

When the 16-year-old dog was first brought in, Barnett says, he seemed happy and relaxed, until his owner left.

“He just kept trying to get to her,” she says.

Eventually, he lay down in his kennel and stared at the wall.

“He just wanted his family back,” Barnett says. “And those are the ones that have the hardest times, is the ones who’ve been in homes who are like, ‘Where is my mom?’”

Combatting overcrowded shelters

While ACCT has also hit capacity when it comes to cats, dogs take up a lot more space and resources, including the time it takes to give each of them a walk every day, which is why dogs are the ones who end up being put to sleep when the shelter has run out of space.

“Euthanizing for space sounds horrible,” she says. “I never thought I’d be somebody doing it. But what I realized was the way that you avoid euthanizing for space by putting dogs everywhere, those same animals you end up euthanizing, it’s not for space. It’s for medical and behavioral issues that were preventable had you had the space.”

In other words, because of its open-intake status, if ACCT didn’t euthanize, the shelter would become overcrowded to the point of being dangerous.

“I think at some point staff would walk out,” Barnett says, “because there’d be too many animals here for them to care for safely as well as humanely.”

Overcrowding inevitably results in a spike in behavioral and medical issues, Barnett says. Some dogs begin to bite; others get sick with kennel cough; they can even end up dying of medical emergencies that were missed due to the medical staff being overstretched. And all of that can make dogs unadoptable.

“So you’ll start to see animals that have behavioral issues that are not safe to place and they’re going to hurt people and other animals,” Barnett says. “And if you’re truly saying you’re not going to euthanize for any reason, at some point someone will come and shut you down because you can’t sustain that model if you are open-intake.”

Public backlash against euthanasia

Euthanasia can happen for a number of reasons, like medical or behavioral problems, though some of those issues can be relatively mild.

“In May, we euthanized an average of three dogs a day, not including those surrendered for euthanasia,” Barnett says. “Euthanizing a dog with no behavioral limitations (like having to be an only dog) or concerns (no kids, overarousal, etc.) purely because we are full is rare.”

But, she adds, there are plenty of dogs with minor problems who end up being euthanized simply because ACCT staff doesn’t have the time and resources to work with them.

“Sparky, for example, is time-stamped right now — best dog behaviorally, a total sweetheart, but has skin issues,” Barnett says. “She is a senior, too, so because skin issues at her level require monitoring and resources we can’t provide, and as a senior she is at risk of getting sick and having a very hard time recovering, we have time-stamped to try to get her out as soon as possible.”

Other dogs are flagged because of behavioral problems resulting from the stress of living in a kennel environment, which is both cramped and loud, due to the barking, which Barnett says is common even for normal dogs.

“And they should be given more time to have us get to know them and see if we can help them find homes,” she says. “But we can’t do that if we don’t have the space and resources to give them that.”

While euthanizing purely for space doesn’t happen often, dogs are time-stamped daily for behavior or medical reasons. Many of the dogs time-stamped for space have minor limitations, such as needing to be single dogs or requiring additional training.

It’s a practice that’s earned ACCT a lot of flak, but that Barnett sees as necessary to spur would-be adopters into action.

“We kind of made the decision as an organization that even though we will probably take a hit — and we have taken a hit from a public relations standpoint,” Barnett sayid, “people do take those time-stamped animals. And they do get out of here alive.”

She compares it to the ASPCA commercial featuring singer Sarah McLachlan that became famous as a brutal tear-jerker. Lots of people hated it, but it spurred more donations than any of the ASPCA’s more light-hearted ads.

“Time-stamping does create that urgency,” she says. “They may not like us as an organization. They may demonize some of our staff. But they show up and they want to adopt that dog, because they feel like they’re saving a life.”

That urgency has turned out to be a double-edged sword for Barnett and her staff. She says they regularly receive angry calls and messages from the public, outraged that ACCT euthanizes animals.

“The verbal abuse that I’ve seen our staff take is horrific,” Barnett says. “The email abuse I’ve seen a lot of them take is horrific.”

That, combined with the emotional challenges of the work itself, has led to widespread burnout, known as “compassion fatigue.”

“It’s basically being fatigued from this vicarious trauma of seeing these animals coming in, the conditions they’re coming in and often being with them at the end of their lives,” Barnett says.

‘There are lots of Mobys’

Barnett herself has been one of the biggest targets of public outrage.

Last year, a 3- to 4-year-old mixed-breed pup named Moby was brought in by police, tangled up in caution tape.

“He was a really sweet dog,” Barnett says. “He was this white dog, and he just looked really pathetic and dirty. And he really kind of really opened up.”

He was cleaned up, got healthy and his clownish personality began to come out. But when ACCT is full, it can only give dogs about a month to be adopted. When that didn’t happen, despite staff efforts to promote Moby and multiple time-stamp extensions, Barnett knew his time was coming to an end.

So the night before he was scheduled to be euthanized, Barnett took him home for one last hurrah.

“He was so happy when I brought him home,” Barnett says. “He was running back and forth. He was so excited. He knocked over like 15 things on the coffee table.”

It was a stark contrast to how Moby had looked when he first came in.

“He was depressed,” Barnett says. “He just looked defeated. Just like you lost against the world. You against the world, and you lost.”

She played with Moby, and petted and held him, and gave him a cheeseburger — a tradition Barnett has established for all the dogs who are about to be euthanized.

She made one final, last-ditch effort to find Moby a home, posting a message on Facebook about his urgent status and need to be adopted. But it didn’t work.

“I took him out for a last walk,” Barnett says. “And it really felt like a failure — like, where you look at those dogs, and you think, ‘You don’t have anything wrong with you. You just are at the wrong place at the wrong time, and there’s 500 other versions of you that have been here this month.'”

In the end, Moby did earn public attention, in the form of a petition addressed to ACCT’s board of directors, Mayor Cherelle Parker, U.S.  John Fetterman, U.S. Bob Casey and local TV news, demanding that Barnett be removed from her position.

“That was one that I didn’t know what would resonate with people,” Barnett said. “But I think it resonated with people because no one thinks about what that process is. You hear dogs get euthanized, you walk into the shelter and we have it happen all the time. And I think with Moby … people felt really bad for him because that was his last day. But that’s the last day for so many Mobys … and that’s something where, again, if every person who signed that petition about him would have adopted a dog here, we wouldn’t have had to euthanize for probably a month.”

A lot of people come in eager to adopt time-stamped dogs, but Barnett says it’s more important to adopt a dog who is a good fit and will be able to stay in someone’s home long-term. Because adopting any dog will free up space to give time-stamped dogs more time — dogs being euthanized not because they have medical or behavioral issues, but just because, like Moby, they were at the wrong place at the wrong time.

“He was one where,  if we had had more time, if we had had the ability to give him more time, he would have found somebody eventually, I have no doubt,” she says. “He was a savable dog. He was absolutely a savable dog, and there are lots of savable dogs like him.”

Further information

• Current timestamped or high-risk animals: Dogs | Cats
• How to help: Make a pledge | Become a foster | Donate
• Animals available for adoption: Dogs | Cats
• Other resources: Pet owners in need | Lost pets | Pet surrenders