LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — The Animal Foundation is asking the Las Vegas community for help after they reached what they called a critical space crisis over the weekend.
Since May, the shelter has been receiving around 100 animals a day. Over the weekend, they received an unexpected influx that filled the shelter's kennels.
Animal Foundation CEO, Hilarie Grey, said they started the weekend with more than 800 animals at the shelter. Although that number had gone down as of Monday morning to less than 700, she expected their numbers to increase.
The large numbers have created not just space issues, but potential health hazards like highly contagious respiratory illnesses among the animals.
Whenever you have a lot of animals together and animals coming in from the public, because we are the public shelter, that may be incubating something there is a risk of a disease outbreak.
Now, they're asking the public for help not just through adoptions, but fostering as well.
"I know sometimes people think 'Well, if I foster and I don't end up adopting is that a bad thing?', but there's great things that can happen out of fostering," Grey said. "It gives an animal a break from the shelter and gets them into a home. And even if you don't find yourself wanting to adopt that animal or you can't for whatever reason, your family and friends see that you have that dog in your home and a lot of the time we end up with what's called 'Ambassador Adoption'."
Grey said that many of the animals who arrive at the shelter are people's lost pets with 78 percent of them coming in without any kind of identification.
The organization is urging owners to get their pets microchipped, or even write owner contact information on your pet's collar with a sharpie so they can reunite you with your pet.
If you're not able to adopt but would like to foster, you canfill out an application online or take advantage of The Animal Foundation's walk-in fostering options.
This Saturday, Oct. 26, the shelter is hosting its first Foster Field Trip Dayto get 25 dogs out of the shelter on field trips with community members.
You can find more information about how to foster, adopt or donate at The Animal Foundation here.
