Tripawds Three Legged Dog & Cat Forum Archives

This Time Magazine article is just over a year old, but I only recently ran across it. It’s about how, beginning about 10 years ago, shelters with few pets and high demand, and shelters with more pets than they could ever hope to house or adopt out began working together to redistribute dogs across the country. It’s a success story that’s saved millions and millions of pets' lives in the process.

So grab your favorite beverage and settle in for a good read. Here’s just a snippet to give you the general picture:

There is not a dog shortage in America—not yet, at least. But there are stark geographic differences in supply and demand. Massachusetts needs more dogs, and Mississippi has too many. The same is true of Delaware and Oklahoma, Minnesota and Louisiana, New York and Tennessee, and Washington and New Mexico, among other states.

To compensate, sophisticated dog–relocation networks have sprung up over the past decade, transporting dogs and cats from states with too many to states with too few. Mostly, it’s a tactical problem: “How do we connect those shelters that have too many animals and are at risk of euthanasia simply because they were born there, to those shelters where these animals are gonna fly off the shelves?” says Matt Bershadker, CEO of the ASPCA, the New York–based animal-welfare giant, which sponsored and organized the flight arriving at Hanscom.

Over the past five years, the ASPCA has poured resources into its “relocation” program, which in March will celebrate its 200,000th animal moved. But it is far from alone.