Do you know if there is a rabie program for dogs in Wyoming county wv? To help the reduce the cost to get a dog sprayed.
Thank you!
When is your next spay & neuter clinic?
please help! i am tryimg to find out how to start a pet pantry for our town. we live in a small place called clintwood virginia and are in need of a pet pantry if you have any information for me please contact thank you regina lane
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Roxanne Fritz said,
May 15, 2009 @ 10:44 amTHE DODDRIDGE COUNTY PET FOOD PANTRY & almost evrything you would want to know about it. It opened December 1, 2008 to help people struggling in the economy be able to keep their pets in hard financial times. Since opening it has had over 138 visits and helped feed over 310 dogs with 1,389 pounds of dog food and over 367 cats with over 304 pounds of cat food given to help families in need. The pet food pantry has low-income guidlines and when people first sign up they must bring proof of residency and proof of income, and are allowed to come once a month. On average approx. 4.5 pounds of food is given per dog and a little less than one pound of food is given per cat. So you can see it is not enough to feed any pet for the whole month, just a little to help out until pay day or in an emergency. We give the same amount of food to a person with 1 cat as to a person with 50 cats (3.5 pounds) this is our effort to keep from encouraging people to have 50 cats. We operate the dog food in a similar manner.
Doddridge County does not currently have an open shelter to take animals to when people cannot afford to care for them so a lot of the time they are let loose to fend for themselves. We opened the pet pantry to try to help this problem in our County and hopefully help people keep their pets and keep them fed. We do have a group of individuals who have formed a Board and are raising money to build and open a Doddriage County Humane Society. They helped us get started with a monetary donation, because they realized the immediate need to help pets and people and their organization does offer a low-income spay and neuter assistance program. We hand out flyers for the spay/neuter program at the pet food pantry in hopes that people will take advantage of it. In 3 years and as early as 4 months old: 1 unspayed female and 1 un-neutered male van produce 512 dogs and/or 382 cats.
Many senior citizens who are on fixed incomes struggle to feed themselves and their pets ecspecially with the recent increases in the cost of everything from gas to electric. Many of our senior’s responded to a survey we sent out and indicated that they would and have gone without food in order to care for their beloved pets. We hope that the pet pantry addresses these problems for people as well as helping the pets. It has been scientifically proven that pets can help you live longer, they lower blood pressure and give people a purpose in later years.
The pet pantry operates solely on donations and all money is used to purchase pet food. Paper, ink, building cost, etc. are all paid by our host site Doddridge County Starting Points Center. Right now we can only offer dog and cat food, as it grows maybe we can begin to offer some others as well as some pet medications such as flea and tick products. We hope to work with veternarians in the future and offer rabie shot clinics to our clients.
It is currently costing between $350-$400 a month to keep the pet pantry operating.
After the first 5 months of operation we figured out that 86 different families with 240 individuals between them have made 138 visits to the pet pantry. These #’s show that same people are not abusing it and coming every month over and over. We were actually surprised to find out that 35% of the individuals we’ve helped within these family units are children under the age of 18. Senior Citizens made up 16% of the individuals helped. We have received some very touching letters from people who are really grateful for the help we’ve given them. Some have said they will bring us their first pay check when they get back to work, so we can keep helping others and one says that her and her husband have fallen on hard times and may have had to give up their pets without our help (they just needed our help to get through a rough spot and are ok now and what a shme it would have been to loose a pet just becasue ofa few hard months)