Storm is a 12-year-old Pit mix who lost her home and best friend when her owner entered a nursing home earlier this year. This patient senior pet has been living at the Last Hope Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation in Wantagh, New York, for about four months and is hoping to find a new best friend on Saturday’s Clear the Shelters event who will cherish her for the rest of her days.
Clear the Shelters, the fourth annual pet adoption drive sponsored by the NBC- and Telemundo-owned television stations, culminates today with more than 1,200 shelters participating in dozens of communities across the country.
Since this year’s event was launched on July 28, more than 42,000 pets have already been taken. To encourage families to find a new pet, whether puppies, older cats, rabbits or iguanas, many of the participating animal shelters and rescue organizations are reducing or waiving adoption fees.
The need remains great. The number of animals entering shelters each year is about 6.5 million, 3.3 million dogs and 3.2 million cats, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Though the number has declined from about 7.2 million in 2011, with the biggest drop in the number dogs, approximately 1.5 million shelter animals are euthanized each year.
On the happier side, about 3.2 million shelter animals are adopted annually and another 710,000 are returned to their owners.
Clear the Shelters began in North Texas in 2014 as a partnership among the NBC and Telemundo stations in Dallas-Fort Worth and dozens of North Texas animal shelters. More than 2,200 homeless animals were adopted that first year, the most in a single day in North Texas.
A year later that number jumped to nearly 20,000 as the adoption drive went national, with more than 400 shelters taking part across the country. Last year, as the event was extended over a month, more than 80,000 pets were adopted from over 900 shelters.
Source : Nbcnewyork
