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Henderson Humane Society Has Five Years of No Euthanization of Adoptable Pets

Humane Society of Henderson County

The Humane Society of Henderson County has made such dramatic progress in finding homes for animals that it has not had to euthanize any adoptable pets in the past five years.

Animals have been euthanized only if they were too aggressive to be adopted or so extremely injured that the cost of medical treatment would be too high.

Humane Society Executive Director Angela Hagedorn says using an Internet pet adoption site has been a key element in the plan.

PetFinder.com was able to put the animals out onto the Internet, so that a broader audience could see the animals. Also we decided to contact various rescues, some of them are breed-specific rescues, to try to get more animals out of the shelter.”

For example, a rescue group for Brittany Spaniels recently helped transport a dog from Henderson to a new home in Vermont.

Hagedorn says the shelter uses many different ways to avoid overcrowding.

“We just make arrangements. We find a way. So we have portable crates. We start trying to encourage more people to foster, so that we can free up some space that we do have in the shelter.”

The Humane Society of the United States estimates three million cats and dogs are euthanized in shelters each year. Of those, nearly two-and-a-half-million are healthy and treatable and could have been adopted into new homes.

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