FLORENCE — The Florence Area Humane Society recently announced a shortage of puppy food.
Katy Hollingsworth, shelter manager, said the problem lies in the fact that the shelter can only use Pedigree puppy food and it can be difficult to find in the Pee Dee.
“Pedigree puppy (food) is very hard to find in Florence,” she said. “You can usually only find a couple of bags at a time and we’re going through a couple bags in the morning, a couple bags in the evening...”
Hollingsworth said it’s important to keep the puppies on a steady diet to avoid giving them more medication which can raise the costs of animals’ care at the shelter.
“We only feed them Pedigree to keep their bellies safe,” she said.
The shelter medicates puppies with loose stools, which can be a symptom of parasites, other diseases and a change in diet, Hollingsworth said
“At this point we’ve ran out of puppy Pedigree,” she said. “We’ve sent out e-mails and announced it on our Facebook page.”
Hollingsworth said a number of dogs in the Florence shelter are getting ready to head north to shelters that actually have a shortage of adoptable animals.
“We’ve got 25 dogs and puppies going to Rochester, N.Y., to a rescue up there called Duffy’s Friends,” she said. “They just don’t have the pet overpopulation up there like we do here.”
Hollingsworth attributed the adoptable pet shortage in the north to licensing laws, pet registration laws and a willingness to spay and neuter pets.
“They’re begging us to take our animals up there so that we can adopt them out,” she said.
Ron Vereen, a Florence pet owner who adopted his companion, Bee, from the shelter, said laws regulating the spaying and neutering of pets would help to curb the fast-growing pet overpopulation in the Pee Dee.
“Most of the animals that come in here aren’t fixed,” he said. “It creates a never-ending supply.”
Vereen, who is a volunteer at the shelter, took in one of the dogs going to New York as a foster owner.
“She’s been in an out of my house since August,” he said. “Hopefully her new home is forever.”
Vereen said the shortage of food plaguing the shelter wouldn’t be a problem if there wasn’t an overabundance of pets constantly filling the cages.
“If we fixed them, we wouldn’t have to feed them,” he said.
Those who adopt animals from the FAHS get a $25 coupon toward the cost of spaying or neutering each dog or cat, which is required by state law for all animals adopted from a shelter.
Plans for the new 7,400-square-foot FAHS animal shelter by architect Chris Clark of Chris Clark Architecture in Myrtle Beach are under way.
The current shelter is located at 1007 Stockade Drive, off of National Cemetery Road, in Florence and is open from noon to 5 p.m. every day except Wednesday and Sunday. Call (843) 669-2921 for more information.
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