Pets Inc. saved by over 3,000 donations, a total $117,000
Ashley Gilmore stood among the barking puppies and mewing kittens at Pets Inc. while she waited for her eight-week-old puppy, Deuce, to get his nails clipped.
Gilmore, a fourth-year public health student, has only had Deuce for a week. When she returned from winter break, her boyfriend surprised her with the pup from Pets Inc. after she begged for a furry friend for what she said felt like forever.
This is Gilmore’s second time at Pets Inc. After this visit, Gilmore will make a few more trips to the West Columbia pet shelter to get Deuce his shots and medicine.
Unfortunately, many other animals at Pets Inc. don’t follow the same storyline as Deuce. Some aren’t as adoptable as the eight-week-old puppies and newborn kittens that fit in the palm of your hand; however, Pets Inc. will keep all animals until they are adopted.
This means the facility is consistently filled to the brim with animals looking for a place to live, adding a financial burden to the management: the more animals that come in, the less space there is to keep them comfortably.
And then there are the costs.
According to Nathan Pope, the front office manager at Pets Inc., each animal that comes through the door costs the shelter at least $150 in medical fees, which include shots, microchips and any other medicine the animal may require.Added services like dental procedures and amputations upped the shelter’s revenue but did not bridge the gap left behind after the 2012 donation drop-off.
After increasing to over $622,000 in 2011, donations fell back down in 2012, according to 2012 IRS filings. With an overflow of animals, a lack of space and an ever-growing debt, Pets Inc. looked to the public for help.
The response they got reminded the staff of why they go to work each day, Pope said.
Over 3,000 donations, totaling around $117,000, poured in. Being a non-profit organization, all of the money Pets Inc. received went directly to the care of the animals, and while the recent swell in donations helped pay off a good bit of the shelter’s veterinary costs, Pets Inc. still isn’t in the green.
“People think we’re rich,” Jane Brundage, the founder of Pets Inc., said. “I don’t know how people can think that when they see that clinic.”
Brundage said 2013 was the “perfect storm” for things to go wrong for the shelter: insurance payments and medical bills came to a head, donations and volunteer numbers were down and some weeks saw up to 50 animals left on the shelter’s doorstep.
“What caused us to nearly fold was the number of animals that were abandoned,” Brundage said. “Maybe [people] just think that this is [the animal’s] only hope, and they do it because they think it’s the best option, but whatever it is it put us over the edge.”
The two biggest expenses for the shelter are staff salaries and pet food, supplies and veterinary expenses. And on top of that, insurance premium payments are coming up fast: a $15,000 payment is due in March, and that money just doesn’t fall out of the sky, Brundage said.
In the 21 years since Pets Inc. was founded, Brundage said they’ve never had any sort of safety net or financial cushion for these sort of costs. There haven’t been donors to send in checks worth tens of thousands of dollars or any extraordinarily successful fundraising initiative.
And although Pets Inc. did raise salaries in 2012 by nearly 50 percent, Brundage said the staff doesn’t get paid nearly as much as they deserve.
“They don’t even stop for lunch most times, and there’s not a lot of time for us to even pat them on the back and thank them,” she said. “These people are driven by the need to help animals. We don’t pay a single person over there well enough to put up with that kind of work.”
Pope interacts with the staff and the animals on a daily basis. When the shelter was in danger of closing down, the workers thought first of the animals, then of themselves.
“Some of us can’t see ourselves working anywhere else, and the thought of having to give up on the animals is discouraging,” he said. “It’s like where are our supporters?”
And that’s one of the things Pets Inc. desperately needs now: volunteers. The management would like to get volunteers more involved in the intricate side of the adoption process, but that kind of initiative can’t be implemented without the manpower.
Although total financial stability is still a ways off, Brundage said with the recent slew of donations, the shelter can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.
“Every time we got in a jam, and we’ve been in a bunch of them, you know, something happens that’s off the chart,” she said. “I don’t know if its the universe or if we have an angel on our shoulders.”
And if the shelter is ever to close, Brundage plans to be the angel to the animals herself, placing as many with families as she possibly can.
“We will not do one of those ‘come and get them or they die at three o’clock’ things that all the others like to do,” she said. “I will find a way to place each and every one of them that can possible be placed. We’ll find a way.”