SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Yellowknife's NWT SPCA Animal Shelter is overwhelmed and under-staffed, according to the society's president Nicole Spencer.
Erika Pieper, 6, and her mother Kristy-Ann Whalen volunteer to walk dogs such as Drake at the NWT SPCA's Animal Shelter. - Sarah Ladik/NNSL photo |
The shelter can house between 15 and 18 dogs at a time but has received more than 200 since it started keeping a ledger in December 2012. This amounts to an average of 45 dogs a month - 90 per cent of them from outlying communities such as Lutsel K'e and Whati. The shelter has one cat.
Many dogs are moved south to shelters with more room in communities with better possibilities for adoption, but some dogs find homes in Yellowknife. While support for the shelter was strong during the planning and fundraising stages, particularly while the project was in the running for money from Aviva's Community Fund, Spencer said despite winning the $300,000 prize in December 2010, volunteers have not materialized.
"We've got this building that serves Yellowknife and the entire Northwest Territories," she told Yellowknifer on Sunday. "But we can't run it with only a handful of people."
Spencer was quick to thank the volunteers who do make the trek out to the Engle Business District - about five km from downtown Yellowknife - who together put in an average of 25 volunteer-hours a day, but said there are not enough.
She is now seeking funding in order to hire a second full-time employee. When the current worker was sick last week, Spencer and other board-members ended up filling in, something that occurs too often for their liking.
"These aren't inanimate objects, they're lives," Spencer said of the animals in the shelter. "You can't just skip a shift because it means they won't eat."
In addition to the shelter's staffing issues, money remains a constant source of concern. There are still much-needed renovations outstanding on the building itself, including more bays to house dogs and proper fencing for outside kennels, totaling around $60,000. There is also a $16,000-a-year mortgage for the land on which the shelter is built due in July. Spencer suspects many people don't realize the land was not donated by the city, but instead was sold to the NWT SPCA for more than $200,000.
To compound the problem, the funding mechanisms for various levels of government remain unclear when it comes to the society. The shelter serves the NWT as a whole, but doesn't receive help from the territorial government. Instead, it gets its money from the City of Yellowknife, despite not holding the contract for the city pound, still located at the Great Slave Animal Hospital. Vice-president Dana Martin believes no one at the territorial level wants to admit they have money to spend and step up to the plate.
"It's logistically crazy right now," she said, comparing the tasks of organizing a regular operation and cobbling together funding to Atlas carrying the world on his back.
Despite these hurdles, Spencer and Martin are looking to the future and planning the next big project. They hope to have a mobile spay-and-neuter clinic up and running by the end of the year, but there is a long way to go in terms of capital as well as community buy-in.
"Beyond the $30,000 or so it would take to set up the clinic, we have to get the communities on side," Martin said. "There's a lot of education to do. Sometimes, people don't even know a procedure exists that would stop their dog from getting pregnant or impregnating another dog."
Spencer said there is a desperate need for the clinic, adding what they do at the shelter is really only a "Band-Aid" solution. There are plans to build a further 15 bays to double the shelter's capacity, but without anyone to staff it, there is little point.
"We need money and we need volunteers," she said. "What a shame it would be to have worked so hard as a community, and to have to shut the doors because we can't run this place."
