The Fourth of July can seem like a combat zone to a lot of people, particularly if they live with a cat or a dog. A few days before and after and certainly during the holiday, shelters get inundated with animals, mostly dogs, who become spooked and run off.
North Long Beach resident Tracy Booth-South has boarded her dog, Mojo, for the past four years after he went blind.
“That’s what seems to have tipped him into the panic mode about fireworks, gunshots, motorcycles and so on,” Booth-South said of the dog’s stressful reaction. Her neighborhood turns into a hellhole during the Fourth, she said, and boarding Mojo with other dogs helps to calm him.
Boarding and company are a couple of ways to prevent pet panic. The Post detailed others in a recent article, but there’s still an animal apocalypse in shelters nationwide around this time. Post-apocalyptic scenarios involve pets lost, found, missing, dead on the street, and taken to shelters by Animal Control to await their humans. Long Beach Animal Care Services (ACS) reported 2018’s July 5 intake so far as 17 animals: nine dogs, one cat and seven others, including opossums, skunks and squirrels. Three of the dogs and one cat were dead on arrival.
How you can help Long Beach pets over the Fourth of July holiday
Even more tragic for long-term shelter residents, crowded facilities with few resources have no other resource than to subject some of these animals to euthanasia. There is, however, a growing awareness among animal shelters of programs using community resources to save healthy animals from shelters and getting them temporarily into homes (and, hopefully, permanently—how can you not fall in love and be a foster-fail?). ACS is among these agencies—they’re running the Foster the Fourth program for the second consecutive year (see “Pick a House Guest for Foster the Fourth”).
According to Deborah Turner, one of the program’s organizers, 14 dogs were ferried from ACS to the homes of Long Beach residents who opened their hearts to them while ACS works to find the owners of the impounded pets. Turner herself took a few of them home—she walks the talk on a short leash).
“This left 10 open kennels in the general population,” Turner said (smaller dogs and bonded dogs sometimes share kennel space).
Michael Fratino, ACS’s Community Information Specialist, added that 132 free ID tags were given out during their July 4 Free Tag Give-Away, which continued through July 1, the last day that the shelter was open to the public until July 5.
Another community effort to locate pet owners is being made by Pet Food Express employee and animal advocate Pam Rainsdon. Rainsdon encourages anyone who has found a pet during the July 4 fracas to come to the store, located at 4220 Long Beach Boulevard in Long Beach, and she’ll use her scanner to see if there’s an embedded microchip. This is independent of the shelter, but it sure helps (Call first to see if Rainsdon is there—(562) 728-1737).
Foster the Fourth co-organizer Patricia Naughton said that she indeed hopes that adoptions will come out of this situation. Meanwhile, there are pets at ACS that are awaiting their forever homes. Here are a few cats, cats, cats for your consideration and awwwwww: .
Squirell (they spelled it—I didn’t!) #A609619, 6-year-old male
Couscous #A607520, 5-year-old female
Henrietta #A607570, 2-year-old female
Lily #A606697, 5-year-old female
Bruno #A605992, 4-year-old male
Sly Cooper #A610505, 3-year-old male
https://www.facebook.com/LongBeachAnimalCare/videos/1943005009053472/