The cleanup and restructuring of Columbia’s animal shelter is continuing, and city officials recently visited Hammond, La., to see how a shelter is operated.
Police Chief Michael Kelly said he came away impressed.
“When I walked in the door, the only thing I can tell people is that it smelled like I was going into an operating room,” he said. “It was so clean and pristine. You can tell these people are very proud of it and they work very hard. It’s the simple fact that we hadn’t been using the right kind of chemicals to clean. That’s one of the biggest things we learned is how to keep our shelter clean. It makes it good and presentable to the public, but most importantly, we’re killing all the bad stuff that makes the animals sick.”
The Columbian-Marion County Animal Shelter has ordered those chemicals and should be cleaning with them by early next week.
That will be one of the new things at the facility when it hopes to reopen for adoptions the first weekend of June.
Leading up to that, the shelter is holding a Service Day on Saturday, May 19 to spruce up. Currently there are only a handful of animals at the Airport Road facility after Kelly decided to get all the animals moved out by adoption or transfer so that they could clean and reorganize.
The police chief said several volunteers have stepped up to help with that process, including several churches and Sunday School classes. Girl Scouts are also assisting with the Service Day.
“We’re going to start around 7 a.m. and work around the shelter,” Kelly said. “We’ll provide some pizzas and stuff for lunch and have a whole day out there where we’ll put paint on the walls.”
In addition, more training from the Hammond shelter is planned. They’ll be coming here to teach and will give a list of things to improve, and the Columbia shelter’s staff will be going to LSU, where the Hammond shelter’s director is an instructor. Animal Control Office Zach Parsons received a full tuition scholarship to go for that training, Kelly said.
The Columbia shelter has already been changed so that the outside part will be the intake so that rescued or seized dogs can be quarantined.
“When we know that that animal is adoptable, we will bring them inside,” Kelly said. “The only other time we would bring them inside is when we know we’re going to have bad weather, but we want to keep those animals separated. It’s just another thing we learned when we went down to Hammond. When we open around the first of June, the public will have a wonderful building that they can go in and all of the adoptable animals will be inside.”
Enforcement is also being taken in a different direction. Kelly said the animal control officer is focusing now on stopping and educating people, who don’t necessarily know all of the ordinances.
“We certainly want to make sure that there are no dogs running at large. We want you to keep your pet on a leash or in a fenced yard. We want you to take very good care of them.”
The focus now is that animals have food and water and ample shelter.
“We’re not going to be the Gestapo police that is going to come and beat on people’s doors and treat them really ugly,” Kelly said. “We want to help people learn how to treat their animals right and provide them with the necessary education and resources to be able to keep those pets in the home, where the pets belong.”
