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Home News Archives St. John Animal Care Center in Dire Straits

St. John Animal Care Center in Dire Straits

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Puppies in need of a home. Photo courtesy ACC.If board members can’t raise sufficient funds to keep the Animal Care Center of St. John’s shelter open, it will have to close by the end of August, board member Jennifer Dale said Thursday.
The faltering economy and a combination of other factors put the center in this predicament.
“We should have sounded the alarm months ago,” Dale said.
ACC board President Diana Ripley put the center’s annual budget at about $150,000 a year.
The shelter needs $13,000 a month to operate, Dale said. This pays for medicine, food, veterinarian bills, shelter operations (including the manager’s salary), and the myriad other expenses that go along with caring for the island’s homeless animals.
“It’s literally life and death,” Dale said.
Unlike many shelters, the center does not kill animals unless they have incurable diseases, are vicious or have some reason to make them unadoptable.
The center is slashing expenses wherever it can, but Dale said that will not be sufficient to keep it open.
The shelter currently is caring for 18 puppies and dogs as well as 41 cats, Dale said.
The center is looking for monetary donations, no matter how small, to help keep the shelter open, but also needs donations of food, kitty litter, office supplies, towels, rugs, and time. People who can walk dogs or do any of the other tasks that the shelter currently pays for are welcome to volunteer.
The organization depends on fund-raising events and government funding, but fund-raising fell short and the center hasn’t received its $13,500 allotment from the local government, Ripley said.
As for the fund-raising, Dale said it’s only generating about a third to half of what it did 10 years ago.
The center has trouble recruiting new volunteers and the ones who have worked for years are burning out.
“We’re just sucking blood from the same generous stones,” Dale said, noting that the organization’s volunteers are all working people without deep pockets.
According to Dale, the shelter needs people with expertise in helping the shelter grow. She said that if it had more space, it could offer services like pet grooming and boarding that would raise money for its operations. Additionally, Dale said the center could use help from someone skilled in writing grants so it can solicit money.
Ripley said that the ACC now gets animals from all segments of the St. John community, instead of just the mainland transplants. This means that fewer animals are ending up on the street. However, she said that because so many transient people adopt animals, when they leave the island or move to a house that doesn’t allow animals, those animals end up back at the shelter.
The center evolved out of an ad hoc group of people who did their best to find homes for the island’s substantial number of stray animals. Efforts to help the island’s animals date back to the 1960s, but after Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989, work began in earnest.
However, it wasn’t until 2003, that the center was able to open its shelter near the Elaine Sprauve Library in Cruz Bay.
The shelter had to close in 2004 and did not reopen again until 2005. Since then, its programs have grown to include a spay-and-neuter program for feral cats, feeding stations for feral cats around the island, an off-island adoption program, and many others.
If you can help, call the shelter at 774-1625 or donate through PayPal at the Animal Care Center’s website.

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