Southern Pines Animal Shelter adoption event draws raves

PETAL, Miss. (WDAM) - The Southern Pines Animal Shelter is doing its best to find “forever homes” for their animals.

And sometimes this means waving fees to make sure the animal finds the perfect family.

“We are really focused on the last few years is help families keep their pets, so we’ve been trying to bulk up our resources and work with other community organizations to provide low cost vet care, affordable pet food, even help with finding pet friendly housing, different things like that,” said Sarah Krock, the shelter’s community engagement manager for the shelter,

Recently, the shelter partnered with PetSmart and Petco to help animals find their new homes.

“We did 77 adoptions for cats and both cats and dogs,” she said. “It was all thanks to our friends at Best Friends. They were really, really generous, and we were able to wave all those adoption fees thanks to funding from them.

“It was really an amazing event, it’s one of the biggest adoption events we’ve had in the last few years.”

Along with waving fees, the shelter also practices open adoptions- meaning it requires no vet or background checks. Instead, it has a conversation with potential adopters.

“We do require that people meet the animal before they adopt to make sure that it is going to work out,” Krock said. “And then we have just the really brief adoption profile, just to collect all the information for the microchip and make sure that everything is going to work out.”

Additionally, Southern Pines supports the community aspect of this event: Making adoption accessible for all potential adopters.

“The most exciting thing was making it really accessible for anybody to adopt,” Krock said. “And we try to do that on our own anyway. We have variable adoption fees that are based on the individual animal, so that we can try to make a really good fit for anybody with any budget.

“But adoption events like this are exciting because it’s truly open to anybody in the community.”

Southern Pines Animal Shelter is open for any potential new adopters and can be contacted at (601) 544-6632.

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