Care costs add up at animal shelter

By Leah Rainwater

Owning one furry friend can be expensive, so imagine the cost of caring for more than 100 of them at the same time.

The St. Joseph Animal Shelter has 52 dog kennels, eight observation kennels and can house about 48 cats. Depending on an animal’s need for care, expenses can add up.

“There’s a lot of fees that go into it, as far as, you know, there’s veterinary fees, there’s medical fees, there’s time to care for the animals and feed them,” said Holly Bowie, the manager of the shelter. “And a lot of that is hard to equate as far as, you know, staff time that it takes because every animal, it’s going to be individual.”

According to numbers from Vetco Clinics, vaccines, tests and microchipping alone cost more than $300 for cats and $450 for dogs.

Depending on vet clinics, spay and neutering costs can also add to those prices.

Bowie said the shelter receives funding for animal care through donations from the Friends of the Animal Shelter, as well as money from the city budget.

“Obviously, we have a certain amount we can spend on particular items,” she said. “Which is why we’re so fortunate to have Friends of the Animal Shelter because they pick up the slack in the areas that maybe we don’t have the funding, especially for medical bills.”

The shelter also has a partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim for pet vaccinations, which they receive at a discount.

Those prices and other veterinary work are reflected in the shelter’s adoption fees.

“Our adoption fees are based on what we have put into the pets, so we charge for the spay or neuter, we charge for the vaccines and we charge for any other testing we might have done,” Bowie said.

However, since the shelter has been at capacity numerous times throughout the year, those looking for a pet can sometimes find deals on adoption fees.

One other cost that the shelter can cut back on is microchipping.

“We don’t charge very much,” Bowie said. “We pay about $7 for each microchip. So we just charge a little bit more for administering the chip. And that’s a pretty competitive price. We do that as part of the adoption because ordinance requires that when an animal leaves the shelter, it has a microchip.”