Sit, stay: The dogs are back at Kent Animal Shelter
Kent Animal Shelter welcomed back some very good boys and girls Tuesday, July 22. The shelter got the go-ahead to bring its dogs back to the brand-new canine facility over the weekend. The adoptable pooches have been living at Bideawee Westhampton for the last year.
“We just literally completed it, within the past days,” said Kent director Pam Green. “We’ve been renting space over there.”
The shelter’s previous canine facility was in desperate need of an update, with the building dating back to the facility’s founding. There were no meet-and-greet rooms and no separate isolation space for animals to go through quarantine.
“The shelter was built in 1968,” said Ms. Green. “The original kennel was in pretty bad disrepair and very antiquated. We tried over the years to keep it going the best that we could, and then finally, it was just like, ‘Well, either we have to do this, or we can’t continue to operate.’”
The renovation has been in the works for more than two decades, with several site plans offered before settling on the final arrangement. The shelter’s location in the Pine Barrens and its proximity to the Peconic River complicated the updates.
“We’ve been trying to do this for 20 years. We’ve been raising money all that time and putting it aside for eventually building this new facility,” Ms. Green said.
As previously reported, the shelter raised a substantial portion of the $4.5 million needed for the project through two grants from New York State totaling $275,000, a $75,000 grant from Suffolk County and a $200,000 grant from Maddie’s Fund. There have also been substantial contributions from other foundations and private donations. The new reception area was paid for by a single donor.
“We probably had 25 functional runs before,” said Ms. Green. “We had all these issues before, because it was an old building. Now, it’s climate controlled.”
The new kennel building has 36 indoor/outdoor dog runs, two puppy rooms, a bonding room, a kitchen and laundry. They were also able to convert the caretaker’s cottage, which had been privately owned, to an isolation and treatment center for intake and any animals who need to be separated.
Kent has a mission to help both local animals and those that have been displaced nationally. While the Northeast does not have an extreme pet overpopulation problem, thanks to the success of spay and neuter programs, many places still do.
“We do take animals locally, sometimes from Brookhaven animal shelter. We also take it out of state. Mostly from the South, like Georgia and Texas, where … they have very high [number of] kill shelters,” Ms. Green said.
Now that this renovation is complete, the shelter hopes to update the other buildings on the campus, starting with Snowball’s Place, the on-site cat retirement home. The spay and neuter clinic is also nearing 50.
With the dog facility once again functioning, the shelter plans to get back to business as usual: helping animals.
“We plan to get right back up and running to the level that we were before we even started this. We’re pretty excited to get back into our own space and just continue to rescue,” she said.
