Alabama isn’t considered a good place to be if you’re a dog or cat.A 2024 report by the Animal Legal Defense Fund ranks our state 48th nationally for laws to protect pets.The group notes that social workers in Alabama don’t have to report signs of animal abuse despite evidence linking mistreatment of pets and domestic violence. One other trend was found regarding dogs and cats around the University of Alabama campus.
It's a full house at the Tuscaloosa Metro Animal Shelter. Cage after cage holds dogs and cats abandoned by their owner and it's up to kennel manager, Raquel Kimball, to deal with these animals and their former owners.
“Our college-age, students or young adults, they're the most active in this kind of field.They're very big animal lovers,” Kimball said.
Kimball says college students make up a large portion of the shelter's foster and volunteer network, but she adds that young people in this age bracket do something else. Kimball says when the spring term ends and students head home for the summer, the number of pets looking to find their permanent homes goes up.
“When they leave, you know, first we have all the foster animals coming back, so that's on top of our regular intake. It's like we ran out of rooms, and now we got all these animals coming back,” she explained.
Foster animals are those that students take in temporarily. The shelter does not allow foster pets to be traveled across state lines, so when the students go home, the problem of overcrowded shelters and surrendered animals remains, and those returns come during one of the busiest times of the year for shelters.
“When we have just kind of a whole week or two of basically just foster returns,”
Kimball began, “that does make us have to consider our space more than we already have to in one of the busiest intake times, which is our like spring summer season, where all the puppies and kittens are coming in.”
And it's the bad outcomes that Kimball wants to avoid. By that, she means abandoned pets that need to be euthanized. You heard earlier about Alabama's bad ranking by the Animal Legal Defense Fund when it comes to pet protection laws. Another study is equally disturbing. The website“Best Friends Save Them All”looked at the number of unwanted dogs and cats that are at risk for being put to sleep. They looked at data for 2025 and found Alabama had over 21thousandpets that still needed saving, and South Carolina is doing much better in that same survey. That state has only around 9thousandpets who still need a home.
“Well, it used to be an annual spring thing, and now it's almost year-round,” said Amie Jordan.
Amie Jordan runs the Lucky Dog Animal Rescue in the town of Florence, South Carolina.That town is home to Florence Marion University, which means lots of students and lots of dogs and cats to keep track of.
“I mean, it's crazy the amount of unaltered, unfixed animals, especially in the South, but kind of worldwide, but especially in South United States,” Jordan exclaimed.
Jordan says her community shares the same college town pet problem Raquel Kimball talked about in Tuscaloosa. The number of student volunteers goes down, and the number of abandoned dogs and cats goes up.
“We do see volunteers, it drops off.We're lucky to kind of bridge the gap with some high schoolers that are really dedicated and diligent,” she said.“We definitely notice when it's summertime.”
Jordan says shelters and rescues must find new ways to recruit help when their regular volunteer base disappears.
“If the college volunteers are what are keeping you sustained through the years,you know you have to reach out to the high schoolers, you have to reach out to seniors,” Jordan recommended.
Despite facing many of the same challenges as shelters in Alabama, Jordan says South Carolina has made progress in reducing the number of pets at risk, though overcrowding and seasonal volunteer shortages remain a constant concern. Jordan says one trick for Lucky Dog is that they look at the problem from the angle of supply and demand.
“We take animals from the local shelters,and we house them here at our rescue campus for about two weeks, one to three weeks,” she said.
We talked earlier about a study by“Best Friends Save Them All,”that's one that said Alabama had 21thousandunwanted pets, and South Carolina had9 thousand.That same survey said the Washington, DC area had only 600pets in need.If true, that means more people may be looking to adopt. Jordan at Lucky Dog says she's happy to supply those dogs and cats.
“They get world-class vet care, they get socialization, and then we put them on a van,and we transport them to the DC metro area. Some, they go straight into a foster home, or a large majority,” Jordan recalled. “Some of them actually get adopted right off of the van. It's called off-transport adoption. Somebody just sees their picture and goes,that's
my cat, that's my dog.”
“In the summertime, you know, we can't count on them coming back anytime soon,” said Kimball. “It's sometime months, so then that's a little harder for us to kind of figure out. Like, okay, you know,what can we do?”
We met Raquel Kimball earlier in our story. She says her shelter in Tuscaloosa tries to prepare by recruiting local families and pushing for additional foster homes, but summer remain sone of the toughest seasons of the year.
One idea to find homes for pets is called “Happy Hour.”The program allows volunteers to take a dog out of the shelter in their care for the day, allowing the animals to get outside and gain exposure to potentially interested adopters.
“We're always trying to encourage local families to participate in the program to maybe offset some of that,” Kimball urged.
Happy Hour worked for a while.
“We have, less happy hours, so less dogs actually going out, getting that socialization, which means the dogs getting more pent up, more frustrated,” she said.
As shelters face overcrowding nationwide,both rescues and local shelters say one thing can make the biggest difference: community involvement.
