by Cole Graves April 1, 2018
Hundreds of furry faces gained a new reason to wag their tails as Orange County Animal Care celebrated the grand opening of its new shelter March 24.
OC Animal Care moved from its 4.5-acre facility in Orange, to a new 10-acre shelter in Tustin, outfitted with more accommodations for the animals, like play areas and air-conditioned kennels.
Since 2016, OC Animal Care has taken in over 25,000 cats and dogs and carried out more than 17,000 live releases.“No-kill shelters are anything above 90 percent live release rate. We are currently at a 96 percent live release rate for dogs,” said Sondra Berg, manager of OC Animal Care. “There’s a lot of different things to a ‘no-kill,’ but we do consider ourselves to be right up there.”
Cats at the shelter have a 43 percent live release rate, but with new programs in the works to help raise kittens, that number is expected to rise, Berg said.
“We have programs coming up where we are actually going to be providing the public with kits so that they have everything they would need to raise those kittens and then they could bring them in and we could adopt them,” Berg said.
Inside the main building, past the front desk, are cat condos, which house groups of cats separated by gender and personality.
Each cat has their own sleeping area and access to an outside litter box and “catio,” a patio-like outdoor set-up with a large fenced enclosure equipped with scratching posts.
For the dogs, six isolated kennel buildings will house dozens of dogs and include indoor and outdoor kennels for large dogs.
However, dogs and cats aren’t the only ones benefiting from the new facility. The main building also features separate kennel rooms for hamsters, rabbits and reptiles, most of which are expected to arrive in the coming days.
