'We're full': Horseheads Animal Shelter to close July 1, leaving a gap in animal services

For the second time in the last 10 years, the Horseheads Community Animal Shelter is looking to close, but this time it's likely to happen.

When the Town of Horseheads, which ran the shelter for years, decided it could no longer afford to maintain the operation, the Friends of the Horseheads Community Animal Shelter stepped up and took over the facility in 2016.

The shelter has taken in and adopted out numerous surrendered dogs and cats since then, but shelter officials announced in early April the facility would close for good as of July 1.

"The decision comes after much deliberation and has not been made lightly," the friends group said on the shelter's Facebook page. "Unfortunately, due to various reasons, including our best efforts to maintain a fully staffed board of directors, we find ourselves unable to continue operations without a sufficient team to oversee our organization's governance and decision-making process."

A ripple effect on Chemung County animal care

The Horseheads shelter is a small operation, with room for six dogs and six to eight cats at a time. It does not pick up stray animals, but only accepts owner surrenders. The Town of Horseheads contracts with the City of Elmira for animal control.

There are other facilities that can take up the slack, shelter officials said, including the Chemung County Humane Society & SPCA and Southern Tier Animal Control.

But the Horseheads shelter has been taking in overflow animals from other area facilities, particularly the Elmira animal shelter, which has dealt with recent overcrowding issues.

City Animal Control Director Craig Spencer said the closure of the Horseheads shelter will be a big blow.

"It's a nationwide pattern. A lot of people are abandoning dogs from COVID," Spencer said, noting many of the animals adopted during the pandemic shutdown ended up back in shelters when people started returning to work.

"(The Horseheads closure) will affect us. They do take dogs from us," he said. "We're full. We hope to get back to the way it used to be. We hate to see people abandon dogs."

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Uncertainty about the future

The Horseheads shelter continues to care for dogs and cats until it closes. It is possible another group could try to keep the shelter open, but nobody has come forward, shelter officials said.

The friends group rents the space from the Town of Horseheads. Town Supervisor Don Fischer said the town doesn't know yet what it will do with the building once it's vacant.

While the people who run the Horseheads shelter believe other facilities will be able to make up the difference, others aren't so sure.

Juli Lathrop, who founded the Kramer Foundation, which rehabilitates dogs considered "unadoptable," said the loss of the Horseheads shelter couldn't come at a worse time.

"We're losing it at a time where every single shelter and rescue is overloaded and overwhelmed, not just locally, but nationwide," Lathrop said. "In over 20 years of doing rehab and foster, I have never seen this world of throwaways so dire.

"Unfortunately I think we'll see much more of this," she said. "There's just no end in sight."

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