Silicon Valley’s newest animal adoption center has furnished rooms with a view for Fluffy, an indoor exercise room for Fido. Very nice.
Haven’t heard about it? On its one-year anniversary, the Silicon Valley Animal Control Authority’s Animal Care Center is trying to spread the word about its cutting-edge facility.
“We’re still kind of the best-kept secret” in the shelter world, executive director Dan Soszynski said.
Soszynski and his staff celebrated their anniversary recently by opening a low-cost spay and neuter clinic, but many of the center’s high points were already included when the animal shelter opened in Santa Clara.
There are no cages for the cats and dogs up for adoption, making it the only cageless animal shelter in the county. Instead, the animals can kick back in den-like rooms with rugs and cat condos or soft beds for the dogs. The cats all have rooms with a window view.
The shelter serves residents of Campbell, Santa Clara and Monte Sereno for animal control, surrender of animals and use of the spay and neuter clinic. But anyone can adopt the center’s animals, sign up to serve as volunteers or foster parents and attend the dog training classes.
In keeping with the more modern approach to running a shelter, all animals up for adoption are posted on the center’s Web site, which is updated hourly. Videos of some animals also are posted. Tuesday, Blossom, a spayed female tabby, was the featured “adoptable pet” online and feline buddies Joey and Quincy were featured in the videos at www.svaca.com.
“We only had $6 million to make this happen, but we got a lot for our money,” Soszynski said.
The shelter has 17,000 square feet, 16 staff members and a $1.8 million annual budget.
A joint-powers authority was created to serve the three cities after the Humane Society decided it no longer wanted to provide animal-control services, preferring instead to focus on improving animal-human relationships to cut down on the high number of animals being surrendered to shelters.
On a smaller scale, this center is trying to do the same. On-site dog training classes are held Wednesday nights. And the facility lets people choose their animals in relaxed, homelike settings. Since opening last year, the center has taken in about 2,400 animals – including dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters and wildlife. Their “live release rate,” the number of animals returned to owners, adopted or sent to rescue groups, is 83 percent for dogs and 39 percent for cats, Soszynski said. About a third of the cats brought in were feral or newborn.
“The figures are excellent for an open-admissions shelter in its first year, or even for an established one for that matter,” he said.
There are 11 furnished rooms for cats up for adoption, 10 for dogs. Stray and sick animals are housed in cages on the animal control side of the center.
“We do take in surrendered animals from the three cities,” Soszynski said. “Some shelters are limiting that.”
Those are the animals where people say “it just didn’t work out” or “my landlord found out.”
“A lot of strays we get in aren’t really strays.”
In the years ahead, the center expects to take in about 4,000 animals a year. Soszynski speaks with great pride of being able to hold many of them long enough – sometimes as long as 10 months to a year – until they are adopted.
“We were able to hold Pumpkin, a cat, for almost a year until she was adopted,” he said. “We’ve had dogs held for months.”
Contact Linda Goldston at lgoldston@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5862..
