Dogs rescued from Hurricane Delta’s path ready to find forever homes in sunny San Diego
They were nervous but safe and dry and ready to find their forever homes.
More than 100 dogs plucked from Louisiana shelters ahead of Hurricane Delta landed safely in San Diego County, San Diego television station KFMB reported.
The dogs — 103 in all and stowed in pet taxis for the journey west — came to Southern California Thursday courtesy of Wings of Rescue, the nonprofit organization that flies endangered dogs, cats and other pets from high-intake shelters to no-kill shelters to be adopted into new homes.
The plan: move the dogs to make room for those now in harm’s way in Louisiana. The California-bound dogs find a new home and the ones back home now have space in a shelter there.
Now a Category 2 hurricane, Delta was expected to make landfall along the Louisiana coast Friday evening, CBS News reported. As many as 11 million people are in the storm’s path.
“If we in San Diego are not taking action, a lot of these pets don’t have any future,” John Van Zante of the Encinitas-based Rancho Coastal Humane Society told KFMB. “The shelters are always crowded. Now we are in an emergency situation where you have hundreds and thousands more pets coming in. They just don’t have room for them.”
The dogs were to be taken to Rancho Coastal, the San Diego Humane Society’s campuses across San Diego County and other care facilities and animal rescues.
The animal rescuers in San Diego stressed that the pets were already available to be adopted in Louisiana, so their people weren’t looking for them.
A Twitter post from San Diego Humane Society showed society workers and volunteers caring for the new arrivals to make sure they were all right after their long flight. Once they are medically cleared, they are ready to be adopted.
Many of these dogs, like their human counterparts, were still recovering from Hurricane Laura just six weeks earlier.
“We are grateful we can help these animals and alleviate some of the stress on the shelters in Louisiana,” San Diego Humane Society President and CEO Dr. Gary Weitzman told KFMB. “They are just recovering from Hurricane Laura and now there is an even bigger threat. When we all work together, we can help more animals and that’s what we’re here for.”
This story was originally published October 9, 2020 at 2:27 PM with the headline "Dogs rescued from Hurricane Delta’s path ready to find forever homes in sunny San Diego."
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