Paula Fasseas always loved animals but never thought she would dedicate her life to saving cats and dogs.
“I always thought I’d like to be a vet, but I really didn’t like blood so much. And it was funny, because back then, as a kid, growing up, you liked animals, the vet was the only path,” Fasseas said.
But that all changed when her daughter was volunteering at a local animal shelter about 28 years ago. She said her daughter would tell her about the high number of animals being euthanized at shelters. Fasseas knew she wanted to save these animals — and that started with getting the word out.
“I thought, ‘If people knew, they’d come and adopt these animals. How can I get them down here?’” Fasseas said. She started to think about streets like Michigan Avenue and Oak Street, which were lively and attracted people with their designer stores. Fasseas decided to host her first adoption event along some of those streets and the next day, she was inundated with calls from people asking how they could help.
Now, 28 years later, Fasseas is still hosting the adoption event along some of the most fashionable streets in the Gold Coast neighborhood. She has also since started PAWS Chicago, one of the largest comprehensive no-kill animal welfare organizations in the country.
Forty retailers along Oak Street, Rush Street, Delaware Place and Michigan Avenue lent their storefronts and windows Sunday to PAWS for the annual Angels With Tails event. Inside and outside, people perusing the luxury shopping streets could find everything from playful kittens to former greyhound racing dogs.
“The idea is to bring homeless pets into the community, into areas where people are just walking around, where they’ll encounter them and hopefully fall in love and adopt. It’s a way to bring the mission front and center,” said Susanna Wickham, CEO of PAWS Chicago.
This year’s event also comes as Chicago Animal Care and Control is receiving more animals than it can take care of. In a Facebook post, the agency said that in the first 20 days of May, it has received an average of 56 animals a day. That number is a slight jump from April, when the agency saw about 54 animals a day.
“During COVID, they had very few animals given up at Animal Control, and a lot of people in demand for animals, wanting animals,” Fasseas said. But in the aftermath of the pandemic, more people are giving up their animals.
That trend is consistent with a nationwide crisis in animal shelters. Since the pandemic, many shelters are seeing a surge in the number of animals they are receiving.
In 2023, 6.5 million animals entered shelters across the nation, a slight increase from 2021, according to Shelter Animals Count’s national database. That number slightly decreased in 2024, with 5.8 million animals entering shelters. Despite the decrease, many shelters still say that they are at capacity and struggling to meet the needs of their communities.
“The thing that is the most alarming is just the amount of abandoned and stray pets, and also the amount of pets that are relinquished by their owners,” Wickham said. “These numbers have been surging for the last couple of years, but they continue to be on an upward trajectory, and it’s just largely tied to the economy.”
More specifically, Fasseas explained that a combination of skyrocketing veterinary costs, people moving to new areas and general life transitions following the pandemic contributed to the surge in animals.
“There are a lot of people that can barely feed their families,” Fasseas said, let alone provide their pet with medical care.
At the Sunday adoption event, dogs patiently sat outside stores like Dolce & Gabbana and Lafayette 148 as people stopped to play with them. Many people were looking for their next feline friend.
“Before I would just walk, play with the puppies — but this year was my time to shine,” Kristen Crabtree, a Gold Coast resident, said. She had spent hours online looking at the cats that were going to be at the event and found herself thinking about two kittens — Hobbes and Fuzz. Luckily, she arrived early and now says she has two new “best friends to play with.”
Yuri Torres, a Jefferson Park resident, had been looking for an orange cat.
“I love orange-flavored things, like oranges or mangoes, and so I always just associate tangerines and oranges with happiness,” Torres said. When she saw an orange and white kitten inside the Marc Jacobs store named Cherub, she instantly fell in love.
“I feel a connection to him,” Torres said. By the end of the day, she’d added a new member to her family.
