A van on a rescue mission rolled to a halt in a lot behind PAWS Chicago’s medical center in Little Village Wednesday afternoon. When the vehicle’s side doors slid open, the beagles inside began to howl as if to celebrate the end of a successful journey.
The three adult beagles — plus three puppies and 16 cats — had traveled more than 300 miles to Chicago from the Humane Society of Southern Illinois in Murphysboro, near Carbondale. The shelter is scheduled to close later this year due to “increasing costs” and “lack of adequate funding,” among other reasons, according to PAWS Chicago.
“Chicagoland always helps out in times of need,” said Tom McFeeley, a PAWS Chicago employee.
Indeed, thanks to the expansive space of the “no-kill” animal welfare organization, it can board around 300 pets at two Chicago locations, and because of its lifetime return policy, the animals will be taken care of for the rest of their lives.
Once an animal becomes a PAWS Chicago pet, it is always a PAWS Chicago pet, McFeeley said.
“If you adopt a pet today, we will take it back tomorrow. We will take it back 10 years from Tuesday,” he said. “It doesn’t matter because we want the pet to be happy and to live.”
In the short term, the organization counts on its large network of volunteers willing to foster pets for a temporary amount of time.
McFeeley said the closure of the Human Society of Southern Illinois will make shelter overcrowding, a ubiquitous problem, even worse in the southern part of the state.
When natural disasters or other shelter closings cause shelter overcrowding in areas across North America, PAWS Chicago can lean on its foster network and encourage people to adopt so that it can take in pets from those areas in dire need to relieve overcrowding pressures, McFeeley added.
PAWS Chicago has flown in stray animals from faraway places including Texas and the Caribbean.
Tori Binelli, a PAWS Chicago staffer, told the Tribune why locals should adopt animals like the beagles and other rescued animals.
“You get constant companionship.” Binelli said. “You get a wonderful friend, a weird guy, to live in your house. I have a cat, and he entertains me endlessly because he’s just so silly and does so many different things, and I take many pictures of him. I have camera rolls full of him.”
Other animals who enter Chicago shelters are not as fortunate as the ones who arrived at PAWS Chicago Wednesday.
National animal welfare organization Best Friends Animal Society released new data Tuesday indicating that in 2023, of the more than 30,000 pets that entered animal shelters throughout the greater Chicago area, about 2,700 were unnecessarily killed because they found themselves temporarily homeless.
A report from Chicago Animal Care and Control about the city’s shelter shows that more than 3,300 cats and dogs were euthanized in 2023.
Binelli said she is aware that potential pet owners might be afraid about shelter pets being different from animals one could obtain from a breeder. But Pinelli pointed out that pet owners won’t truly know if they will get along with a shelter pet or a pet from a breeder until well after adoption.
“You do your best. You get your pet but then you have to learn their personality,” Binelli said. “You have to figure out how they work in your house, and you have to work with them.”
McFeeley said some people discover that they are drawn to a pet that is deaf or blind or maybe has some other sort of quirk.
“The dog tends to pick you, or the cat tends to pick you,” he said.
