There were 96 guinea pigs newly surrendered by an overwhelmed owner. There were 50 baby chicks, abandoned at a post office by someone who ordered them but failed to pick them up.
And there were 28 kittens, 11 adult cats and five dogs, all taken in from another shelter, an overcrowded system where the potential pets were at risk of euthanasia. Oh, that doesn’t count the abandoned horse turned over to them.
The San Diego Humane Society had its hands full Thursday.
“It was a very busy day,” spokesperson Nina Thompson said. She praised the organization’s “really incredible staff” for the work to get the animals into the shelter.
The shelter says it took in nearly 275 animals in a 24-hour period. A typical day usually yields an intake of perhaps 60 to 100 animals, from strays to those surrendered by owners.
Quite a bit of work for a shelter already over capacity for housing dogs.
The San Diego Humane Society started Thursday by taking in the cats and dogs from a Los Angeles shelter. Thompson said the San Diego Humane Society is a founding partner of a collaborative to support the Los Angeles shelter and offered to take in the animals after learning they were at risk of euthanasia.
That was a planned intake. But what happened later in the afternoon was not: The overwhelmed owner of several dozen guinea pigs unexpectedly reached out for help. An intake team at the Escondido campus sprang into action, quickly triaging and assessing which animals might need immediate medical attention. The guinea pigs were distributed to the four campuses throughout the agency’s shelter system.
The intake of so many guinea pigs at once nearly tripled the organization’s population of the little animals. The newly received guinea pigs will be spayed or neutered before they are placed up for adoption.
While the organization’s leadership team was on a conference call about the guinea pig matter Thursday, one of the directors got word that someone was about to drop off 50 chicks at the El Cajon campus. Apparently, someone had ordered the live baby birds to be mailed from Utah to the Logan Heights post office but failed to pick them up.
“We are so grateful to the post office worker who thought about the well-being of these birds,” Thompson said. She also thanked the person who was in the post office at the time and offered to drive the chicks to the East County site.
If the owner does not reclaim the chicks, they will go up for adoption sometime next week.
There would be one more curveball before Thursday ended. Tribal police at a local reservation reached out and asked if San Diego Humane Society could take an abandoned horse. It’s not clear how old the mare is, but she is underweight, Thompson said.
Thompson said the horse is settling in at the Escondido campus, where she’ll receive care.
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