Maricopa County Animal Care and Control opens new shelter in Mesa
Kim Powell, MCACC Communications Supervisor, talks about the county's newest animal shelter serving Mesa.
The dog pack surveys the neighborhood from a large window in the living room. A gate keeps them away from the front door to fend off escape artists. When there is suspicious activity — a neighbor walking by or a visitor at the door — they sing their alarm song to anyone who will listen. As visitors approach, their chants quiet down, the sniffs and licks follow and the race for who gets more pets begins.
The cats are a different story altogether. They are nowhere to be seen, lingering in doorways, under furniture, on kitchen counters and the fridge. The cats approach at their leisure, both curious and unfazed.
Their temporary home is pristine. It smells like scented candles and the floors and countertops are clean, almost reflective. The house looks lived in — a home — but organized. You would never guess that three people live there with over 30 animals — about 15 dogs and 17 cats — though the number fluctuates often with new intakes and reunions.
Colby Love Can, a family-run nonprofit in Mesa, takes care of pets, mostly dogs and cats, while their owners undergo drug or alcohol rehabilitation. When the owners are ready to take care of themselves and an animal, they’re reunited, filling a gap that most treatment centers and animal rescues are unable to meet in the greater Phoenix area.
In most cases, pet owners struggling with substance abuse are not allowed to bring their pets with them into rehabilitation centers. This poses a barrier to recovery, as many of them do not want to part ways with their animals and may not have a loved one who can care for their pet temporarily. And surrendering their pet to a traditional animal shelter can lead to them never seeing their friend again.
“We've been doing it for seven years. It became officially a nonprofit with the IRS in January of last year … but we've always had a heart and a passion to help people and animals,” said Colby Love, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Colby Love Can.
How it all started
The nonprofit’s name was inspired by the commitment to help people and animals in need. “I help a lot of people on Facebook, and it's always like, well, ‘Who can help? Colby Love can! … I saw that all over Facebook,” Love said about the name’s origin.
The operation is managed by Love, her husband Harry (Boo) Martin, her sister Whitney Taft and her two daughters, Liana and Kayla Rooney. It’s run out of their two homes in Mesa — one where Love, Martin and Liana live, and another where Taft lives. Some of the animals are their pets, but the majority belong to people getting treatment in substance rehabilitation centers in the Valley and other parts of Arizona.
Between 2012 and 2021, the overdose death rate for synthetic opioids like fentanyl increased by over 6,000% in Maricopa County, and as of 2023, “more than three people die every day on average due to fentanyl,” according to the county’s Office of the Medical Examiner.
In a Maricopa County report that interviewed 300 patients suspected of nonfatal opioid overdoses between Sept. 2021 and Aug. 2022, “one in three respondents reported currently being in substance use treatment or having an appointment scheduled for treatment.”
One of the barriers people face to accessing treatment is having pets. As a person with an addiction in recovery who has worked in the treatment space for years, Love knows this firsthand.
“I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict. I've been clean and sober for 13 years. While I was running the streets, I was always an animal person. I had cats that would pee in the bathtub, and I had dogs that would stay on the streets with me,” Love said. “Being on the receiving end of phone calls doing admissions for treatment centers, I've heard people say, ‘I can't go. I won't go because of my animal,’ and it hit.”
“My whole family has a big passion for animals, and we're all in recovery, so we do know that there's a big need for that… My mom used to save everything, so it's just something that we've always been into,” Taft said.
Community partnerships
Love is now self-employed running her own business, Colby Love LLC, a consulting group that helps design and revamp treatment center intake and outreach processes. But before that, Love worked for treatment centers in the Valley helping people access the care they needed. She made connections with facilities that she now partners with for her nonprofit.
One of those centers is Crossroads, a nonprofit organization that has been around for over 60 years and is one of Phoenix’s largest treatment centers.
“If we have people that come in and are needing treatment and have animals, we call Colby, and Colby comes down and gets the animals and houses them while they go to treatment,” said Christin Day, communications and outreach manager at Crossroads.
Day and Love go way back and are close friends beyond their professional relationship. Both are in recovery, and they understand each other’s pasts, struggles, and goals. “Colby and I have known each other for six years. I met her when I was about a year sober, and just her energy and everything about her — I was so drawn to her,” Day said.
Colby Love Can has also formed relationships with other nonprofits and government entities.
“I've gotten a couple calls from the Humane Society. I'm friends with Mesa Animal Control — they do call me to help out, so people are starting to get to know me.”
Some of their most valuable partnerships are with volunteers who assist with the rescue’s day-to-day chores and individuals who foster animals with behavioral problems and are unable to live with other animals. Instead of turning these animals down, they do their best to match them with single-foster homes and remain involved in their care.
The impact
Meghan Sloan, a cat-lover and bartender from Scottsdale, transformed her life for the better by getting treatment at Crossroads. But her recovery journey at the facility wouldn’t have been possible without Colby Love Can’s help. “It saved my life because I was going to leave rehab to take care of the cats. I was so stressed about them,” Sloan said.
Sloan lives in a studio with her four cats, Mimi, a tortoiseshell cat, and Jaime, Daisy Mae and Dandy Rae, all three orange tabby cats. Sloan is soft-spoken and laughs easily. She speaks of her cats with great tenderness: “They lower my anxiety, and they're fun. I think they all have different personalities. They're so cute. Every single one of them is different. Yeah, (they’re) my family.”
Deciding to go to rehab was a tough decision for Sloan. She was in the middle of a divorce, moving out of the home she had shared with her wife in Tucson and struggling to keep a job due to her worsening alcohol addiction. Putting her life on pause to get better was exactly what she needed but not knowing how she’d secure care for her cats — her family — was making recovery a daunting prospect.
Sloan shared her concerns with her case manager at Crossroads who recommended Colby Love Care’s services.
“When I called [Love] … I was like, I have four animals. We can split them up. Maybe you can take two, and I can find another home for the other two, and she stopped me right there. She was like, ‘We're not splitting up your family. The cats live together. They go together. I can take all four,’” Sloan said.
Sloan felt a weight lift from her body and mind; after that call, getting better felt like a real possibility. “It was like the easiest phone call in my life. I thought it was going to be really difficult. I thought finding a place for my cats was going to be so hard,” Sloan added.
Love and Sloan kept in touch while Sloan was in the treatment facility. Once she transitioned to a sober-living house, Sloan would visit her cats at the nonprofit. She’d hang out and play with them in a room in Love’s house, often overcome with emotion from getting to see them again.
Then, all of Sloan’s hard work paid off; her addiction was no longer dictating her life and she was ready to live on her own and reunite with her four cats.
“Colby not only saved (my cats’) lives but saved my life.”
Addiction, homelessness and pets
According to the Maricopa Association of Governments, “there are more people entering homelessness than leaving homelessness. From July 2023 to June 2024, there were 19 new people experiencing homelessness for every 10 people finding housing.”
Unhoused people are more likely to struggle with substance abuse than their housed counterparts. About 38% of unhoused individuals suffer from alcohol dependency, and 26% abuse drugs, as reported by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
In 2019, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) estimated that roughly 12% of unsheltered adults experiencing homelessness owned pets. Most homeless shelters and rehabilitation centers for drug and alcohol abuse do not accept pets.
Organizations like Colby Love Can ensure that individuals can access care while their pets are cared for, and can also help them secure stable housing post recovery. Maricopa County shares a list of temporary housing and foster resources for pets in the area, including Love’s nonprofit, which is listed as “Paws for Recovery.”
“My favorite part of this is the day-to-day, spending the time with these animals and watching them connect and watching their little demeanors,” Love said. During the interview, Love held Little Boy, a brown and white chihuahua wearing a grey, pink and white hoodie, in her lap.
Aside from the manual labor involved in keeping the animals healthy, fed, groomed, happy and the house clean, the goodbyes are usually bittersweet.
But, seeing the owners and pets reunite is also heartwarming. “It's awesome. Watching the animal go back to their loved one, and hearing the dog almost cry, like whimper, because it's so happy, is amazing,” Love said.
Managing the human component can be complex; every situation and reunion is different.
Sloan is an example of a best-case scenario. She went to rehabilitation, got better, reunited with her cats and is now living a happier and more stable life with her pets. However, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, treatment goes on longer than initially expected and the reunification has to be pushed out. Other times, they pick up their furry friend only to drop them off again a few months later after a relapse. The worst-case scenario is when the owner doesn’t get better and can’t come back for their pet, or they come back for their animal even though they won’t be able to care for it properly.
“I do like reuniting, but it makes me feel uneasy because … I hope that they're going to do the right thing. I hope that they're not going to drink tonight or whatever and put their animal in a bad situation,” Love said.
The Colby Love Can members have adopted animals whose owners were unable to take them back and adopted others out to stable homes looking for new companions.
“It's two things we do: We help animals and we help people,” Martin said.
Alessandra De Zubeldia is an investigative journalism master's student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
