The City of Prince George and the Prince George Humane Society will soon be partnering with a new location opening in 2025.
It will be located at 4011 Lansdowne Rd. The partnership is under a five-year contract with the option for a three-year renewal.
This agreement came after the BC SPCA's contract ended, with the city offering a $1,209,315 contract to the Humane Society. The SPCA will still continue its work in the city including working with bylaw in handling animal cruelty investigations.
The new location will offer community animal shelter services that will handle stray animal intake and adoption services for both cats and dogs.
The Humane Society has also decided to keep its current location on First Avenue open as well allow for an expansion of services.
“We have a lot of programs and services that we believe would benefit the community as well as the city," said Humane Society president Angela McLaren. So it would be a great opportunity for us…” Explains Humane Society president Angela McLaren. “That includes working with pets with behavioural issues but also working on providing services for low-income community members. We've recognized that shelters are pretty overwhelmed with the number of animals that have been surrendered ... We felt that we needed to create solutions to prevent animals from coming into the shelters, we just couldn't continue with our old capacity. That's a program we believe that with the city we can provide some additional support to the community members."
The First Avenue location will specifically be the cat adoption and humane education centre and will continue to offer the same services and programs as before with no interruption expected.
As McLaren notes, this new location is expected to increase community engagement and volunteering efforts.
“I know a lot of people didn't necessarily volunteer at the First Avenue location because we didn't always have dogs, but now there will be opportunities for people to get involved with socializing and walking dogs, so we want to encourage people to go to our website and put in a volunteer application," she said.
If you are looking to help out the Humane Society in the new year applications can be found at www.pghumanesociety.ca.
