1

GAZETTE FILE PHOTO

Dakin animal shelter volunteer Louis Westhoff moves "Pip" from a cage to another one so Westhoff can clean up in October 2007 in Leverett.

SPRINGFIELD - Like a terrier pulling the heavy sled in place of an ailing husky, the small Dakin Pioneer Valley Humane Society of Leverett is taking over an animal adoption center in Springfield after a larger organization closed it down.

The Dakin organization announced Thursday that it will buy the former Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals building in Springfield for $1.2 million. The building is 15 times the size of the Leverett adoption center, and the organization's annual budget will double, said Leslie Harris, the executive director.

"It's daunting, but it's really exciting," she said. "We're not abandoning Hampshire and Franklin counties; we're expanding what we already do to Hampden County."

The Dakin organization's mission is to prevent animal homelessness. The shelter runs extensive spaying and neutering programs and accepts only animals that are good candidates for adoption. These policies have resulted in a euthanasia rate of only 5 percent.

The Dakin shelter in Leverett had been looking for land on which to build a bigger facility ever since Harris was hired in 2001. It looked at sites in South Amherst, Sunderland and South Deerfield, and merged with a Greenfield shelter in 2006. That Greenfield shelter will close at the end of June, she said.

Meanwhile, Harris worked with the MSPCA staff in Springfield, sharing techniques and technology, and was just as worried as other animal-lovers when its adoption center closed down March 31 because of financial problems.

The Dakin organization had $1.2 million that it had raised from donations to build a new shelter. The MSPCA was willing to sell its building at 171 Union St. for that amount even though it had originally marketed it for $4.8 million, because it wanted to see its work with animals continue, Harris said.

The organization plans to move its administrative and development offices from Leverett to Springfield in June and July and reopen the 46,000-square-foot building around Aug. 1, she said. It has already hired one of the former MSPCA staffers and is accepting employment applications from all 17.

"There will be some changes to the building, but the beauty of this is that instead of building from scratch, this is a building that was built for this purpose," Harris said.

It is not yet clear what the future role of the Leverett shelter will be, she said. The Greenfield shelter's functions of accepting new animals and quarantining ones that are sick can be done more safely and humanely in Springfield, she said.

But it will not run a hospital in Springfield, a service the MSPCA abandoned in 2007, Harris said.

"We will have a veterinary staff to serve our animals, but we're not there to provide wellness visits for the public," she said.

The Dakin organization's annual budget is expected to double from $1 million to $2 million, creating new fundraising challenges. It receives no governmental money and relies on donations from animal lovers plus some grants from private foundations, and has about 100 volunteers, Harris said. It is not affiliated with any state or national humane society.

The Springfield MSPCA was an "open admission" shelter, meaning it was obliged to deal with a large volume of animals, some of which were unadoptable, such as dogs with biting problems, she said. So it had a much higher euthanasia rate than the Leverett shelter, she said.

"Our ultimate goal is to end euthanasia of all adoptable animals," Harris said. "The only way to do that is to enlist community support."

Although many people associate animal shelters with dogs, there has been a more serious overpopulation problem with cats, she said. Since 2002, Dakin's Sunday free clinics have neutered more than 5,000 feral and barn cats, and its CatSnip program has brought affordable spaying and neutering to hundreds of lower-income families' pets.

Dakin hopes to bring its high-volume, low-cost spaying and neutering to Springfield, she said.

"We don't believe it's just about finding homes, but preventing animals from being homeless in the first place," Harris said.

The shelter has provided schools, community groups and colleges with educational programs to improve how animals are cared for, reaching more than 15,000 people a year, she said. These "humane education" programs include animal-assisted therapy for people with behavioral, emotional, physical and learning challenges to increase their self-esteem and empathy.

These programs started at the Greenfield shelter and have expanded since it merged with Dakin, and have already started in Hampden County, Harris said.

Photographs of animals awaiting adoption and information on volunteering are available at dpvhs.org.