The end is finally in sight for the 3-year-long construction of the new Carroll County Animal Shelter as Animal Control Director Tim Tant prepares to move into the adoption area of the shelter by the end of the month.

“Our DSL and our phone lines will be in by the end of the week,” Tant said. “Admin (the Administration office building) has already been approved.”

The shelter is experiencing some holdups – last month’s bad weather put the project about a month behind and it is still waiting for the delivery of the cages it ordered for the animals. The rest of the shelter is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year.

The county has been working on the new shelter for a long time. The shelter was one of the projects approved on the 2003 special purpose local option sales tax referendum. The county broke ground on the project in October 2006. But the decision to save money on the project by using prison labor – about 85 percent of the work has been done by prison labor – has significantly lengthened the project’s turnaround time.

The new shelter will double the capacity of animals from about 150 at the current shelter to about 300 at the new shelter. The real advantage of the new shelter is that at 16,000 square feet, it is much more amenable to the public searching for a pet to adopt.

The adoption area alone will be approximately 3,500 square feet, or about three-quarters of the size of the entire existing shelter. The new shelter has separate accommodations for adoptable cats and kittens as well as adoptable puppies and dogs. It has “get-acquainted rooms” for pet owners to spend some time interacting with the pets before they decide to adopt them. Tant also has plans for an adoption row, an outdoor area where, in nice weather, people can see the animals available.

In addition, the shelter will use a new computer program that will allow potential pet owners to look at adoptable dogs and cats online. Pet owners who have lost their pets will also be able to view the new arrivals to the shelter online to see if their lost animal is among them. That should help cut down on the time an animal has to spend in the shelter. That’s important because animals are only kept three days before the healthy ones are put up for adoption. Fewer days in the shelter also means fewer days a pet could be exposed to diseases that strays could carry.

Everything is designed to bring people in to adopt the animals and to make it a pleasant experience.

“We still have like 100 animals a week come in,” Tant said. “The idea is not to have a full shelter. The idea is to have a shelter where there is more adoption and more going out.”

When Tant started in January, the shelter was adopting out about 11 percent of its animals. Now it is closer to 24 percent, and he hopes to raise that to about 40 percent with the new shelter. This year, 911 animals have been adopted from the shelter. That doesn’t include the ones taken to a rescue shelter or lost animals reclaimed by their owners.

“We’re setting our goals real high, but we’re expecting a lot, too,” Tant said.

Unfortunately the shelter will still have to euthanize the majority of the animals that come in just because there are so many.

To combat that problem, another program Tant wants to start is a spay and neuter program. Educating pet owners about the importance of spaying and neutering is crucial to curtailing the stray animal population. It would cut down the number of unwanted animals abandoned in the first place.

Tant prefers to call animals “lost,” a reminder that all the animals or their mother or father were owned by someone at one time – someone who neglected to have their animal spayed or neutered.

“We will definitely have a spay-neuter program set up of some sort,” Tant said. “Either it’ll be paid and done here or it’ll be paid in advance – a certificate to go to the vets.”

That would go a long way toward decreasing the flow of animals into the shelter.

The new arrivals will stay in a separate area until they are examined, to make sure they don’t spread disease among the adoptable animals. The intake area and the euthanizing are in the same section, so at no time will those animals be exposed to the healthy adoptable population. That’s an issue the old shelter has had problems with. On more than one occasion, the shelter has had mass euthanizations because an animal came in with parvo and exposed the entire population.

In back of the shelter will be the livestock holding area. Most of the livestock – pigs, cows or horses that have gotten loose – are reclaimed. The shelter gets a lot of livestock, Tant said. The shelter was prepared for a large influx after the flooding, but didn’t see it.

“They had a special unit, I think it was from West Georgia and out of Atlanta, that was working on that,” Tant said. “It really surprised me. We were on back-up for it but we never had problems.”

The Carroll County Agricultural Education Center was set up to be used as an emergency shelter if needed, he said. The flood came up slowly enough that animals were able to get to high ground if it was available.

“They’re a whole lot smarter than people,” Tant said with a laugh. “Where we don’t believe it, they believe it.”