The Denison Animal Welfare Group said it took in more than 140 cats and kittens during August, and Sherman Animal Services said its city shelter had reached capacity, according to public notices from both organizations. DAWG attributed its own crowding to cats. The Sherman notice described the shelter as full without naming a species.
DAWG released the August count in an appeal asking supporters to pick up donated supplies while they were already out running errands, saying stock was going fast. The group has described cats as the tightest point in its operation. In a separate post about 10 cats abandoned at its facility, DAWG said its cattery was over capacity before those animals arrived.
Source: Denison Animal Welfare Group public post
Those limits reach Denison's public animal-services system. The city's official animal services page says Denison partners with DAWG for adoption services, which puts the organization inside the process residents use rather than beside it as a private rescue.
Sherman Animal Services laid out its situation in a notice shared through the Sherman Police Department, saying the shelter was full and at capacity and asking residents to adopt, foster, volunteer, or pass along listings for animals waiting on homes.
Two shelters, two different accounts of what is filling them
Denison Animal Welfare Group
Says its cattery was already over capacity when 10 more cats were abandoned at the facility.
Sherman Animal Services
Says the city shelter is full and at capacity, and asks residents to adopt, foster, volunteer or share listings.
Source: Public notices from DAWG and Sherman Animal Services
A Sherman nonprofit is working at the front end of the problem. The Texoma Center for Sustainable Welfare says its programs include pet food help for owners who cannot feed their animals and trap-neuter-return for free-roaming community cats. The center also lists emergency crisis holds, short-term care meant to keep an owner from surrendering a pet during a personal emergency.
Gainesville has carried one of those tools in city policy for years. The municipal feral cat information page says trap-neuter-return is legal in the city and names the Texas Coalition for Animal Protection as Gainesville's first TNR sponsor.
The rules sit in a 2015 ordinance amending the city's animal control code. Under that ordinance a cat enrolled in a TNR program must be sterilized, vaccinated, ear-tipped and registered, and a program cat cannot be impounded or destroyed solely for being at large, feral, or untagged.
Cooke County has a capacity question of its own, though not one anybody has tied to cat intake. Noah's Ark says on its website that it has outgrown the Gainesville shelter it operates in and is pursuing a new building. The organization gives no species breakdown and does not describe its space problem as part of what DAWG and Sherman Animal Services reported.
No public record gives a single count of the cats now held across shelters in the area. The records available show organizations in three cities saying their space falls short of what is coming in, with DAWG the group that has publicly pointed to cats as the cause.
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