08/24/2026
The data collected by the Georgia Department of Agriculture is a snapshot and, because of the cycle for publication of the data (about 3 weeks into the next month), it is somewhat stale by the time it is available. That said, it can help track changes month-to-month.
July's impounds and dispositions didn't look significantly different than June's. The biggest change is is a non-substantive one--it appears that seized animals (those taken involuntarily from an owner, usually for violation of an ordinance) are now being reported as part of the "stray" impound number instead of as "other" impounds. That's the the way they were reported prior to 2020 but then they started being broken out to more finely distinguish the ways animals came to the shelter; I don't know if that is a permanent change in reporting or just the way things got reported in July and, as I said, it's not a substantive difference.
On the dog side, intakes and live dispositions were both up, but the dispositions were not up as much as intakes so shelter inventory was up as well.
A large intake of 11 dogs from a single home in the last week of July pushed the shelter into overcrowding (from merely very full); 100 dogs in custody is a lot for a shelter with 47 kennels split between general, quarantine, and puppy / small dog. While the 11 dogs got along well enough to bunch them in a few kennels, the kennels are too small for that to be a good long-term solution. We've found that when several dogs are housed in a single kennel, they rarely get taken out and their lengths of stay are extended; separating them out takes up more space but means they have more humane housing and get adopted or rescued more quickly.
About a dozen of the impounded dogs would have been in foster care and 6-10 at Project Homebound Athens GA, but that still left too many in the shelter itself.
On the cat side, inventory continued to grow as is typical during the summer months. While cat reproduction never truly stops in the south because the longer days even in winter mean cats continue to go into heat, summer means far more litters and the shelter population reflects that.
"Stray" on the cat side includes friendly cats found roaming by community members, cats seized for ordinance violations (though not for running at large; while owned cats are subject to the same control requirements as dogs in Athens, Animal Control Officers do not pick up roaming cats as they do dogs), and cats brought to the shelter in traps by community members.
Athens has an active trap-neuter-return (TNR) community and TNR-friendly ordinances, but injured or ill unsocialized cats or those that neighbors find to be a nuisance are often brought to the shelter. We strongly encourage anyone with unsocialized cats that don't fall into these categories to reach out for help with TNRing instead of bringing healthy non-nuisance community cats to the shelter; ACCAS has traps they will loan out if you are engaging in TNR, there are resources for learning to trap, and ACC residents can obtain vouchers to have unsocialized cats altered & vaccinated with the county or Athenspets paying the cost. Bringing a nest of kittens or a few healthy, unsocialized free-roaming cats to the shelter without getting the others in the colony altered means increasing the reproductive success of the remaining cats, increasing the free-roaming cat population. Fix the cats to fix the problem.
While impounds for cats were up marginally in July, about twice as many cats were transferred to rescue groups (the Athens Area Humane Society pulled about 35 at one time which was a big help) than in June. However, inventory still increased as fewer cats were euthanized / died in care (yay!). At this point in August, this bump in inventory is gone (as of this morning there were 202 cats in custody), though understanding the exact reason for it (decreased impounds in August? increased live dispositions? increased nonlive dispositions?) will need to wait another month.
Still, the total capacity for care at ACCAS--the number of animals staff can care for appropriately in the shelter--is only about 120 and even accounting for the animals housed elsewhere (Project Homebound, Entangled Cat Cafe, Petsense Athens GA, and foster homes), there were more than twice that many at the shelter at the end of July.
KEY:
- Transfer in: When an animal is taken to UGA as a Good Samaritan turn-in, they are stabilized and "transferred in" to ACCAS for on-going care, treatment, holding, and disposition. At times this number also includes animals adopted from ACCAS that have landed in other shelters where the impounding shelter requests a transfer or animals swapped with other shelters.
- Other intakes: I'm not clear what this number includes; I suspect it's a combination of cruelty seizures, quarantine impounds, and animals coded as dead on arrival. Athenspets typically excludes animals listed as DOA from the data we report since (1) most dead animals are picked up by the roads department so it isn't a good indicator of community deaths; (2) no care the shelter provides can affect these outcomes (though intake approach--whether it is open or managed--can); and (3) they don't get recorded as dispositions anywhere so including them ends up making the starting and ending inventory numbers for a month not quite make sense.
- Transfer out: This represents animals transferred to a rescue group or other shelter, whether local or remote (transport).
- Live release rate (LRR): One of the metrics we track, it indicates the percent of the animals that left the shelter that month alive. The numerator for the calculation is the animals that were adopted, rescued, and reclaimed; the denominator is all of the animals that left the shelter's custody regardless of how. A shelter's LRR is just one data point to use in evaluating how humane a community is. Others include: Is the shelter open admission so that the most vulnerable animals are not left to suffer, uncontrollably reproduce, injure people and pets, spread disease, and die in the community? Is the shelter warehousing animals so that there is insufficient capacity to care and/or insufficient humane holding spaces for the impounded animals? Are care standards and resources in the community appropriate and enforced to prevent unnecessary suffering? Is the shelter actively working to reduce pet overproduction and provide support for vulnerable animals to prevent them losing their homes?
Athenspets is an all-volunteer 501(c)(3) organization. While we publicize the animals at Athens-Clarke County Animal Services and work to improve conditions there, we are independent from the shelter and do not work for the Athens-Clarke County. In addition, we run a community spay/neuter program to reduce pet overproduction in the Athens area.
