It grows every day - and those driving along the I-90 in West Seneca see the progress every day. It is the new $15 million home of the Erie County SPCA, being built without government funding at 300 Harlem Road. WBFO took a tour of the site with Executive Director Gary Willoughby, who said the shells of all buildings have been completed and construction is now moving inside for the winter.
Next spring, the SPCA will mark its 150th anniversary with a new home: 52,000 square feet on 10 acres of a park-like campus that re-positions the organization for the future.
"We're in our main adoption room now. We'll have featured pet rooms when you first come in," said Willoughby. "To your left when you walk in will be a large small-animal area. So your pet mice, your rabbits, your guinea pigs, your ferrets and those types of guys will be there on the left. And then on the right-hand side will be adoption counseling rooms, so if you're interested and you want to talk to someone about it, you'll have more privacy here than at our current facility."
https://youtu.be/3C4-xdFf01Q">The site will have double the space of its current location in the Town of Tonawanda. But Willoughby says the goal is not to warehouse more animals.
"The intent isn't necessarily just to see how many animals we can fit in a bigger building," he says. "But the animals we treat now, to treat them better so we can see less and less euthanasia in the future."
He says they tried to retrofit their current facility as much as possible. But now, a complete rebuild is necessary to meet current animal care and disease management standards.
"We're doing more medically and fresh air flow, isolation areas, a lot of the stuff that the public would never even see or really notice, but (animals) are more likely to potentially catch something if they're here for a long period of time and get stressed out," he says. "We want to get them in here, get 'em cleared and get 'em into a loving home as quickly as possible to reduce their stress level as much as possible."
And as WNYers have a good handle on spaying and neutering their pets, Willoughby says intakes have been going down by the thousands in recent years.
"Using GIS and data mapping, where your problem cats come from, where your strays are coming from, you can usually narrow it down to certain neighborhoods," he says. "In Toledo (where Willoughby last worked), they had specific zip codes that were the worst and sometimes even census tracks, where they went in, got some grant funding and did a lot of outreach and made a big difference really quickly."
So in its new home, as thehttps://youtu.be/cOH4tK6zC7M"> SPCA looks toward the next 150 years, the organization will be re-positioned more as a community resource.
"We hope to have this facility available to the public in a variety of ways," he says. "We're going to be a lot of educational opportunities where we'll bring in people to talk about properly taking care of their pets, invite the veterinarians to come in and give presentations on subjects that are important to them. We'd like to have the other animal welfare organizations in the area to come and train them on how to spur on adoptions, whatever they need help with."
Along with that re-positioning will be an updated logo next year that reflects the SPCA's commitment to its original mission, as well as its expanded services. That all-familiar cat and dog will be joined by a representative from the wildlife and farm animals that will be much more prominent at 300 Harlem Road.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C4-xdFf01Q&feature=youtu.be
