NEW BRAUNFELS, Texas — Overcrowding in animal shelters is a local and national problem and it's getting worse, forcing some shelters to make hard decisions to make room for the never-ending influx of pets.
Wednesday at the Humane Society of the New Braunfels Area, Betsy Pettett crouched next to her foster dog Stella dreading the thought of meeting her new owner when her boyfriend, Dave Weinberg, handed her a new pink and silver dog tag.
"I flipped it over, and I got to the sixth digit and realized it was my phone number," Pettett said.
For the animals in the shelter, this is about as close as you can get to a storybook ending.
"It took me a second still and I looked up at him and I realized what he was doing,” she said. “That he was buying Stella for me."
Once upon a time Weinberg, who has fostered dozens of pets over the years had a rule he said he'd never break.
"My rule was never to keep a dog or a cat and for probably now, 15 years, I've been successful at that,” Weinberg said. “But Stella was different."
Of course, long before this, Weinberg and Pettett were already the heroes of Stella's story, taking her in as a foster pet and helping her get healthy.
"If we couldn't have found a foster for her as quickly as we did, we would absolutely have considered euthanasia," said New Braunfels Area Humane Society Director Sarah Hammond.
She says they often turn to Dave for troubled cases like Stella, who came to them at only 26 pounds, fighting off infections and losing her hair.
"She was in such bad shape and we knew there wasn't anything that we could do for her to live in a kennel," she said.
Hammond said that normally, those tough decisions are rare. But a steady stream of intakes have made them necessary more often.
“We're contractually obligated to take every stray in Comal County,” she said. “So, if animal control drives up with five dogs, we have to find a place for them.
This problem goes beyond New Braunfels. A report from the non-profit Shelter Animals Count forecasts that for 2022, the shelter animal population is on track to increase by 10%.
Hammond said it's become so crowded they haven't been able to help families in crisis.
"…which is every other phone call that we get right now,” she said. “And we have to say no because we literally don't have anywhere to put them."
Hammond says they need the help of the community in the form of adopters and fosters like Weinberg. For his part, Weinberg says it's well worth it.
"It will absolutely change your life,” he said. “It becomes a calling."
Hammond said taking a foster dog in gets them out of the shelter and allows them to decompress. So even if they hadn’t adopted Stella in the end, she said they gave her a better chance to find her happily ever after.
"Had that foster not stepped up. There's no way we could have – she couldn't have had that happy ending," she said.