By Theresa Opeka
Carolina Journal
Many animal rescue organizations have come to the aid of shelter pets and other animals affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina, as well as South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
One such organization is BISSELL Pet Foundation’s Animal Incident Management.
Well known for its Empty the Shelters program, BISSELL Pet Foundation, founded in 2011, launched the Animal Incident Management (AIM) initiative in February 2023 in partnership with Animal Search and Rescue Training and Response (ASAR).
“This was really born in February of last year, however, we’ve been doing disaster and crisis work for quite some time,” Brittany Schlacter, marketing and public relations specialist for BISSELL Pet Foundation, told Carolina Journal in a phone interview Thursday. “After Hurricane Ian took place in 2022, we noticed that there were some gaps.”
AIM takes action through partnerships with professional animal welfare organizations nationwide and provides resources to emergency management teams and communities, such as animal search and rescue, pre-event planning to post-event recovery, shelter support, and humanitarian efforts where people and animals are assisted together.
They work on rescuing animals from disasters like hurricanes, to puppy mills, and hoarding cases.
Schlacter said that state emergency management officials called on their team to come to the state to aid in search and rescue efforts.
Kim Alboum, shelter outreach and policy development director, and Eric Thompson, executive director of AIM, who also runs ASAR, are helping with the efforts in the western part of the state.
Thompson worked with search and rescue crews during the Maui wildfires last year.
She said their team is working collaboratively with other national organizations like the ASPCA where they divvy up the work based on the need.
On Thursday, Thompson and his team rescued horses from a completely inaccessible property. Their elderly owner stayed with them the whole time. They were also scheduled to move dogs from a home on Friday. The family wasn’t there when the floodwaters hit but have been cared for.
At the same time, AIM is transporting pets from impacted shelters such as the Asheville Humane Society, Yancey County Animal Shelter, Mitchell County Animal Rescue, shelters in Polk, Henderson, and Rutherford.
“After the storm, they were left without power, water, and no supplies, and we worked to move pets out of those organizations because they obviously couldn’t care for them,” Schlacter told CJ. “We work with our network of partners and say, hey, who has space to take how many animals and we kind of divvy it up, and then we pay for the transport whether it’s a flight transport that happened on Monday, and we’ve got some happening today, but we’re also running ground transports so those are vans that are moving pets as well.”
She stressed that the pets being moved were not on stray hold or pets from the community, possibly somebody’s lost pet, but those that were already homeless before the storm arrived.
Most pets are being moved to other North Carolina shelters, like the SPCA of Wake County and the Forsyth Humane Society. There were nearly 100 that BISSELL Pet Foundation flew for free from Asheville to Winston-Salem on Monday.
Forsyth Humane Society has become the organization’s hub at the airport in Winston-Salem, where animals can be divided between the other shelters based on need and space.
Alboum, who is from North Carolina, has coordinated the efforts on the ground and been an escort on the plane trips.
“It speaks volumes to the collaboration and resilience of the North Carolina community as a whole, but one of the most amazing things that I saw is how these communities have turned out to generate donations of supplies for the impacted shelters,” Schlacter said. “Forsyth Humane Society actually worked to fill the plane, and we made some donations as well as filled the plane with supplies for Asheville Humane Society. So, we flew in 1000 pounds of supplies, and then on Monday, we brought back two loads of pets, about 100 altogether.”
Shelters in other states, like the Broome County Humane Society in Binghamton, New York, took 10 dogs from the Pasco County Animal Shelter in Florida through a flight from BISSELL Pet Foundation. In return, the Broome County shelter filled the plane with food and supplies for all of the affected shelters in North Carolina.
She told CJ that AIM would continue transporting pets and coordinating rescues into next week, possibly a lot longer, as the need is great.
“Not only are we in these communities with them doing this work, but our hearts are with these families, the pets, and everything that they’ve seen, this is unlike anything we could have imagined,” Schlacter said. “The BISSELL Pet Foundation and Animal Incident Management exists to respond in situations like this. We exist to respond to the unimaginable.”
If people would like to donate, they can go to bissellpetfoundation.org/donate and click the Crisis and Disaster tab.
“The best thing about giving to the BISSELL Pet Foundation and what makes us different from a lot of other large organizations is that 100% of every contribution to the Foundation saves lives, so we have no overhead, no executive compensation salaries, or anything like that,” Schlacter said.
In addition to donating to the Foundation, she added that people can check out the shelters that were impacted and see what donations they need from their wish lists. People can also foster or adopt a pet from the shelters in North Carolina or anywhere across the country as it frees up critical space in the shelters that are so desperately needed.
Theresa Opeka is the Executive Branch reporter for the Carolina Journal.
