Habersham County Animal Care and Control participated in a transport Friday that sent more than 100 animals to rescue groups up north to find their forever homes.
The transport was part of a rescue initiative called the Georgia Transport Alliance, which is organized by volunteer coordinators and Northeast Georgia animal shelter teams. Since the organization was founded by Gail Connor of Metro Atlanta in 2018, more than 10,000 Northeast Georgia animals have gone to northern rescue organizations to find their forever homes.
Connor, a native New Yorker, spent more than 15 years in animal rescue. One of the things she’s seen during her time in Georgia is that the number of homeless animals far outweighs the number of adopters, something that isn’t the case up north.
“In the north, they have more adopters than they have animals, which is something that we can only dream about Georgia,” Connor says. “I have about 115 rescues in the Northeast and Midwest that we transport to.”
The Habersham County Animal Shelter, led by Animal Care and Control Director Madi Nix, has participated in 77 animal transports and sent around 806 animals to rescue organizations with the Georgia Transport Alliance.
“For a lot of animal control [groups], their job is to rid the town of unwanted or lost animals . . . I’m so thankful that some of the shelters do take on a rescue mentality so that they are looking for answers to save lives,” Connor says. “In Georgia, we just don’t have enough adopters for all the homeless animals. Many [animal control groups] from my experience don’t even try hard to find solutions for their animals, whereas Madi will do whatever it takes.”
A group effort
Northeast Georgia animal shelters, from Madison-Oglethorpe Animal Shelter in Danielsville to Forsyth County Animal Shelter in Cumming, come together to make these transports happen. Through the cooperation of these shelters, transports happen almost weekly, but not always of the magnitude of Friday’s transport.
Habersham County sent 37 animals on the transport, while Madison-Oglethorpe sent 28. Shelters like the Athens-Clarke County Shelter, Hall County Animal Shelter, DeKalb County Shelter and a slew of others also sent animals on the transport to get them into forever homes.
The transporting of animals isn’t free— but it is a group effort between Northeast Georgia’s shelters and the rescues that take those animals in to make sure financial burdens don’t fall on one group or organization.
During transports, the shelters trade off who pays for gas money, and the rescues up north help take care of vet bills. For Habersham’s share of transport costs, Nix says that donations have helped cover those expenses. But she says that even with transports up the coast costing around $400 in gas, it’s a better allocation of tax dollars to transport animals to rescues.
“It’s costing us less to get these animals out of here than it is to pay to feed them, to pay to take care of them, to have the space to house them, all that kind of stuff,” Nix says. “There’s no point in these animals sitting here for no reason. It’s not like we don’t have to put money into them the longer they sit there.”
Nix estimates that each animal at the shelter costs about $10 a day to feed, house and provide veterinary care for.
Finding Fur-ever
Transports work when it comes to getting homeless animals adopted, according to Nix. She tells Now Habersham that the animals they send on transports have been waiting at the shelter hoping for homes for months. Several of the animals that went out on Friday’s transport had been at the shelter since September.
Kensington, a female terrier/pit mix who came to the shelter at the beginning of September, went on a transport to Connecticut earlier this month. Within five days, she’d been adopted by her forever family.
“No one wanted that dog,” Nix said. “[But when] she went up north, she was adopted within five days.”
Kensington joined a family of four, where she has a bed of her own, two children, ages 5 and 7, to play with, a fireplace to warm her belly and an adoring mom.
“We’ve been having a blast with her already,” Mandi Evans, who adopted Kensignton, tells Now Habersham. “She loves snuggling on our beds with us and going for walks to explore the neighborhood. She’s already learned to ‘sit’ and ‘lie down’, so we’re pretty excited about that! She’s super sweet and we just love her so much already!!”
Not only are these transports successful, but Connor says they are the best way for Georgia to decrease their homeless animal population. The best defense against homeless animals and euthanasia is, according to Nix, Connor and animal rescue groups around the country, spaying and neutering.
“The answer to getting our [pet] population under control— there are three things you have,” Connor says. “You’ve got Georgia adoptions, which are never going to solve the problem, you’ve got spay-neuter, which is very important to get these populations under control and then we have transport— or you have euthanasia, take your pick.”
Bookman: Naming names, former Sens. Perdue and Loeffler conspired against democracy
About the author: Jay Bookman covered Georgia and national politics for nearly 30 years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, earning numerous national, regional and state journalism awards. He is the author of “Caught in the Current,” published by St. Martin’s Press. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.
Anyone in public life who supported, advocated, justified, participated in, financed or helped to organize the scheme to void the 2020 Electoral College vote, take away the voice of the people, and MacGyver state legislatures into keeping Donald Trump in the White House is guilty of conspiring to end American democracy.
History will record that as a fact.
Now, some might disagree. I mean, it’s not as if Republicans just hyped themselves into a frenzy with a totally groundless story about “voter fraud,” then used that frenzy as an excuse to throw out tens of millions of legitimate votes, cancel the election, overrule the American people and re-install a president whom voters had clearly and definitively rejected. If all that had happened, even the skeptics would have to agree they had conspired against democracy.
Of course, all that did happen.
So let’s call out some names:
You, David Perdue. You conspired to end American democracy. As a U.S. senator sworn to defend the Constitution, you instead supported efforts to trash that document. You conspired to throw out the 5 million votes that were cast legally and in good faith by your fellow Georgians so that Republican legislators could substitute their will for the will of the people. You did so for no other reason than you didn’t like the outcome.
You had – and have – no evidence of voter fraud to justify such breathtaking action. The laughable lawsuit that you recently filed accuses Fulton County election officials of “unlawful, erroneous, negligent, grossly negligent, willful, malicious, corrupt, deceitful, and intentional manipulation of votes.” It claims “Fulton County permitted great multitudes of fraudulent persons to fraudulently vote in the General Election using the name(s) of qualified and eligible Georgia voters.”
If what you allege is true, then thousands of legally registered voters in Fulton County – if you believe Trump, tens of thousands – must have been barred from voting on Election Day because when they got to their precincts, they would have been told that somebody else had fraudulently cast ballots in their name through the absentee process.
So produce these “great multitudes.” You cannot. You cannot because they exist only in the land of unicorns, fairies, magic rainbows and GOP lawsuits.
I know, I know – we’ve all heard the excuse: The lawsuits are necessary to uncover the evidence that you’re sure is there. Yet that in itself is a damning admission. Given your support a year ago for blocking the transfer of power to President Biden, it is a confession that you were willing to subvert American democracy based on evidence that to this day you do not have.
Furthermore, in your campaign for governor you have made it clear that you would use the powers of that new office to do even worse in the next election, if given the chance. Indeed, that promise is the entire animating force behind your candidacy. And if you’ve somehow managed to convince yourself that all this nonsense is true, if that self-delusion helps you sleep better at night, it doesn’t make the Big Lie any less of a lie. It just makes you a bigger fool.
But of course, Perdue is far from alone.
You, then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler, joined Perdue last year in supporting a Texas lawsuit that would have rendered 5 million Georgia voters voiceless in the presidential election, based on the false claim of 80,000 forged absentee ballots in our state. Your fellow Republican, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, had condemned that suit as “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong,” but that didn’t deter you in the slightest. No defender of the Constitution or democracy would have taken the momentous step of trying to throw out millions of ballots without overwhelming evidence. You did so with no evidence whatsoever.
Twenty-eight state legislators also joined in supporting that ridiculous lawsuit, as did seven House members from Georgia. Again, we should name names: House members Jody Hice, Rick Allen, Buddy Carter, Doug Collins, Drew Ferguson, Barry Loudermilk, Austin Scott: You too have conspired against American democracy. When the vote of the people of Georgia went against your candidate, you tried to silence their voice, and all but Scott did so again on the House floor on Jan. 6.
Hice is now running for Georgia secretary of state, the office entrusted with the sacred power of guaranteeing the fairness and legitimacy of our democratic republic. As with Perdue, the entire reason for Hice’s candidacy is his eagerness to use the powers of that office to succeed next time where he and others failed last time. He has no other platform, no other agenda.
Hice, Perdue and too many other GOP candidates are asking the people of Georgia not just to validate their past attempts to subvert democracy. They are asking that you join in that conspiracy, that you participate in it.
Don’t do that.