Annual Spayghetti Dinner held Saturday

MOSES LAKE — Les Kinney and his wife drove up from Yakima for the annual Grant County Animal Outreach fundraiser because they love animals. They love dogs, especially dogs like their indomitable terrier Angel.

Angel was hit by a car and had to use a Jack Russell terrier-size wheelchair to get around, which she did. Angel never let her circumstances stop her, Kinney said. At a different fundraising dinner, Kinney purchased a photo package for pictures of the family dogs. That included Angel, in pictures not long before she died.

“It’s just important to support lots of animals,” he said.

The annual banquet is called the Spayghetti Dinner partly to emphasize responsible pet ownership. Kelsie Einspahn, who is a coordinator at the animal shelter run by Grant County Animal Outreach, said one of GCAO’s main areas of emphasis is spay and neuter clinics and urging pet owners to make sure their animals don’t contribute to pet overpopulation.

In 2019, shelter personnel also worked on expanding microchipping services, Einspahn said, and “dramatically reduced the number of feral cat colonies.”

Judy Hanson said she and her husband were at the dinner, held Saturday night at the ATEC building on the campus of Big Bend Community College, to support the animal shelter and to call attention to the problem of unwanted cats and dogs.

“We as a community who love animals want people to be aware there are so many animals without homes,” she said. And it’s important to her that all animals have a home, she said.

“We get in more than 1,000 animals a year,” Einspahn said, dogs and cats whose owners abandoned them, who wandered away from home, or who never had an owner in the first place. The number of animals in the shelter varies, she said. The shelter has “16 kennels in big dog and eight in puppy run,” and 12 quarantine kennels. Animals are not euthanized unless they are too badly injured or too aggressive and can’t be retrained, she said.

Of the animals in the shelter in 2019, 818 were adopted and about 200 were transferred to other shelters, she said.

Moses Lake Police Department officer Lucky Atkins, whose job includes animal control, was the guest speaker. Atkins also answered questions from the audience about city regulations.

The city does have regulations for dogs, he said, but not cats. If a cat is captured and brought to the police department it will be turned over to the shelter, “but other than that, we don’t deal with cats,” he said.

He cautioned against leaving food outside for animals, since the food not only feeds feral cats and stray dogs, but also wild animals. If skunks, raccoons, rats and mice “find a food source, they’ll come back,” he said.

“Dogs at large, now, this is a big one,” Atkins said. Dog owners may think their dog is secure at home, but that’s not always the case. “I’ve seen dogs be escape artists,” he said, finding an open gate or a weak spot in the fence, or sometimes jumping the fence altogether.

“Please, when you leave, make sure your dog is secure,” he said. Wandering dogs can make for trouble with neighbors, and so can barking dogs. The city’s code provides for dog owners to be cited if their dogs are a nuisance or are deemed hazardous, he said.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at [email protected].