KFDA - NewsChannel 10 / Amarillo News, Weather, SportsTexas Panhandle Pet Savers

In the near future animal shelters in the panhandle could become no to very low-kill. The Texas Panhandle Pet Savers is shedding light on the issue. Their mission: buy dogs and cats some time to find a permanent home.

"I have always wanted to help the animals in the shelters in Amarillo. When you're there it feels a bit helpless you want do something but what?" says TPPS volunteer Jennifer Eades.

Sometimes when things seems impossible there is the simplest solution waiting to be found.  Robin Cupell is a dog trainer at La Chateau, she is also busy looking for a solution to Animal Control's extremely high kill rate.  Just 20% of the dogs that go in ever come back out alive.  Thousands of animals are killed every year in Amarillo.

"At first it's a little overwhelming and devastating. And then you just take a look at it and realize you can do something about it. And there's enough people in this community that want to see some change." says Cupell.

Cupell founded the Texas Panhandle Pet Savers, a non-profit that takes dogs off the euthanasia list at the city shelter and puts them in a foster home.  From there she adopts them out to their. . .hopefully. . .forever home. 

"We're a bridge from the Humane Society to a family looking for a pet. We wash them and love them and make them ready to go to another home," says TPPS volunteer Mary Haddad.

"We're trying to bring a movement to Amarillo. We're trying to improve this, we want to see these animals get into homes. There's enough homes out there. We just have to take a little time to look for them," says Cupell. 

"Perfectly lovable, adoptable, adorable dogs like Heidi would've been already euthanized," says Haddad.

At the same time Cupell is asking the city commissioners to make changes to the Animal Control and Humane Society policy of killing animals within 72 hours of them entering the shelter if they are not adopted.

"We want them to appoint an animal advisory board, so this board or commission would really look into some programs that could be implemented through Animal Control that could increase the amount of animals that are coming out alive. . .we thought you know not the exact same thing is going to work for every city, but we thought they could determine what would work best for Amarillo," says Cupell.  

Until then. . .Cupell will continue to lean on her team of foster parents.

 "I wanna keep everyone of them but when I meet the families I'm like okay I can let them go with that family," says Eades.

And she continues to hope her team grows as more people learn about the Texas Panhandle Pet Savers' mission.

"In the very near future I see us cutting that euthanasia rate in half. In the not so distant future we could get us down to maybe 10 or 15 percent of animals being put down instead of the 80 percent being put down right now," says Cupell.