Changes are coming to the Manteca Animal Shelter, slowly but surely.

The City Council this week approved additional hours for a part-time kennel worker.

The $10,000 mid-year budget adjustment will provide 440 additional hours to allow the kennel worker to do what they can to coordinate with rescue groups to place dogs that haven’t adapted to avoid situations where healthy animals have to be euthanized.

And while Mayor Gary Singh noted that there needs to be even more hours set aside by the city for those purposes as well as other expenditures made, it is a need that is competing with other pressing city concerns.

The council action Tuesday comes on the heels of the city launching two programs aimed at reducing kennel stress, increasing the possibility of dogs being able to be adopted, as well as to collect information on their behavior to provide better matching with prospective owners.

One is a foster program to take a dog home overnight or for multiple days. The other involves volunteers who are willing to take dogs for walks.

The goal is to get them away from being locked up in kennels all day that can lead to them to develop behavior that is counterproductive for them to be candidates for adoption.

The inaugural day of the doggie walking volunteers program saw 20 participants — community members as well as city staff including Interim Police Chief Stephen Schluer whose department oversees animal services — take dogs out for exercise and to explore.

Schluer, who took his pet Welsh terrier Kurle several days afterwards to the city’s dog park, noted there were two doggie walk volunteers there at the same time who were exercising animal shelter dogs and helping them relieve stress.

The foster program also allows the city to create additional capacity in the animal service system to hold animals while they are working to get them adopted.

The city also has formed a Friends of the Manteca Animal Shelter group. Community members are being urged to join it or simply drop by to volunteer when they can to take dogs for a walk.

The city is working toward a goal of being as close to a no-kill shelter they can get.

Officials noted there are times such as when the health of an animal has deteriorated to a certain point that euthanizing is an appropriate option. What they want to do is work toward avoiding situations were kennel conditions or the fact the shelter is at capacity puts them in the position of having to euthanize otherwise healthy animals.

In 2022, Manteca’s shelter took in 1,982 animals. That included 862 dogs, 993 cats, and 315 others such as chickens and pot belly pigs.

Of those, 1,982 were from Lathrop.

Now that the City of Lathrop’s contract with the city has expired given they now have their own shelter, that means additional shelter capacity is now available.

Even so, last year 101 dogs and 315 cats had to be euthanized. Some of those euthanized were due to a severe deterioration in health.

Overall, there was an 88.3 percent success rate of dogs avoiding the need to be euthanized given they were adopted or taken by a rescue group. The cat placement rate for 2022 was 67 percent.

The 88.3 percent success rate for dog placement in 2022 is a marked increase from 75 percent in 2008.

In raw numbers gleaned from by annual reports over the years, the actual numbers of dogs euthanized each year by the City of Manteca has been dropping.

 In 2002, there were 241 stray dogs euthanized compared to 234 in 2010 and 282 in 2012. There were 101 dogs euthanized in 2022.

 Cats didn’t fare as well. They were 776 stray cats put to sleep in 2002, 911 in 2010, and 934 in 2012. The number of cats euthanized in 2022 was 315.

The city is now in the process of working with East of Eden that is helping provide low cost spay and neutering services using a $65,000 grant. The goal is to reduce the number of feral cats in Manteca.

The city in 2018 spent $424,446 on animal services. By 2022 the budget had increased only to $448,337.

This year’s budget of $550,968 includes obtaining grant funds for spay and neuter efforts as well as helping pay for medical needs.

The city only has a $1,800 medical budget for animal services.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com