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The Brownsville Animal Regulation and Care Center’s mission of trying to find homes for the city’s huge population of homeless dogs and cats in its charge is a monumental undertaking, one that requires more resources than BARCC has.
That’s the reason for the animal shelter’s inaugural Toast to Tails Gala, scheduled for Nov. 4 at 6 p.m. at the Brownsville Events Center, during National Shelter Appreciation Week.
BARCC is working hard to get the word out about the event with the aim of selling hundreds more tickets and attracting the necessary number of sponsors to make it a success, while raising money for shelter’s critical operations and programs, shining a light on BARCC’s mission of saving innocent lives, and celebrating recent wins.
That’s according to Dr. Antonio Caldwell, who joined the city of Brownsville as deputy director of animal services in the spring.
“More often than not as we’re doing our community events, we’re finding out that a lot of people don’t even know that there’s a shelter in Brownsville,” he said.
BARCC hasn’t had an event like this at least since the current shelter was constructed in 2005, Caldwell said, adding that a major goal of “Toast to Tails” is creating awareness of — and filling — the essential needs the shelter has to be able to care for the 300-plus animals it houses at its facility, which is actually in Olmito. The issue of unwanted animals is a big problem that’s not getting smaller, he said.
“The number of homeless pets definitely isn’t decreasing, and we do need some community support to begin to kind of chip away at that in a bigger way in terms of low-cost spay and neuter clinics … and vaccine clinics that we’re hoping to start offering,” Caldwell said. “All those things we’ll be able to start doing in some capacity, even in a small capacity, with events like this raising additional funds and awareness.”
Ideally, the gala will raise enough money for BARCC to be able to buy additional vaccines for more vaccine clinics to help city residents keep their pets healthy, and support additional low-cost spay-and-neuter programs, he said.
The high incidence of residents not spaying/neutering their pets is why Brownsville has so many unwanted dogs and cats, Caldwell said.
“That’s definitely the crux of it all but it’s also the biggest rock for us to move, is to provide adequate low-cost spay-and-neuter to our community of almost 200,000 people,” he said. “That’s definitely a bigger hurdle for us to get over, but we are working on it. That’s top of my list.”
It’s going to take the community has a whole stepping up and “a lot of resources to make it happen,” Caldwell said.
Space is another issue: BARCC could definitely use more of it.
“I think for the community sometimes it’s hard to understand how the shelter operates, but yes, we only have a limited number of spaces,” Caldwell said. “And when more animals come in than spaces that we have, that’s when we have to make those very tough decisions, to potentially euthanize for space.”
On the plus side, the shelter has dramatically increased its “save rate” over the last 12 months, from around 26% this time last year to 75% to 78% today, he said. While a year ago BARCC was forced to euthanize 300 to 500 animals a month, nowadays it’s typically 50 or fewer per month, Caldwell said.
“More animals are leaving alive,” he said. “They’re finding happy homes. They’re staying longer. What a difference a year makes, but we can’t keep those numbers that high if we don’t have the adequate space,” he said. “We have acreage behind our shelter that we hope will be the location of additional kennels so that we could house more animals.”
Sponsorships for Toast to Tails range from $500 for Bronze to $25,000 for Signature. The event will also feature raffles, dinner, live music, a pet fashion show and adoptable animals. Individual tickets are $100, about 100 of which have been sold so far, though Caldwell is hoping to sell more like 300 or 400. There are also plenty of sponsorships still available, he said.
“We still have quite a bit,” Caldwell said. “Ticket sales are slowly moving. I don’t know if it’s potentially just kind of the Brownsville way, where people buy kind of last minute, but we’re still pushing very hard for sponsorships, both table sponsorships and the seven auction items. And then we still have lots of individual tickets available.”
For complete details about the various sponsorship opportunities or to buy individual tickets, visit AToastToTails.eventbrite.com.
