Bowling Green Warren County Humane Society seeing increase in parvo cases

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – The Bowling Green-Warren County Humane Society has seen a recent spike in parvo cases, with very few infected dogs surviving.

“So we have seen in the last three weeks about 40 cases of parvo, and I would say 85, maybe 90% of those are coming from the public,” adoption counselor Katlyn Hare says.

The humane society has noticed it’s mainly from dogs being dropped off at the shelter.

“Obviously, we do see that virus here in the shelter just because we are such a high-intake facility. It’s impossible to deter every single illness and every disease here in a shelter. But we are doing free vaccines, and that is the only way to prevent this virus, which is deadly. We had a litter of 11 puppies come in a couple Sundays ago, and only three or four of the litter survived, so it’s not a joke. It’s very, very serious,” Hare says.

This is not a centralized issue to just the humane society, even though they’ve had drop offs after the shelter is closed for the day.

“We’ve received calls anywhere from our business hours to 11:00 at night, 2:00 in the morning about people coming in, meeting one of our staff members here because their animal has parvo, and it’s not just Bowling Green. We have people from out of county coming to see us. Obviously, we’re a low-cost clinic, so we’re doing everything we can to protect these animals because not everybody can afford to go through this treatment with a clinic, which we completely understand, and we admire those vets for even being willing to treat that case or those cases as well,” Hare says.

The main solution is to drop them by the humane society to get a vaccine before it’s too late, but there are some other tips as well.

“Any puppy that you have that is not fully vaccinated, which would require four vaccines, they are going to be three weeks spread apart. Here in a shelter environment, we have them two weeks spread apart, and it is super, super important until your dog is fully vaccinated with all four of those vaccines that they’re not going to the dog park. You’re not taking them to Petco to walk around, PetSmart to walk around, things like that. I know it’s very difficult with puppies not to let them outside, but it’s crucial to save their lives,” Hare says.