Ruff Haven: Help For Homeless Pets
(KSL/NBC News) For Lauren Langley, her cats are family.
“I am already the crazy cat lady,” she says.
She got Flo from the Humane Society.
“Anytime I’d pack a suitcase, she was on my suitcase telling me not to go,” Langley says.
Peaches was an orphan.
“She was actually a street cat, found as a kitten at just 4 weeks old, pretty much just skin and bones,” she says.
Langley gave them both a loving home. Then she fell on hard times herself, made worse by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Started with my job. I lost my job, just couldn’t afford our apartment, bills, day care, really anything,” Langley says. “So, just kind of one thing after another, lost almost everything.”
If not for a new Salt Lake City nonprofit, Ruff Haven, she might have lost her cats, too.
“I’ve been going crazy without them,” Langley said.
Langley hasn’t seen them in three months, but she knew they were safe.
“They’re everything to them,” says Kristina Pulsipher, a social worker and co-founder of Ruff Haven.
She saw the need for a free pet shelter for people with medical or substance abuse issues, or who are homeless.
“We’ve definitely seen an increase in situations where clients have lost their jobs, or have been evicted, and have really struggled to find a place and they don’t want to lose their pet,” she says.
Ruff Haven provides 60 to 90 days of temporary sheltering at a boarding facility or a foster home. The group is keeping pets out of animal shelters and reuniting them with their owners.
“To see them go and recognize them again, and go back to them again, it’s just like this whole other level,” Pulsipher says “It’s been wonderful to kind of see that.”
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