Joplin, MO pets

Does anyone know what's being done to help the pets of displaced people in Joplin, MO? There has got to be a lot of people staying in shelters and with friends and can't keep their pets with them. I wanted to offer to foster a couple of cats for a displaced family but I can't find out anything about such a program being set up or if there is even a need for it. I emailed the Humane Society in Joplin but haven't heard back. Anyone know anything?

There are a lot of rescue groups in the Kansas City area that are working to help them. I'm seeing the information on Facebook and on the yahoo e-mail group for KC animal rescue. I'll look for some specific requests and post them here. I've volunteered to transport animals up here if they need help. Haven't heard any specifics on that yet.

I just did a quick scan and found the following.

Joplin Humane Society has set up a temporary shelter that can house up to 1200 animals. Their focus right now is on reuniting pets with their owners. Contacting them directly to offer help isn't a good idea, as they are being inundated with offers of help. Someone made a comment that they couldn't get to their "volunteer" page on their website. I suspect they took it down rather than try to keep up with it.

Both Kansas City and St. Louis are sending in food donations, kennels and volunteers to help with the situation.

One area that was being neglected was the caretaking of feral cat colonies. Alley Cat Allies is trying to coordinate activities on that, so that these cats don't go hungry.

From the looks of the pictures on their facebook page, it appears that they have a huge amount of donated food on hand. There was also a picture of a large stack of pet kennels. Until they can get beyond the immediate need of reuniting pets with their owners, they won't know how many pets will need to be put up for adoption.

If you go to their facebook page (just search for Joplin Humane Society) and "like" them, a business is donating 10 cents for every new like.

If you want to help, I would suspect they need monetary donations more than anything right now. They are housing a lot of animals (hopefully short term), and will have a lot more animals than normal longer term. While cities like Kansas City and St. Louis will transport animals to help place the ones where the owners could not be found, they still have a huge expense in the mean time.

I could not find any information on whether their shelter was damaged and needed repairs. I do know that the temporary shelter was set up to manage all of the displaced pets right not.

I'll post more if I hear specifics.

Thank you! What I was hoping to do was to foster a couple of owned cats that have a family but where the family can't care for them temporarily. I know there was a huge need for that during the floods in Indiana a few years ago. People had to leave their homes and stay in shelters where pets were not allowed so they had to go to the animal shelter. I'm sure it has to be horrible losing your home and having to worry about your pets' safety too. Hopefully with enough resources in Joplin there won't be a need for that though. They should have learned something after Katrina where people were forced to leave their pets behind.

If you live in the Kansas City metro, like Momofmany said, there are definitely ways you can help- either through manpower or donations! I've got a bit of money I'm going to send- it's not a lot, but every little bit counts, and I'd rather donate some than none at all. Please keep all the people doing these good works in your thoughts and prayers!

Unfortunately I'm all the way up in Chicago so there isn't much I can do to help. I checked the HS Facebook site and they have a foster sign up page for people interested in fostering. Fortunately there seems to be a lot of people signing up to foster that are closer than I am so maybe there isn't going to be a shortage of help. It's great to see that so many people are stepping up to help. I'm going to keep an eye on their Facebook site and see if a need arises for temp foster homes and if so I'll contact them then.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the Joplin HS is in a big need of Frontline for cats and dogs so if anyone wants to help them out with that they can send it to the shelter.

I'm giving this a little bump so that folks don't forget all of the poor babies in Joplin. It looks like they are adding more photos of the lost pets on their Facebook wall, and it made me cry looking at all the poor cats without their owners. Poor babies are mostly in the types of carriers that you use to transport a cat to the vets. They appear to be pretty desperate for larger cages.