Cities invest millions in new municipal animal shelters
by Sharon Bishop-Baldwin
Across Oklahoma, new state-of-the-art municipal animal shelters are proliferating almost as quickly as the stray and feral animals they’re built to serve.
At least five cities, including the state’s two largest, are investing millions of dollars into new facilities to help their animal welfare officials try to get a handle on pet overpopulation in their communities.
The effort is multipronged: keep up the messaging about the importance of spaying and neutering; ensure that animals in shelters are at their most adoptable — healthy and well-adjusted; and create a shelter environment that makes would-be adopters want to be there.
Tulsa Animal Services Director Sherri Carrier said her current shelter can be “overwhelming,” with scores of dogs all barking loudly in the cramped, dilapidated space.
The new shelter, which will nearly double the agency’s space, will offer “a better atmosphere for people and animals to meet each other. We don’t have that currently. … This is going to be warm and inviting and will have a lot more calmness for the animals and the people coming in and will allow them to make a connection,” Carrier said.
Moore Animal Welfare Director Stephanie Adams-Hawkins said the “No. 1 benefit to having a new facility is that it’s welcoming.”
“We’re no longer a dog pound,” she said. “We’re a welfare center. We should be a triage center moving animals ‘through’ the building.
“Shelters are no place for animals. They need to be moving through the building and out to adoptive homes. We want animal welfare centers where you can come to decompress and see animals and love them and adopt them.”
The amenities the new shelters feature are virtually identical: multiple entry points to welcome potential adopters separately from intake areas for animals that could be ill or have behavior issues; isolation areas; expansive kennel areas, with dogs and cats occupying separate spaces; “get-to-know” rooms, where people can visit privately with animals they’re considering adopting; outdoor play areas and kennel space; outdoor cat enclosures; dedicated areas for laundry, food preparation and grooming; adequate office space for staff, plus kitchen facilities not used for animal care; a conference room for meetings or continuing education; and medical facilities that allow staff to do more care in-house.
If that sounds amazing, consider where they’re coming from. These new shelters are replacing facilities at least 25 years old; most are more than 40 years old.
“There are definitely a lot of upgrades that we don’t have at our current shelter,” said Sand Springs Animal Welfare Director Coty Vincent, “but having more space to accommodate what we need to be doing for our community, as far as the people and the pets, this is definitely something that’s going to make that more possible now.”
But what was the simultaneous impetus for all of this change?
“I think it’s long overdue, and I think just one shelter needed to be the spark to get other municipalities to realize that people care about their animals,” Stillwater Animal Welfare Supervisor Rachel Wasserman said.
“I think we’re having a really big shift in the animal welfare world where we’re focusing on education and keeping pets in the home and on spaying and neutering” as well as making the shelter “a more welcoming place where people want to go to adopt instead of going to a store to shop.”
Size Matters
Oklahoma City Animal Welfare: All 70,000 square feet of the new Louisa McCune Animal Welfare Center is expected to open late this year or early next year on the same property as the current 47,000-square-foot shelter at Southeast 29th Street and Bryant Avenue. The massive $42 million shelter was funded through a voter-approved MAPS 4 sales-tax initiative.
Tulsa Animal Services: A new 24,000-square-foot shelter is being built on 3.5 acres at 5995 E. 36th Street North. At nearly twice the size of the current 14,000-square-foot, 1970s-era shelter, the new shelter was funded through $13.8 million in city voter-approved monies through the Improve Our Tulsa capital improvements program. Construction is expected to be complete by this fall.
Moore Animal Welfare: At 15,000 square feet, Moore’s new animal shelter is nearly five times the size of its previous shelter, which was built around the turn of the century. Residents in November 2021 voted 2-1 for an $8.2 million general-obligation bond proposal to fund the shelter, which sits on 1.6 acres west of Interstate 35 south of Southwest 34th Street. It opened in April 2024.
Stillwater Animal Welfare: Stillwater’s new 12,000-square-foot shelter will be more than triple the size of the current 1984-era shelter. Residents in April 2025 voted 3-1 for an $8.75 million general-obligation bond package to build a new shelter, which is expected to open in the winter of 2027. The shelter is near the airport and just two miles from Oklahoma State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
Sand Springs Animal Welfare: With about 7,500 square feet of indoor and outdoor space, Sand Springs’ new shelter is more than double the size of the one its Animal Welfare staff outgrew several decades ago. Nearly two-thirds of city voters in June 2022 supported a general-obligation bond proposal to allocate $3.1 million to build the new shelter, which is west of Case Community Park on Wekiwa Road.
