PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A major technological improvement will help make diagnosis and treatment much less expensive for Philadelphia's only open animal intake shelter. With a donation from a New York-based foundation, the Animal Care and Control Team of Philadelphia, or ACCT Philly, has opened a radiology suite at its Hunting Park facility.
“I knew that there was a lot of suffering among the animal population here, because they did not have their own radiology equipment,” said Philip Randal, vice president of the Irving and Phyllis Millstein Foundation for Animal Welfare.
“I also knew that they would be spending tens of thousands of dollars each year without it, that could be used to help other animals in other ways. Plus, the staff was taken off-site and had to stay with the animals in waiting rooms and not here to help other animals.“
Marsha Perelman, the co-chair of the Board of Directors at ACCT Philly, says improvements to services at the city’s only open animal intake shelter have been extraordinary over the past few years.
“The city has been very helpful in giving us a more appropriate budget than we had years ago. We have almost 50% more space than we had three years ago. And piece by piece this building, which was never designed to hold animals, is becoming one in which animals can actually be very well cared for,” Perelman said.
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“To have this piece of equipment right now is just a giant leap forward in what is otherwise still a very concerted effort to make this building appropriate for the animals that come in here every year.”
Thousands of dollars was spent to diagnose and to treat a dog that was recently in the shelter’s care. The new radiology machine will change all of that.
“She had eaten something she shouldn’t have and we had to send her off-site. And they did an x-ray and they saw some screws and they had to do surgery. And they took out seven pounds of material, which is insane. She could not have stayed here, with needing that,” said Sarah Barnett, the executive director of ACCT Philly.
“But, we have that machine. We can do that x-ray here and we can see that and say ‘Okay this is what it is, this is what they need.’ We can schedule it, find a foster, instead of sending them offsite and spending four or $5,000 that can now be used for other needs that are really urgent.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated ACCT was based in Yardley. It is based in New York.
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