PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Animal shelters are seeing a spike in adoptions in part because of people spending more time at home because of the pandemic. Even many hard to place animals are finding loving homes, including one recently adopted dog saved from a South Korean meat farm.
Mira is a 5-year-old black Labrador mix. She spent about a year at the Brandywine Valley SPCA in West Chester after being rescued from South Korea.
"She was saved from a Korean dog meat farm. Came over to us, spent a year in our shelter learning to trust people, get used to walking on a leash," said Linda Torelli, with the BVSPCA.
It was love at first sight for empty nesters Jonathan Smolowe and his wife Beth, of Elkins Park. They adopted Mira last weekend.
"And she’s coming around and its going to take months before the fear is totally gone. It may take years. But she has already turned into a loving family animal so we are thrilled to death. We are thrilled to death," he said.
"Apparently what they do is they breed them," Smolowe added. "The minute the breeding is over, they breed them again. And they just keep breeding them and it reeks havoc on them and when they can’t breed anymore because their bodies just give out, they just basically discard them."
The BVSPCA had a 20% increase in pet adoptions overall in 2020. They've been has been getting creative to get the more hard to place dogs exposed to families and adopted.
They recently found homes for nearly 30 dogs that participated in their holiday sleepover program. The dogs were temporary guests at people's homes during the last week of December. Many of the dogs in the program have been at the shelter for a while, including older dogs and dogs like Mira, that had been severely abused before rescue.