Aireworth Dogs In Need, Keighley: Yorkshire pet rescue forced to turn down dogs due to being at full capacity for first time in its nine-year history

With the combination of a significant increase in dogs being given up for adoption and a considerable reduction in foster applications being filled out, Aireworth Dogs In Need has had to make the devastating decision to put a temporary halt on accepting any new admissions.

A foster-based rescue has no kennels and doesn’t have a centre and its rehoming process consists of taking in a dog, assessing it to understand if it can acclimate with other dogs, children or with cats.

Then volunteers at the rescue will gauge whether it can be left alone and what kind of home it needs, before finding it a temporary foster home.

Chairperson at the charity in Keighley, Caroline Porter, told The Yorkshire Post the decision to put a temporary stop to accepting dogs in has been a tough one to make.

“This is the first time in our almost 10 year history that we had to close the doors to accepting any more dogs in,” she said.

“On a very regular basis now we’re getting emails, phone calls, messages from people asking us to find a new home for their dog for lots of different reasons; previously we might have been able to say yes or bare with us or we’ll come and assess them but we had to take a temporary stand and say no.

“We’re full. We’re not accepting new dogs. We’ve got no capacity.

“We won’t even add you to a waiting list. We just need to say at this point in time we can’t help because we are just beyond our capacity.

“We’re nine years old this year, it’ll be our 10-year anniversary next year and during that time we’ve helped almost a thousand dogs.

“I think we’re on 996 at the moment and we never had to do this before and it was a very difficult and emotional decision to come to because obviously the reason we all volunteer - and we are all volunteers, nobody is paid at all - is because we want to help dogs in need and we want to help owners who are having crises that might need our help but we just don’t have the capacity.

“So it was quite a tough decision for us for lots of different reasons, it was necessary.”

She also explained how volunteers had been sworn at with pressure building recently.

“Another reason we took the decision when we did was we’d had a particularly bad week where our volunteer who answers the charity phone had been sworn at and shouted at by a chap who phoned saying ‘I need to rehome a dog, I need you to come and get it now!’”, she added.

“We can’t do that; we need to assess the dog, we need to understand what it needs, we literally have nowhere to put it. He was so abusive and called her all the names under the sun.”

There are lots of complex reasons why the charity has had to make this difficult decision, according to Ms Porter, one of them being the huge boom in dog ownership that occurred during lockdown at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020; the huge increase in people wanting a dog meant that the rescue struggled to keep up with the demand, the same people changed their minds and this has resulted in a surge of dogs being given up.

The current cost of living crisis has also been a factor as people are struggling to keep up financially.

Ms Porter explained that the housing crisis has been a significant contributor to the charity’s current situation.

“People are not being able to find suitable properties. It feels to us like perhaps an increase in evictions and we know that the chances of finding a private rental property that will allow pets is just so difficult and that’s one of our biggest challenges,” she said.

“We get a real proportion of people contacting us to say, ‘I’m losing my property, I'm being made homeless. I’ve been looking for weeks and weeks for somewhere that will allow me to bring my pet with me and I can’t find anywhere and so therefore I have got to give the dog up’.”

A number of factors contributed to the considerable reduction in people adopting dogs including the impulsive decision to adopt dogs during the 2020 lockdown and the cost of living crisis.

However, the charity is struggling to understand why it's getting a reduction in applications for people to foster.

“We have a small army of amazing volunteers who take those dogs into their homes, assess them, really get to know them, whilst we then find a more permanent home.

“While the dogs are in foster care, we as a rescue pay for everything; we pay for vet bills, we pay for the food, we provide leads and collars, treats and toys, anything the dog needs, we cover the cost.

“We also offer behavioural support from professional behaviourists to help the dogs the best way possible. One of the reasons we’ve had to temporarily shut is that we just can’t recruit fosterers; we just can’t get people to come forward to offer that temporary stop-gap for the dog to function. For the last nine years we’ve always been constantly recruiting.

“What we would need or would help us is if we had more people come forward who would help to foster, in the immediate term, that would make a difference on a day-to-day basis.”