Dog hops over wall at Minneapolis shelter to be with puppy pal
UPDATE: The two dogs featured in this story have been adopted ... as a pair.
MINNEAPOLIS – A cement wall wasn't enough to keep a pair of pups apart.
Video from inside Minneapolis Animal Care and Control (MACC) shows a brown dog climb over the wall at the shelter so she could hang out with her buddy in the next kennel over.
Brenda and Linda came in at the same time -- and now they're inseparable. And MACC hopes the pair leave together, too.
"Me and another employee were walking through the kennels, and we walked by and we had to like triple take, like, what's going on, because two pitties came to the front of the kennel to greet us, and we were like, 'What?'" said MACC's Madison Weissenborn.
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Security camera footage cracked the case.
"We knew that they had to be together," Weissenborn said.
Brenda climbed her way over the wall to join her pal, Linda.
"We rewatched the video that we have, and I about died. I was like this is truly magnificent," she said.
The pair came in as strays to MACC two weeks ago, where the shelter has been near capacity. Weissenborn says adoptions are down and surrenders are up 20% from 2022, which was a record-setting year.
"I would say the majority of our cases are due to housing. So either people moving away, moving into places that don't allow specific breeds," she said. "We're seeing people experiencing homelessness that didn't before and are just in hard times."
Surrenders aren't the biggest challenge at the Animal Humane Society. It's a shortage of vet techs.
"We probably have about two-thirds of our vet tech staffing compared to what we had pre-pandemic for the same number of buildings, which means we can't help the same number of animals," said Dr. Graham Brayshaw, AHS's director of veterinary medicine.
Large dog adoptions have slowed some, too, which is part of a trend seen nationwide.
"We all heard of the COVID dog, COVID puppy, and potentially if everyone who was thinking of adopting a dog in the next few years got them at the beginning of COVID, you're gonna see those adoption numbers spike, and you got to see them drop before they level out again," Brayshaw said.
At MACC, there's no fee for adopting dogs 7 months or older.
"We know it's not gonna be easy to find them placement together, but we would love it if we could," Weissenborn said.
So consider Linda and Brenda a package deal.
All adoption fees will be waived this weekend at MACC's shelter. If you can't adopt, you may want to consider fostering, donating, or volunteering at your local animal shelter.