Renovations Usher in New Era for Kent Animal Shelter in Calverton

Established nearly 50 years ago by a dedicated group of humanitarians, Kent Animal Shelter has become a steadfast refuge for abused, abandoned, and homeless animals. As a private nonprofit humane society, the shelter has helped thousands of animals leave behind lives of pain and find love and care. Through its rescue and adoption programs, Kent provides food, shelter, medical care, lifesaving surgeries, and permanent microchip identification for animals in crisis.

Kent has been going through renovations lately, costing a total of $4.3 million. Dan’s Papers sat down with executive director Pamela Green, who has been with the shelter for 39 years, to discuss what Kent does as well as what those renovations will mean for the historic animal shelter.

How did you come to be involved with Kent Animal Shelter?

I came here basically right out of college, and they had a search application for an executive director. My degree was in biological sciences. I graduated from Cornell from and I was in the Animal Science program as well. So, oh, wow, yeah, so, you know, I came here in 1985 and basically interviewed, and it was not really operating at that point. They were considering filing for bankruptcy and closing it down. But they thought they’d have a last ditch effort and hire someone that could maybe get the operation going again. I took the position, and they really had very little money at that point. I started fundraising. The clinic was closed at the time when I came here because they didn’t have veterinarians, and it was always a low cost spay and neuter clinic. So that was the mission, part of the mission of the shelter. So, I hired a veterinarian, and I had some animal hospital experience at that point, because I had worked, you know, part time in an animal hospital while I was in college.

So you basically saved Kent from the brink of folding, right?

Yeah. They also had very few animals here at the time, so we started bringing in animals. You know, back then, there were a lot of municipal shelters that were jam packed with puppies – and kind of like what it is in the South now – puppies. We get a lot of puppies from down South. Back then, started taking dogs in from the municipal shelters and spaying and neutering a lot. We had a pretty progressive program for spaying and neutering, and it really worked. I think Kent was instrumental in helping with the overpopulation of animals on Long Island, because people come from all over because it is less expensive. And so we spayed and neutered so many, we don’t see litters of puppies getting dropped off at animal shelters or high euthanasia rates anymore. There’s still overpopulation. There’s a lot of, you know, unfortunately, pit bulls in the shelters, and they’re difficult to place. That being said, we do between 600 and 650 adoptions a year.

Kent has been closed recently for renovations. What do those renovations entail?

For the past 20 years – the shelter was built in 1968 – the kennel was the old cement block building. This place is a campus of buildings that all have different functions. And so over time, of course, the buildings deteriorated. And for the past 20 years, we we were trying to build new facilities, but we really had a lot of roadblocks, because the Town of Riverhead doesn’t have zoning for animal shelters. And so, we weren’t allowed to expand or relocate, because there just weren’t other properties in the town. The zoning was always an issue, and we also had the Pine Barrens Society that didn’t want us. They fought us every step of the way, because they really didn’t want us to touch a blade of grass. So we had that, we had the zoning issues, and finally we came up with a plan that all parties were agreeable to. And that brings us to now, when, in May of this year, we started knocking down buildings and building new stuff.

So these renovations have been 20 years in the making?

Yes. We’re getting a new kennel, and that used to house about 25 dogs, and we really didn’t have any puppy facilities in there or anything. We had, like, one room with a chain link gate on it, and that’s where we put puppies. And there were maybe 25 adults that could go out there. And that was pretty much it for that building as far as the utilization of the new building, it’s actually on the same footprint, but totally redesigned. So between then we have a separate building that’s an isolation building, which we didn’t have before. Between the two buildings, we’ll have 32 dog runs, so we’re able to accommodate more animals, and there will also be bonding rooms in there that people could, you know, sit and potential adopters could get to know a dog or a puppy. And so we have that, and then we have two big puppy rooms, or could also be used for small dogs. We’re actually going to have a lobby. We didn’t have that before. We’ll have indoor and outdoor dog runs, and we’ll have dog play yards out back there. The isolation building will also have a large treatment room, and there’ll be rooms in there for cat quarantine. So the idea of that building is that when new animals come in, they can go in there, rather than being introduced right into the general population. In fact, in January of next year, New York State has a new law coming out, the animals have to be quarantined. So the whole building project is $4.3 million. We’ve had fundraisers and grants from both New York State and Suffolk County.

When will the renovations be complete?

I’m going to say that the isolation building will be the first one to get done, and I would say that we would finish it sometime over the winter or early spring. In the meantime, our dogs are over at Bideawee in Westhampton, and we do adoptions out of there, but the cats are still in this facility. There’s a separate property right next door. We have a house over there, and then the clinic. It’s still on this property, so it’s still open and functioning.

What are some of the present-day challenges of running an animal shelter?

Pitbulls are overbred, there are just too many of them.  I had heard at one time they were going to try to pass a law that you couldn’t breed them. But, you know, even if that, people would be doing it underground or whatever. So there’s just a lot of them, and as I mentioned, they’re difficult to place, so when they get into a shelter, the chances of them getting out are not great. Yeah, you know, they don’t destroy a lot of these shelters. Now, don’t you know, they don’t really destroy animals unless there’s one that’s, you know, very aggressive and something like that, yeah. People are also a little reluctant to take them. You’ll see every once in a while that some pitbull mauled somebody. But they’re not all like, of course. There’s very nice ones, and we’ve had them here and they just take a while to get adopted. People just have some of the wrong information on them.

Kent Animal Shelter is located at 2259 River Road in Calverton and can be reached at 631-727-5731 or kentanimalshelter.com