Daily Herald opinion: DuPage animal shelter gets expansion worthy of its mission

DuPage County Animal Services has made remarkable progress over the past two decades.

Long forgotten are the days in the mid-2000s when the department — then known as Animal Care and Control — faced heavy scrutiny for its treatment of animals and high euthanasia numbers.

Changes in policy and philosophy improved the open-admission shelter in Wheaton and have helped save more animals. The live-release rate at the facility has steadily increased over the last decade to 92% in 2023.

However, the aging building itself had long struggled with chronic overcrowding. So, after years of planning and fundraising, county officials broke ground last May on a roughly $14 million project to expand and renovate the shelter along Manchester Road.

The result has been inspiring.

As senior writer Katlyn Smith highlighted in a story last week, the shelter has about doubled in size with a 10,000-square-foot addition. It now features cat condos, additional dog kennels and a main lobby with high ceilings, creating a more welcoming environment for animals and visitors.

A gym room allows outgoing cats to roam freely outside their cages. A detached “real-life room” gives dogs a break from their kennels and helps them reduce stress.

Laura Flamion, the interim administrator of DuPage County Animal Services, noted that creating spaces designed to resemble a home environment has become a trend in animal sheltering.

“Usually people just take like a small office and throw a chair and a table and a rug in there,” Flamion said. “But we actually have a full building separate from the shelter, which is nice because it separates that animal from the noise and smells and everything else happening.”

The addition also offers a dedicated room for small animals, including rabbits and guinea pigs. A spacious multipurpose room could host educational events and serve as an indoor play area for dogs.

Meanwhile, extensive work is under way to transform the original building into a veterinary suite with separate areas for prep, surgeries and recovery.

All the building improvements will significantly benefit the more than 2,000 animals that the shelter takes in each year.

To make the project possible, officials raised money from multiple sources, including a $4.5 million interfund loan from the county’s general fund, roughly $2.6 million from the animal services reserve fund and more than $5.7 million from donors to DuPage Animal Friends, a nonprofit benefiting the shelter.

Thanks to the dedication of county officials and the generosity of private donors, DuPage County Animal Services will have an advanced facility that reflects its important mission to provide a second chance to homeless and abandoned animals.