Humane Society shelter gives cast-off canines a better chance to escape death or exile

As Janine Budgell opens the door, the squall of wailing dogs is at first a shock to the ears.

Budgell is visiting the Iqaluit Humane Society's new shelter for the second of what will be four times this day. Opened late last month, the shelter shares space with the city's new dog pound in an industrial area off Federal Road.

Budgell, the society's president, and volunteer Pauline Schipper are here to let the shelter's 10 current residents – all dogs – out for a little exercise and to relieve themselves. These dogs are healthy and happy, unlike some of the dogs that live in the pound.

"If these dogs were in the pound there would be nobody to exercise them," Budgell says.

The new building has more space than the dilapidated old structure near Baffin Correctional Centre that used to house the pound. The room allows the Humane Society to have its own space for the first time, and that means healthy dogs that are prime candidates for adoption no longer have to be flown to Ottawa or put down.

It also frees up city bylaw staff to deal with more problematic dogs and separate the healthy from the sick, as Budgell puts it.

"We work really close [with the bylaw department]," she says. "With the new facility it'll be even easier."

The two grown dogs currently residing at the pound, a purebred Canadian Inuit dog, and a giant, exuberant Newfoundland-Husky cross, clearly need the workout.

Locked in big cages for hours at a time, the dogs bound out of their cages and once leashed, pull hard on their leads, giving Budgell and Schipper workouts of their own.

The volunteers also take care of a litter of eight mutt puppies that were found under a house, abandoned by their mother.

They squeal and wail and burst out of their cages when Budgell frees them, and it doesn't take long before puddles of urine and piles of feces to start appearing on the floor.

Budgell is up front with new volunteers: you will clean up poop. But it hasn't stopped Schipper, a self-proclaimed animal lover, from offering up her time to help out.

"I've seen a lot of mistreated or malnourished animals" since coming to Iqaluit a year ago, Schipper says. "Here, more than anywhere, we need a humane society."

Despite that need, the society still doesn't have the money to intervene on behalf of the roughly 2,600 pet animals that live in Iqaluit, Budgell says.

But volunteers do go into local schools to help teach kids how to avoid confrontations with dangerous dogs and the society teams up with the Rotary Club to bring veterinarians to town twice a year.

They'd also like to offer regular spaying and neutering, but Iqaluit's one resident vet doesn't have a space to perform surgeries, Budgell says.

And besides, the $400 cost of spaying or neutering one animal buys enough dog food to feed 25 animals for a month.

In the meantime, the society is relying on donations of materials and labour to bring their new space up to snuff, with a floor specially designed to collect and dispose of urine and a wider door to admit larger kennel cages. Plans are also in the works for a separate room to house either cats or mother dogs with newborn litters.

Budgell also says the society is looking for volunteers. Anyone interested can call 222-1300.

If you don't want to clean up poop, the society happily accepts donations.