Shelter Hits An All-Time High for Pets in 2025

As the holiday season ends, the entire team at Gardenia E. Janssen Animal Shelter (GJAS) wants to extend our deepest, most heartfelt gratitude for your unwavering support, compassion, and tireless efforts. As 2025 ends, your community shelter pauses to reflect on a year filled with honor, success, and some heartbreak while caring for the unwanted dogs and cats of Fayette County.

GJAS’s nonprofit mission is unique - it’s about public safety and animal welfare, something that touches every resident in a very real way. The challenges GJAS faces are very different from other nonprofits in our community, and the services provided are crucial to keeping our community and homeless dogs and cats healthy and safe.

In 2025, GJAS reached an all-time high number of 1,754 dogs and cats in need: an increase of 72 dogs and cats over 2024. It is not a milestone anyone hoped to achieve, yet it speaks to the stray animal crisis in our community. In total, GJAS provided care for 1,017 cats and 737 dogs, each one arriving with a different story, a different need, but all with the hope for a second chance.

The honor of this work lies in serving Fayette County through a vital public safety service. GJAS helps keep dogs and cats from running at large protecting your children riding bikes, playing in their own yard, safeguarding family pets and livestock, and preventing accidents before they happen. More importantly, it is an honor because helpless lives depend on GJAS for a warm, safe place while they wait for a family of their own to love.

The success of 2025 is found in saving 1,703 of the dogs and cats that found their way into the shelter’s care. It is reflected in the trust and involvement of the community— neighbors helping neighbors, volunteers giving their time, fosters opening their homes, and adopters choosing compassion. These helping hands come from all walks of life, but they share one common mission: helping those who cannot help themselves.

The heartbreak remains unavoidable. Not every story ends the way we wish it would. Each loss is felt deeply by staff and volunteers who give their hearts every day. These moments remind us why prevention, education, spay and neuter, and responsible pet ownership matter so much.

GJAS proudly serves the entire county. Fayette County citizens have many choices county-wide for doctors, dentists, restaurants, vehicle maintenance, groceries, or buying a car and much more. GJAS, however, is the only place to surrender a dog or cat in need, and the only animal shelter where families can adopt a new furry friend.

Animal shelter work is one of the most misunderstood jobs there is. While moments of playing with puppies and cuddling kittens do happen, they make up only a tiny fraction of the work. What most people never see are the heartbreaking decisions, the intake rooms filled with fear, injury, and neglect, and the emotional weight of staff and volunteers absorbing grief, guilt, anger, and desperation from the public— often all at once.

Shelter staff and volunteers work tirelessly to ensure safety, provide medical care, enrichment, advocate for animals with no voice, and maintain compassion despite exhaustion, burnout, and relentless demands. The constant cleaning of kennels, litter boxes, managing overwhelming volume of phone calls, texts, emails, and walkins genuinely takes a toll, all while making every attempt to spend social time with those in our care. Often the staff faces criticism and blame and still show up every day because they believe animal’s matter.

Behind every wagging tail and soft purr of safety is a dedicated, exhausted team holding together a world few ever witness. The shelter is staffed 365 days a year, missing holidays, family moments, school events, and celebrations to care for animals who have nowhere else to go. They cannot save them all—but they try, because saving even one life makes every tear, every hard decision, and every long day worth it.

Looking ahead to 2026, the shelter begins with 92 dogs and cats in care. GJAS remains tremendously grateful to our community of support. The shelter is committed to compassion, public safety, and the belief that every animal deserves a chance and Fayette County deserves to feel safe from dogs and cats running at large. Thank you to our donors and the community. GJAS is grateful for the volunteers and fosters that roll up their sleeves every day and stand beside the shelter—because this important work is only possible by working together.

How can you help?

If you ever wondered how you can help—be kind, be patient, support your local shelter, volunteer if you can, and choose responsible pet ownership by spay and neuter. Behind the scenes are real people carrying an enormous physical, mental, and emotional load so that animals in need can have a second chance. And that work, though unseen, matters more than words can say.