Animal rights group to start working with UNC

This month, students will have two chances to support AnimalKind, an organization which aims to stop the overpopulation of adoptable pets and animals on UNC's campus and beyond.

Along with their Great Human Race 5K in Durham on March 28, AnimalKind will be holding a donation drive in the Pit on Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Items collected in this drive will go to ReTails thrift shop in Raleigh, which has used its net profits to fund AnimalKind for a decade.

Brad Johnson, manager of ReTails, said his store has a large donor base in the Raleigh community.

“We’ve been in the same store for ten years here, so we’ve got a good customer base. We have a lot of shoppers here that are resellers, maybe at the flea market at Raleigh or eBay,” Johnson said.

“And then we’ve got loads of volunteers — we work with the school system, the court system. Without them, our doors are shut. We try to hit a certain amount of profit each month to give to AnimalKind.”

Johnson said his staff and supporters of the store love AnimalKind’s cause.

“It's just a great, focused mission, it’s simple — we’re trying to end pet euthanasia in North Carolina shelters,” Johnson said. “It’s just a wonderful cause, we love our pets and we love what pets can do for people, and we just want to help the low-income families who can’t normally spay and neuter their pets. So (AnimalKind is) paying 80 percent of the spay and neuters for their pets when they’re applied for AnimalKind.” 

Kristen McGreevy, AnimalKind’s advisory board coordinator for UNC, said even with the money from ReTails, the organization is in need of help. 

“We’re getting less money from the government because more spay and neuter programs are becoming popular in North Carolina,” McGreevy said. “So we’re getting less and less money as time goes on because the budget is staying the same but programs are increasing.”

McGreevy said AnimalKind aims to remind people that animals’ lives hang in the balance of deciding whether or not to spay and neuter one's pet.

“I think mainly it's to educate people. Because people have other concerns, and they think many other issues are more pressing,” McGreevy said. “(AnimalKind doesn’t) have very many people here at UNC so they don’t have a very big influence in the area, so they wanted to spread the word and spread the spay and neuter programs in this area.”

Another on-campus animal rights activist group, Helping Paws, has similar goals as AnimalKind and helps to raise money for AnimalKind, said Helping Paws co-chairwoman Laura Hoerning. 

“Basically we’re like an animal welfare organization that works to better the lives of animals that are looking to be adopted, which is why we work so closely with Orange County Animal Services,” Hoerning said.

Hoerning said people who don’t spay or neuter their dogs sometimes worry about taking away male dogs' masculinity but don’t think of the effects of not fixing a pet.

“A lot of people don’t realize the magnitude of litters and births that can happen from just one individual dog. People don’t understand that one dog can create 30 more dogs in the span of their lifetime,” she said. 

“It’s just like anything else, if you let that population continue to increase, the harder it’s going to be to control and reduce numbers in the long run.”

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