A number of Bay Area families welcomed new, four-legged members to their families Saturday as part of a nationwide effort to “Clear the Shelters” and help animals find forever homes.
NBC Bay Area and Telemundo 48 teamed up, once more, with partners across the U.S. for the campaign’s ninth-straight year of encouraging pet adoption as well as donations.
Dozens of cats and dogs were adopted Saturday at the County of Santa Clara Animal Service Center in San Martin, as were dozens of kitten’s at Silicon Valley Humane Society’s “Kitten Palooza.”
The event was also held at Berkeley Humane, where there was a total of 147 adoptions.
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The adoptions were a big help for the Santa Clara service center, which has been at maximum capacity for most of the year, overwhelmed with an influx of big dogs.
One of those big dogs, Chris, finally got to go home today.
“We’ve been looking for a while,” said Santa Clara resident Emily Hoeft, “we saw a picture of this dog online, we heard about this today, and we said 'let’s get him.' ”
Hoeft and her partner drove 2 hours to San Martin and immediately fell in love.
“He’s just really sweet. He ran right over and wanted to snuggle, can’t beat that,” Hoeft said.
Pet adoption was free Saturday as part of the “Clear the Shelters” campaign, so pets went to their new homes already vaccinated, spayed, neutered and microchipped at no cost.
Prior to Saturday, a father and son from Gilroy spent a month fostering a red-nosed pitbull named Blue. The family adored Blue, who was a perfect match for their other pitbull, but they thought they had to say goodbye when another family offered to adopt him.
“It didn’t work out,” said Ricardo Rivera. “And they brought him back. So they called us and said he wasn’t eating or anything like that, so we came down and decided to adopt him.”
Saturday and Sunday was “Kitten Palooza” at the Humane Society of Silicon Valley, who had a goal of adopting out 100 kittens.
Kittens are just $20 during “Kitten Palooza.” Shelters across the Bay Area are in the middle of kitten season, so they’re working hard to adopt out cats and kittens to make room for more.
Since 2015, NBC Bay Area and Telemundo 48 have helped more than 23,000 pets at local shelters match with their forever homes.
Nationally, more than 700,000 pets have been adopted through our “Clear the Shelters” program.
