TUCSON (KGUN9-TV) - Maybe some plaintive puppy eyes are looking for you.
Pima Animal Care had a surge of stray dogs just as the new year began.
The way some people celebrate New Year's scared the dogs away from their homes.
In their own way, some of the dogs at Pima Animal Care Center are party animals. We're talking about the New Year's Eve partying where for a lot of people, those parties include fireworks. Those fireworks scared some of these animals so badly they ran away and ended up at PACC.
A lot of dogs are missing their old friends. The pop and boom and New Year's Eve fireworks made some of them run and run until they could not find their way home.
Many of the dogs on the Pima Animal Care's lost page have the same story: Found on January first.
Adam Ricci of PACC says, “So far this week we've had just over a hundred stray pets come into our facility and of those, I want to say it's 111 pets, 25 of them have already been returned back to their owners. We've also had over 50 lost reports placed with us as well and 15 of those pets have been returned to their owners as well."
But that leaves the others, waiting for a familiar face to bring them home. Not all the strays are in Pima County's shelter. Sometimes kind-hearted people care for the animals near where they found them but reporter then to Animal Care.
Ricci says, “If you're able to even care for it for just a matter of a couple of days for us, that will really help us to try to identify an owner and prevent that animal coming into our facility. And the statistics are there that show that if a pet stays in its neighborhood it has a higher likelihood of getting returned to its owner."
And the hope is the dogs' people will find them again and return them for a new year in a safe home they will not run away from.
