It’s a place that warms your heart and breaks it at the same time.

Each year staff and volunteers of the Lewis and Clark Humane Society in Helena take care of hundreds of abandoned dogs and cats, providing clean and humane temporary shelter until the animals find new permanent homes. Dogs get daily walks. Cats tumble and chase each other in play areas. Sick animals receive medicine and care from a veterinarian and trained staff. The shelter provides services such as spaying and neutering, holds classes on pet obedience, and offers innovative programs such as one that allows families to take a potential pet home for two weeks to see if the animal is compatible. It’s an inspiring place.

Learn more:

The case for a new shelter

Why the need?

Latest video

New shelter details

A benefit to the community

How you can help

Incentives for giving

Campaign report

But the shelter could do so much more. Due to space limitations within the decades-old structure, sick cats must often be crowded into stuffy rooms, where one sneeze can reinfect others trying to recover from respiratory illnesses. Some days the shelter holds so many cats that up to a dozen are held in the bathroom. Dogs must be herded into cramped areas while their kennels are cleaned, and the barking reverberates throughout the shelter off the hard walls. Despite the facility’s daily four-hour cleaning, the sour smell of dog and cat urine and feces greats visitors hoping to adopt a pet.

Lack of space means that some dogs and cats must be euthanized before they have a fair chance of being seen by potential owners. Grieving pet owners bringing their deceased animal in for a dignified cremation have to walk past howling strays and abandoned dogs. The crematorium, which sits in the middle of the shelter, often backs up, sending the smoke of euthanized animals throughout the faculty. Plaster crumbles from walls deteriorating from hundreds of disinfectant scrubbings. And the conditions are no better for shelter staff and volunteers, who worked in cramped, crowded corners where file boxes, dog food, kennels, and other supplies are piled up to the ceiling. 

Says one shelter worker, “It’s frustrating, because we do so much for dogs and cats here, but we could do so much more if we had a better facility.”

That, in a nutshell, is the reason for the Lewis and Clark Humane Society’s new “Their Pathway Home” campaign.

The LCHS’s goal for the new facility and enhanced public education program is to improve the quality of life in the greater Helena region by helping abandoned or unwanted dogs and cats find “The Pathway Home” to new and loving families.

Lewis & Clark Humane Society
2112 E. Custer Avenue • P.O. Box 4455 • Helena, Montana 59604 • Phone: (406) 442-1660 • Fax: (406) 457-9446
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