TLC for homeless and evacuated animals

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Oceanside:

The homeless dogs played their morning game of fetch on the tennis courts, evacuated horses and ponies stretched their legs on the dusty softball diamond, and cats napped in the greenhouse. For the fourth consecutive day, El Camino High in Oceanside served as a shelter for animals displaced by the San Diego wildfires.

The North County Humane Society in Oceanside ran out of room early Monday, so El Camino High’s farm
has been getting the overflow. By today, some 150 animals and 125 people
were calling the high school home.

On a typical day, a few steer, pigs and horses would be occupying the farmland adjacent to the gym. But this week, they have quite a bit of company -- more than 100 dogs and cats, 12 horses, 20 goats, a handful of chickens, an iguana, a snake, a blind pig, a pregnant pot-bellied pig and a duck named Aflac.

The Humane Society is operating the temporary animal shelter, but El Camino students such as Brittany Rose are pitching in and working overtime. One night, Rose couldn’t stand to leave the displaced critters, so she slept for stretches on the floor near the restless dogs and in a car next to the noisy chicken
coop.

“I love them,” said Rose, 17, who plans to be a horse veterinarian in college. “There’s nothing they can do about their situation. They need people to take care of them.”

Erica Leal, 19, of Valley Center, said she was grateful her two horses had a place to stay but she could tell they were missing their three-acre ranch. “Right now, they’d be running and having fun all over my three acres,” she said. “This is a little weird for them, but they’re trying to get used to it.”

Most of the dogs were behaving themselves, except for the five greyhound puppies who just arrived from Escondido. “Those guys are escape artists,” Rose said. “You can’t keep them in their cages.”

Lindsay Hood, a Humane Society spokeswoman, said it is unclear how long the Oceanside school district will allow the animals to bunk at the high school.

“It’s pretty much day by day,” she said.

--Dave McKibben