Photo Provided Belmont County Cat Stray Shun Director Candace Fleagane is pictured with a rescued cat.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE — Man may no longer be a dog’s best friend.

Belmont County Cat Stray Shun Director Candace Fleagane is stepping up to help defray the cost of spaying and neutering the most recent batch of puppies that were abandoned in the county. Her organization ordinarily is devoted to helping the cats that come into the shelter, since the shelter is not obligated by law to care for stray cats.

Fleagane recently raised $1,500 for the animal shelter to spay and neuter the five dogs that were recently rescued by the Belmont County Animal Shelter from impending doom. She collected the money by hosting two fundraising dinners — one at Applebee’s and one at Primanti Brothers at The Highlands — in November as well as auctioning off two homemade Christmas baskets filled with goodies. She said she was just shy of the $1,500 goal, so she decided to donate the remaining money out of her own pocket to ensure that the dogs receive the needed procedures.

“It costs the shelter at least $300 apiece to get a dog completely vetted and then they adopt it at $125, so every dog that comes in they lose money on,” Fleagane said. “We’re not in the business of making money, but there’s nobody else really doing fundraising for the animal shelter. So that was just my goal as a Christmas present to the dogs of the shelter.”

She added that she hopes community members realize the cost of getting these animals vetted and donate to the shelter to make it easier for the facility to afford to provide the care the animals desperately need.

“The bottom line is if there were spay and neuter laws, that would put an end to all of this,” Fleagane said. “In the long run, it would even save the county money because people are bringing in all of these puppies and dumping all of these dogs and a lot of them are sick, so it’s costing more than the $300 per animal. If people would just spay and neuter their animals we wouldn’t have all of these animals in the shelter and they wouldn’t be dumped on back roads and freezing in boxes. We need spay and neuter laws.”

Fleagane said situations involving pets being abandoned on the side of the road have been on the rise in Belmont County. The pups that will benefit from Fleagane’s efforts were found on a roadside in the Somerton/Jerusalem area.

Belmont County Dog Warden Lisa Duvall said the animal shelter is completely full and that almost all of the dogs currently housed there were rescued after being dumped on either the side of a road or in a secluded area.

“We didn’t have room but we still took them because we didn’t want them to freeze to death,” Duvall said of the shelter’s most recent new residents.

She believes that the increasing cost of living is the reason for this year’s upswing in abandonment of animals.

“People aren’t being responsible,” she said. “People really need to think before they get a new animal: ‘Can I afford it/? Do I have the time for it? Is it the right fit for a family?”

Duvall praised Fleagane for the donation.

“It’s fabulous, the cats helping the dogs and everybody working together,” she said. “It’s great because all of our vet bills went up.”

She added that anyone who would like to donate can give money directly to the shelter or go to New Horizon Animal Hospital and place a card on file with an allotted amount of money for the shelter to use when it brings animals to the vet.

Additional funding is sorely needed, since a social media post by the shelter states that seven more puppies were found along Belmont County Road 4 in the Martins Ferry area earlier this week.