Our New Facility | Kent Animal Shelter, Calverton, Long Island, NY

Let Us Rebuild

Our Long Struggle for Approval

Your continued support and action appreciated

The fate of the Kent Animal Shelter will soon be decided. We’re asking all pet lovers for their support.

We’re proposing a $2.5 million facility upgrade that will enable us to better help more animals as well as improve our environmental impact. Kent Animal Shelter is a private nonprofit no kill shelter established almost a half century ago, but our aging facilities need to be replaced.

We have designed and received permits for this new facility from the Town of Riverhead, Suffolk County and even the State DEC. One final hurdle, the granting of a waiver from the Central Pine Barrens Commission, remains.

Unfortunately, Richard Amper and the Pine Barrens Society are doing all they can to kill the project. He has been an outspoken critic of our rebuilding plans. His ranting, hand-waving, finger-pointing tactics seem to intimidate many but the fact is that Kent Animal Shelter has the right to rebuild. He threatens to sue if the Pine Barrens Commission approves our permit.

We have submitted a solid legal case that Kent qualifies for a waiver to build in the Pine Barrens.

Like the Pets We Help, We Find Ourselves Facing Homelessness

Like the pets we've helped all these years, we now find ourselves facing an uncertain future. Our own home is old and falling apart. We have to rebuild. If we are not allowed, a time will come when we will cease to exist.

Kent Animal Shelter has been on a small property along the Peconic River in Calverton. We are a no-kill shelter for abandoned, abused and neglected cats and dogs, adopting out hundreds to loving homes every year. We have a low cost spay/neuter clinic that has prevented millions of unwanted pets from over running the community. We even have a cat retirement home so these loved pets have a nice home if something should happen to their owners. We're leaders in helping people have a better understanding of pets, and by extension of the Animal Kingdom, and you could even say of our planet. In 2009 we won national recognition for our work. We do it all with private donations and grants.

Why Can't We Rebuild?

Why can't we rebuild? It's not the money. Although it won’t be easy, the Kent Animal Shelter will raise enough to rebuild. It’s not that people don’t care about Kent. Legions of animal loving heroes who have used our services these many years wish us the best.

The bigger question is whether we'll be allowed to rebuild.

We have permits to rebuild from everyone we need--the NYSDEC, the county, and the Town of Riverhead. But since we are located on the extreme edge of the core Pine Barrens, we must get approval from the Central Pine Barrens Commission. For that, we're going to need a special permit, and the bar is quite high due to the state Pine Barrens Law enacted years after Kent was established.

All questions point to the same answer: we need to rebuild, and we need to rebuild in the place we've called home for almost a half century.

Although we're not lawyers or architects or politicians, we're working to defend our existence. We are relying on experts to find a solution for the Kent Animal Shelter that will allow us to rebuild on the extreme edge of the core Pine Barrens. We want to be permitted to continue doing what we do best. We're expert at finding solutions for pets.

Pamela Green

Director

Kent Animal Shelter

12 Things About Our Proposed New Facility

The shelter has been a vital organization for the care and sheltering of homeless animals on the North Fork of Long Island since 1968;
The shelter provides a tremendous public service to the residents of the surrounding communities and all of Long Island by offering assistance to individuals and families in crisis situations that are no longer able to provide for their pets;
The shelter provides low cost spay/neuter services to over 4000 pet owners annually helping to control overpopulation of homeless animals;
The shelter provides a vital community service by reducing the number of feral cat populations through foundation funded spay/neuter projects;
The shelter places over 780 animals annually in responsible homes;
The shelter provides assistance to municipal shelters by helping to relieve overcrowded conditions in their facilities;
The shelter provides Humane Education to schools, local councils of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America and Little Flower Children’s Services;
The shelter provides internships for Eastern Suffolk BOCES and Family Residences & Essential Enterprises,
The shelter participates in work programs for the Suffolk County Dept. of Corrections,
The shelter provides a workplace for court mandated community service for Towns of Riverhead and Southampton;
The new shelter will greatly benefit the environment by providing a state of the art, upgraded facility reducing pollution, waste and noise;
The new facility will provide an aesthetically pleasing, calm and serene environment created on the banks of the Peconic River by removing the antiquated kennel and replacing it with a vegetative buffer of native plants with a park-like atmosphere.