Animal Friends of the Valleys’ new Wildomar clinic is good news for pets – Press Enterprise

After living with two for more than a decade, stray dogs will always be special to our family.

Friends from Temecula gave us the first one, Smiley, in 1995. She was from the local shelter at the time, Lake Elsinore Animal Friends, or LEAF The family had been told that her puppies were taken from Smiley and euthanized. The things we do are what we call our “best friends.”

My wife Joanne rescued the second outcast, Happy, in 2001 from busy Whitewood Road in Murrieta. No doubt she was either going to be killed by traffic or scooped up by animal control. We theorized she’d been dumped by her previous owners, given how ornery she was. Sometimes you have to be a saint to deal with a pet.

Then there are the folks who do this angelic work for a living, Animal Friends of the Valleys, successors to LEAF

The groups have been providing shelter services to southwest Riverside County since 1987. The area now has a population of about 500,000 — easily five times what it was 36 years ago.

The news that Animal Friends of the Valleys is opening a new location is great news for our wayward dogs, cats and other critters.

The new clinic will open later this month next to the current shelter, 33751 Mission Trail, Wildomar. Animal Friends has raised more than $1 million and the goal is to ultimately generate $2.7 million for the cost of the new facility.

“This is YOUR community and we need you to help the animals,” an Animal Friends news release states about the opening of the new place.

We keep the facility busy. Animal Friends serves all of the area’s cities: Temecula, Murrieta, Menifee, Lake Elsinore, Wildomar and Canyon Lake. Last year, the clinic provided almost 13,000 low-cost spay/neuter and vaccination procedures, said Beth Soltysiak, Animal Friends’ director of development.

With the new facility, Animal Friends will be able to double the surgeries and vaccinations it does at the current clinic in Lake Elsinore, Soltysiak said.

It will have “modern procedure rooms and equipment, spacious air-conditioned lobby and an increased capacity to meet the demands of our pet community,” she said.

As for the history of the local shelter, Pat Kubis, of Canyon Lake, recognized the need and ran a newspaper ad asking fellow animal lovers to meet. After a series of gatherings, a board of directors was formed and all were women. Interesting.

In 1990, Riverside County contracted with LEAF to provide animal control services. The cities joined later. The name was changed from LEAF to Animal Friends of the Valley in 2000 to “better reflect all the communities it serves,” Soltysiak said.

Last year, Animal Friends took in more than 8,600 dogs and cats, plus about 1,000 other creatures, including rabbits, guinea pigs, reptiles, tortoises and other small farm animals, she said. Sounds like a modern-day Noah’s Ark.

The good news is that the facility now has the highest adoption rate in its history, she added.

“We are looking forward to a time when there will be no more homeless pets in the valley,” she said.

Aren’t we all?

As for our own strays, Smiley and Happy, along with their store-bought brother Midnight, brought endless joy to our family. Happy was the last to pass in 2013. Our lives haven’t been the same since.