Five puppies were abandoned in rural Gastonia last week, and Gaston County Animal Care and Enforcement officers are still searching for their owner. Officer Cindy Zimmerman says this isn't an isolated case — dogs get abandoned in Gaston County multiple times a month, according to Zimmerman.

Right now, county residents who want to legally surrender a pet can only book an appointment on Tuesdays and Thursdays, between 1 and 3 p.m. Two narrow windows, four hours total, for an entire county.

PETA is calling out that gap directly. "Any sort of mechanism that makes surrendering more difficult for people risks the animals getting abandoned on the street," said Daphna Nachminovitch, PETA's Senior Vice President of Cruelty Investigations. She argues taxpayer-funded shelters like Gaston County's should operate as open admission shelters, so no owner is turned away or forced to wait for the next available slot.

Gaston County Animal Care partners with Best Friends Animal Society, which promotes "managed intake" and home-to-home placement to keep animals out of shelters in the first place. That approach has value, but it can't be the only option when someone needs to surrender an animal today, not next Thursday.

Nobody wants to see shelters overwhelmed. But two narrow appointment windows a week isn't a system, it's a bottleneck, and the puppies found dumped in Gastonia last week show what falls through the cracks when it is.

The Gaston County Board of Commissioners and Animal Care and Enforcement leadership should expand surrender appointment availability now, before more animals end up abandoned instead of surrendered. Sign the petition to demand more surrender hours in Gaston County before another litter is left on the side of the road.