For those in St Charles County, we have some incredibly positive news to share. O’Fallon Animal Emergency Clinic (AEC) has graciously offered to provide a very generous, civic contribution to hold found pets when our St Charles County Pet Adoption Center is closed (i.e. evenings and Sundays). We are SO fortunate to have an organization like them offer this assistance to its community!

• The way the process works is if you find a pet in the off business hours, and you take them to the AEC, they do not perform intake for the shelter. Meaning, their service is to hold the found pet until the shelter opens at its next scheduled business hours. As you can imagine and we hope appreciate, the primary line of business at the clinic is to help emergent pets in need of medical care.
• AEC may or may not scan for a microchip, all depending on current cases at the clinic which take priority. Again, AEC is providing a free, gracious service to our community to hold found pets so they aren’t running at large, in streets, finding themselves being shot by a property owner for trespass etc.
• As soon as it is possible, AEC contacts the shelter to notify them that there is a found pet(s) to be picked up.

This is a service by AEC that we should be so grateful for, in our humble opinion.

An animal control officer or approved transport team member will be dispatched as soon as possible. As I hope we can all appreciate, they too have to triage as they have animal related emergencies which may arise and take precedence.

Once the pet is transported to the shelter, the intake process begins. The pet is entered into the Chameleon system which feeds petharbor.com. the pet is scanned for a microchip. Calls to owners, if the microchip is appropriately registered, will begin by a designated staff member.

We strongly encourage residents of St Charles County to monitor petharbor.com. As soon as the pet is processed, the pet will show up as a FOUND pet on petharbor.com.

Keep in mind, pets only become available for adoption if an owner has come forth to surrender ownership OR the legal stray hold period has expired.

PetHarbor is a great tool to use, but applying some sensibility to understand that pets are continuously being processed during the day helps. It is highly possible that when you contact the shelter, your pet may be onsite but not yet processed, which means the pet is not yet listed on petharbor.com.

We have included a video on how to use petharbor.com to search for your lost pet. These instructions will work for any Missouri zip code, provided your county/municipality has a shelter AND they use the Chameleon software.