As the days grow shorter and the temperatures turn toward freezing, hundreds of stray animals throughout Licking County could find themselves without shelter. Some dogs, cats, and other animals will lack the food, warmth, and care they need to survive the winter.
According to local non-profit animal rescues, more can be done to support local populations of unsheltered animals. In 2024, the Shelter Animals Count national database recorded 137,221 dog and cat intakes into shelters and rescues — an increase of over 17,000 animals from 2020.
Fairytales and Tiny Tails Rescue in Columbus, Whiskers Animal Rescue in Granville, Walking Wild Fox Rescue in Newark, and Stop the Suffering Animal Rescue in Columbus are all 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organizations that provide safe channels for animals like dogs, cats, and more to find safe, forever homes.
“There’s a need for rescues in our area, clearly,” said Julie Guglielmi, gesturing to the 30 cats lounging across the main room of Whiskers Catnip Cottage at 1893 Columbus Road, Granville.
Guglielmi, 50, of Granville, is a member of the Whiskers Animal Rescue team that has transformed a house south of Route 16 into a space where the public can view and interact with adoptable cats. The cottage opened in February 2025 and has seen an influx of adoptions since then. Of the 675 adoptions since the rescue’s beginnings in 2023, nearly 400 have occurred just this year.
“We started small,” Guglielmi said. “It was a group of three women; we were all like, ‘We like animals. We want to make a difference,’ and it’s snowballed.”
The rescue is foster-based, so most cats and kittens that find themselves with Whiskers Animal Rescue spend time being socialized and cared for by volunteers before they are ready for adoption. Due to the difficulty they had placing older cats in foster homes, the rescue converted a house into its headquarters and cat cottage, where cats of all ages can interact with each other and be visited by potential adopters.
The cottage also features a small shop with cat-themed merchandise and rooms for quarantined cats that might need specialized medical care. While many of the cats there are healthy, some have mobility issues or illnesses that make their care more nuanced.
According to Guglielmi, the rescue takes a thorough approach to screening every person and family who applies to adopt one of their cats. The digital adoption process guides interested adopters through a series of questions that can demonstrate whether their home would be the right fit for a Whiskers Animal Rescue cat.
“We ask a lot of questions because we care where our guys go,” Guglielmi said. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, you apply, you want a cat, here’s your cat!’ …We want them to have good homes, and we want it to be a forever home.”
A rescue operation for the youngest kittens
Fairytales and Tiny Tails Rescue, based in the Columbus area, operates with similar standards. Originally started in Waco, Texas, by Paige Stefanowski and August Adams, who are both 22 and now live in Delaware, Ohio, the rescue focuses on vulnerable and at-risk kittens.
“A lot of the rescues here don’t do more of the neonate side [of cat populations] … and we wanted to help the neonate population, so that’s where our niche fell,” Adams said. Neonate kittens include those that are between birth and about five weeks old, and often need more intense care due to a loss of their mother or medical complications from birth.
“That includes bottle feeding, syringe feeding,” Adams said. “Basically, they can’t eat hard food or really do anything by themselves.”
Fairytales and Tiny Tails is foster-based and does not have a physical location where their intakes spend time, but it recently began operations out of an office in Westerville. Its approved foster homes will often take full litters into their care so that kittens can grow alongside and socialize with their siblings.
Adams said some kittens do better physically and socially when they are paired and adopted with a sibling, so not all of their cats go home alone. Each kitten needs to be paired with the right human, too — different cats have different levels of interaction needs, and Stefanowski said that some cats are better suited to certain home environments than others.
Tweedledee, “for example, is super loving,” said Stefanowski, as their cat climbed up their arm and onto their shoulder. “He obviously really needs to be around people a lot, so you don’t want to place him in a home that is a nurse or a student that is going to be gone for 12-hour days. That’s not what he wants.”
Both Adams and Stefanowski spend a significant amount of time making sure that people who apply to adopt the rescue group’s kittens will provide safe and loving homes. Since May 5, 2025, when the rescue began taking in kittens, they’ve had around 114 in their system and hope to grow even more.
When asked how they’d like to expand in the future, Stefanowski smiled.
“It would be really cool to have a ‘catio’ trailer that we can bring to events,” they said. “That’s a dream of mine, but it requires a lot of funding, and we’ll have to build it. … If we can’t get a physical location, I think that a trailer that we can have cats in at events would be awesome.”
Some wild animals need homes, too
In Newark, about 40 minutes east of Fairytales and Tiny Tails Rescue’s office, another rescue is contemplating expansion.
Walking Wild Fox Rescue serves a more niche population of animals: With 174 foxes covering four different species — Fennick, Red, Arctic, and Gray — as well as coyotes, goats, skunks, and a donkey, the rescue covers a portion of the 20-acre property owned by Molly Schulz and her husband, David.
Since 2020, Walking Wild has operated as one of the very few fox-specific rescues across the United States. Their foxes are not adoptable — so once they take in a new one, it’s likely to stay there for the rest of its life.
“We quickly became the largest non-wild fox sanctuary in North America,” said Schulz, who is 36 and lives on the Newark property that houses the sanctuary. According to Schulz, only six other U.S. states have fox-specific rescues: Florida, New York, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Michigan.
The lack of places for rescued foxes to go led to Schulz’s interest in starting the sanctuary. Originally, she and her husband adopted two foxes, Banjo and Fiddle, after extensive research into caring for the animals.
“When we got Banjo, we recognized there was a need in the space that didn’t exist for an environment that was more than just a bunch of 10 by 10, you know, kennels with doghouses in them. That’s kind of all there was in the space at that point. And we recognized that there was a need for something better than that for these animals,” Schulz said.
Fiddle was rescued from a fur farm, where foxes are bred and then killed for their pelts. Schulz said that many of the foxes they have in their care currently were seized from fur farms, where she said conditions are often dangerous and unsanitary for the animals.
The rescue’s expansion from two foxes to 174 took four years and a lot of carpentry.
“We are the only sanctuary that does give all of our foxes climate-controlled spaces. So everybody has an inside space — it’s heated and air-conditioned — and an outside space that they have access to,” Schulz said, pointing towards the outdoor and indoor facilities in the distance.
While they hope to expand to house even more foxes and a variety of other animals, the facilities they want each fox to have access to can be expensive and time-consuming. According to Schulz, a new building to increase their capacity would cost around $450,000.
“We’ll be starting that fundraiser [at the] beginning of next year to build a second [building]. But to raise $450,000 for us, when we are a smaller nonprofit in the scheme of donors, can take a hot second. So it won’t be a quick thing,” she said.
Currently, the rescue isn’t open to the public and doesn’t advertise its location, but Schulz seemed hopeful that future public engagement could bring significant awareness and aid to the organization.
Saving shelter dogs from an early death
Stop the Suffering Animal Rescue in Columbus has been operating as a primarily dog-focused rescue since late 2002, when Lynne Aronson said the organization began transporting dogs from kill shelters in Ohio to places out of state that would help them find permanent homes.
“I just thought, okay, I’m going to do this because there aren’t enough homes in Ohio, and they had a really big kill rate, you know?” said Aronson, 73, of Clintonville. “It wasn’t unusual on a Friday, if no one was gonna be there on the weekend at any of these shelters, for them to just put dogs in the gas chamber. It was awful.”
The realization of how many dogs were being euthanized made Aronson want to do something, she said. Now, after celebrating its 23rd anniversary, Stop the Suffering has consistently transported about 4,000 animals annually, thanks to many volunteers who give their time to dogs in need.
Since 2017, the rescue also has facilitated the adoptions of 450-550 dogs each year. Their foster-based programs fund spay and neuter surgeries as well as medical the cost for extra care for sick dogs.
“In 2022, we started doing a transport on Wednesdays to the puppy mills,” Aronson said. “It’s mass production. Just … mass production of dogs. They’re not well cared for.”
Even as the group transports and finds homes for more and more dogs, the output of puppies from puppy mills can be daunting. When more people take in ‘designer dogs’ instead of rescues, more dogs are left without a forever home.
“It just puts a major impact on the rest of the dogs in need. It’s just so unnecessary,” Aronson said.
With a new, $25,000 grant to put toward puppy-mill rescues, Aronson hopes that Stop the Suffering will have an even bigger impact on local dog populations. With appearances on television, a popular Facebook page, and an in-depth website that all help spread awareness about these issues, Aronson’s goal is to “be out of business.”
As much joy as she gains from rescuing and caring for these dogs, she wants the spay and neuter programs that the group sponsors to result in a controlled population of dogs, so that no dog has to spend its life in a shelter.
Margo Ellis writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.