Furkids opens new Cumming dog shelter, doubles rescue capacity

Furkids moved 50 rescued dogs into its new Sutherlin Dog Shelter in Cumming on June 4, giving the metro Atlanta rescue a much larger home base and immediately expanding what Forsyth County can absorb when animals need help. The new building is built to hold up to 135 dogs, almost double the organization’s former dog capacity, and each animal will have its own room instead of being housed in a cage.

The shelter sits on Furkids’ 9.1-acre campus on Union Hill Road, where the nonprofit has spent years building what it calls a destination shelter. The dog facility is about 15,000 square feet and was paired with a new Giaquinto Medical Center as part of the same campus expansion. Furkids had first broken ground on the project in September 2024, after earlier describing the dog shelter at about 13,000 square feet before the finished plans grew to the larger building now in use.

For Forsyth County, the significance is practical. Furkids says it rescues more than 5,000 animals each year, and about three-quarters of them are cats, which means a dedicated dog shelter can free up staff time, foster space and medical attention for the kinds of overflow cases that routinely arrive from across north Georgia. When county shelters and animal services face a surge of surrender, neglect or hoarding cases, a local rescue with room for 135 dogs can make the difference between taking an animal in quickly and turning it away.

That need has been visible in recent years. Furkids helped after more than 50 dogs were rescued from a hoarding case in February 2026, and in 2025 it took in 20 dogs from a Gainesville hoarding investigation and asked the public to help care for them. The new shelter gives the organization more space to stabilize animals like those, prepare them for adoption and move them through the system faster.

Furkids also says the Cumming campus began in the early 2000s, after founder Samantha Shelton found a stray mother cat with kittens and could not find a shelter that would take them. That origin story has grown into Georgia’s largest no-kill animal shelter and rescue organization, and the new dog shelter marks its biggest expansion yet. For residents, the result is straightforward: more room to adopt, foster, donate or volunteer, and a stronger rescue network rooted right in Cumming.