Animal Care League

The Animal Care League was founded in 1973 as the Village Humane Society to help homeless animals in the Oak Park community. After a few years of operations, the Humane Society realized the need for help extended beyond the Oak Park borders and changed its name to the Animal Care League to better communicate our purpose.

At the beginning, the ACL did not have a physical shelter to house animals. Instead, supporters cared for animals in their homes until a permanent home could be found. This personal touch was very nice, however, it greatly limited the number of animals that could be helped and made the adoption process very slow. In the late 1970’s, the Animal Care League rented its first shelter, relocating to a new building a few years later. For many years the shelter worked out of this small facility, but in 1998 we moved again to our current location. We have the capacity to house up to thirty-three dogs, more than 120 cats and many other little critters such as birds, rabbits, mice, snakes and even chickens.

From the very beginning, the ACL has had a policy of keeping adoptable animals until we could find them a home and this is still in practice today. This means that no matter how long it takes, we keep an adoptable animal with us until we find that right loving home. Even though the number of animals coming through our doors for help each year has increased by 100 percent in the last several years alone, we firmly believe in this policy and will continue to give every animal the best opportunity possible to find a new home. We have accomplished this by taking proactive approaches to animal care and adoption as well as preventative measures to help reduce the number of homeless animals in our communities.

The Animal Care League works very hard to keep our animals healthy, reduce the number and severity of behavior problems and to act proactively in finding new homes for our pets.

We serve the following cities, towns and/or counties:
Oak Park, River Forest, Forest Park, Lyons, Riverside, North Riverside, LaGrange Park, Cicero, Berwyn and more.