PAWS Chicago — Pippen Fasseas Adoption Center

PAWS Chicago — Pippen Fasseas Adoption Center

PAWS Chicago's adoption center at 1997 N Clybourn Ave in Lincoln Park, open since 2007 and described by PAWS as the Midwest's first cage-free, no-kill adoption center.

Hours

• Monday–Friday: 12:00 PM – 7:00 PM
• Saturday–Sunday: 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Open seven days, which matters more here than almost anywhere else in this directory — meeting a dog you might live with for a decade should not have to happen in a Tuesday lunch hour.

Do the paperwork before you go. The process is: complete the ComPETibility quiz and an adoption application, then schedule an adoption appointment. Dogs in foster homes are handled separately, through a foster pet adoption inquiry. Turning up unannounced expecting to browse and leave with a dog is not how this works.

What "no-kill" and "cage-free" actually mean here. No-kill is a policy of not euthanising for space or time — it does not mean every animal is saved regardless of condition, and it does mean a shelter can decline an animal it cannot place. Cage-free means dogs live in rooms and group spaces rather than runs, which is better for most dogs and genuinely harder to operate.

How this sits alongside CACC. PAWS is a private no-kill shelter and can choose which animals it takes; Chicago Animal Care and Control is the city's open-admission shelter and cannot. The two are not competitors — much of the private rescue world in Chicago, PAWS included, exists partly to pull animals out of CACC. If you are adopting, it is worth looking at both. If you are surrendering, start with the conversation about whether a rescue can take your dog before CACC becomes the answer.

Adoption fees are not published on this page. Ask when you book, and ask what the fee includes — spay/neuter, vaccinations and microchipping are usually bundled, which makes a rescue dog considerably cheaper than the sticker price suggests.

Getting there: Clybourn near Armitage, on the #73 Armitage bus and a walk from the Armitage Brown Line.

Hours, address, phone, the adoption process and the cage-free no-kill description all verified from pawschicago.org. Fees are not published.