Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe SEATTLE, March 25 (UPI) -- The Seattle Animal Shelter has been given 12.7 tons of bagged dog food that the city's airport used to test a new airport baggage system, officials said. The Seattle Post Intelligencer reported Wednesday that the Port of Seattle purchased 1,600 bags of dog food in June to test new baggage conveyors at Sea-Tac International Airport. Advertisement "The dog food is perfect because of the weight and the way it shifts in suitcases," Port spokeswoman Terri-Ann Betancourt said. "The manufacturer of the conveyor system actually recommended using dog food." The newspaper noted that the $40,000 in dog food was paid for by the airport's capital improvement project budget. After luggage conveyor systems at Sea-Tac were certified in October, the bags of dog food were warehoused. "We probably would have gotten rid of it sooner had the snowstorms in November and December not happened," Betancourt said. "After all that we said, 'Hey, we have all this dog food.'" The Seattle Animal Shelter is expected to give the bulk of the dog food to area food lockers who can in turn give it to needy dog owners, the newspaper reported. Advertisement "I'm not sure what the plan for distribution is yet," Northwest Harvest spokeswoman Claire Acey said. "But I can tell you for clients, particularly at the Cherry Street Food Bank in Seattle, their pets are tremendously important to them. We get a lot of requests for dog food.
