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MAYFIELD - The rush started as soon as Susan Kelly opened the door to her home on Route 343. She opened a gate and about 15 dogs flooded into one of three fenced-off areas in front of the house, running around until they settled into the new area.

Those, however, aren't all the dogs that live at Kelly's home, which also doubles as her own no-kill not-for-profit shelter called Kelly's Haven for Friends.

Kelly started caring for dogs when her father died in 1999 and left her with 11 dogs. After that, the animals just kept on coming. If she can, she finds people to adopt them, but if she can't, the animals live out the rest of their days on Kelly's 35-acre farm.

"Some of them are my originals," she said. "I've lost some of my old ones, but I've got a couple of dogs that are 17 or 20 years old. No one wants old dogs."

Kelly said she often gets calls from pet owners who are moving and can't keep their dogs, or from local shelters that are full and can't accommodate another animal. Some people just leave their pets on her property when no one is home, she said.

Kelly doesn't have any children, although she says the animals are her children. In addition to the 60 dogs, she also has cats, pot-bellied pigs and horses.

"I have blind dogs and dogs with arthritis," she said. "I have a female chocolate labrador, and the people abused her. She hates people. That's not the dog's fault."

Despite the large number of dogs, she can keep everyone's name straight, even though it can get confusing at times when all the dogs are causing trouble.

"When there's a ruckus and you start yelling, some of them scatter and you miss a few names," Kelly said.

Kelly obtained nonprofit certification in 2000 and runs the shelter mostly by herself, although she does get some help from several community fundraisers. She said she works a variety of jobs in the area, including roofing, siding and shoveling snow, to support her efforts.

The Auction Traders of Broadalbin hosted a benefit auction March 2, and the Telephone Pioneers Association of Frontier Communications hosted a Best Friend Walk in Johnstown, which helped raise money for the care of the animals.

"We got a couple of hundred [dollars], and three quarters of that went for medicine," Kelly said. "We've got a lot of arthritic animals, diabetic animals and animals with thyroid problems. Medicine doesn't go very far around here."

The most overwhelming time for Kelly was when she went into the barn next to her house and found 37 pregnant cats.

"They were dropping kitten," Kelly said. "Everybody was unfixed. I had 100-and-something cats. That was my biggest expense, getting all of them fixed."

Not all of the animals that are brought to Kelly end up staying at the shelter. Some of them get adopted through the Montgomery County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which has resources at its disposal that she doesn't have.

Montgomery County SPCA Shelter Manager Debi Crandall said Kelly's shelter is extremely helpful because she often takes in dogs that no one else can handle.

"She takes in a lot of animals that have nowhere else to go, dogs that are not adoptable, and she takes care of them and gives them a life," Crandall said. "What she does is really hard, and she does it all by herself. She's really a good-hearted woman."