animal lovers: this is disgraceful

9 comments

Please forgive my venting. I have been venting about this all day and still need to vent some more.
As I’ve mentioned before, I work in a county animal shelter. This morning I found an email from a friend involved in cat rescue sitting in my inbox. She’d forwarded an article from Examiner.com about the Carroll County Animal Shelter. This is not my place of employment, but I live in Carroll County, & so my tax dollars support this shelter and pay employees’ salaries. I knew conditions were bad there, I knew that staff were unresponsive regarding animal control and welfare issues, I knew the director was a former prison guard and part of the good ol’ boy network so pervasive in local politics and government. But I didn’t expect this. Here are a few excerpts from the article:

“This week has been declared National Animal Shelter Appreciation Week by the Humane Society of the US, which would have us believe that shelter staff are caring and would stop at nothing to save the lives of animals, that they hate killing more than anyone else. The No Kill Advocacy Center counters that the evidence shows otherwise….Carroll County, Georgia is a case in point.
The numbers for the third quarter of 2010 at the Carroll County Animal Shelter are out and indicate that the place is ripe for reform. The department’s webpage states that “one of our most important tasks is the promotion of adoption of animals from the shelter.” Their own numbers indicate that they are failing miserably in this most important of tasks. In the months of July thru September 2010, the shelter took in 902 cats, and killed 904. They actually managed to kill 2 more cats than they took in…this is possible because there were already cats in the shelter at the start of the quarter. Only 46 cats were adopted during this 3 month period. One was reclaimed. Zero were rescued….The Carroll County Animal Shelter has a reputation for being “rescue-unfriendly.”
The situation is not much better for dogs. In the 3rd quarter of 2010, the shelter took in 971 dogs and killed 862. 6 dogs were rescued during that entire 3 month period, a rate of about 1 every 2 weeks.
They killed 1766 animals in 3 months – that’s a rate of nearly 20 per day. Or you could look at it as a rate of nearly 27 for every day the shelter was open to the public or 1 for every 25 minutes that the shelter was open to the public.
In the 3 months spanning July thru September 2010, only 261 dogs and cats got out of the CCAS alive. The shelter killed 94.29% of all dogs and cats it took in, which certainly ranks it among the worst-performing shelters in the nation."

And, GOY’ers, this shelter had EMPTY CAGES available! They were not operating at even close to capacity & yet they still euthanized nearly every dog and cat that walked through the doors. This is a disgrace. We taxpayers paid for a brand-new shelter last year – the old one was filthy and cramped, with leaking ceilings & no heat – in the hopes that animal care would improve & adoptions would increase. The problem is that the attitude didn’t change. It is still run by West Georgia rednecks and corrupt lifetime county employees who only want an easy paycheck. Animal control wouldn’t even call me back when I left messages about my neighbor’s dog, who’d been hit by a car but was not receiving vet care! How would they like to be tied to a tree with a broken leg? They can’t be bothered to investigate serious animal welfare situations, but if a deer with a nice rack gets killed on the road, the employees are all out there fighting to get it! They even euthanized a pit bull puppy who had been adopted from our shelter, but surrendered to the Carroll shelter, the same day she came in! That was a good dog and there was no reason for her to die; I would have adopted that puppy. I am sickened by this but I don’t know quite what to do. I suppose I’ll call my district’s commissioner and complain….and then spread the word to everyone I know. Most people here have pets & I’m sure that most of them have no idea what’s going on. I didn’t, and I’m in the business, so to speak, as well as being involved in rescue.

Thanks for reading and letting me get this out.

• 11 Nov, 2010
• 0 likes

More blog posts by lauram