MY WORK TO IMPROVE SUBSTANDARD ANIMAL SHELTERS

Here we are at episode 8 of my 10-week series, "The Animal Shelter Life." If you haven't already, catch up by reading the previous seven as well!

First of all, I want to commend and thank all my readers who have bravely read the first seven essays in my 10-part series, “The Animal Shelter Life.” I know this window into the realities of the companion animal overpopulation crisis can sometimes be disturbing to read.

But unless more people face the truth about this crisis, nothing will change. So thank you, for your willingness to be mindful about what’s really going on, and please spread the word. Let’s get people’s heads out of the sand and find some solutions together.

I promise, this will be the last essay in my series with devastating stories. For my last two posts, I will be focusing on uplifting stories from my experience in the animal shelter field—and there are many!

But first, an essay about hallmark cases I encountered as a shelter caseworker for a well-known animal rights organization, my first job in the shelter field. (See my previous Substack post, “Ethical Dilemmas Facing Animal Shelters.”)

I had struggled with Bipolar I Disorder for ten years, and had been hospitalized several times, before I landed this position. While I was, for the most part, stable on medication when I began the job, I had serious imposter syndrome at the animal rights organization. I wondered if I had an invisible sign on my chest: “Psych Patient.”

I knew I was passionate about the work, and I believed I could do a good job, but I wondered: would my colleagues realize who I really was? (To read more of my writing about my struggles with mental illness, check out my website.)

My first day of work was on my thirtieth birthday, February 2, 1999. The job entailed working to improve substandard shelters, intervene in hoarding situations, educate the public about shelter issues and what’s wrong with breeding and buying animals (See my previous Substack post, “What’s Wrong with Breeding and Buying Animals?”), and ensure that shelters used humane methods of putting animals down when necessary.

That first day of work, as I attempted to shake my nervousness and weed through a stack of fifty cases I had inherited from the previous caseworker, I received a call from a distraught woman who lived in Nova Scotia.

Hearing gunshots, she had ventured into a wooded area in a rural neighborhood and witnessed an animal control officer shooting dogs. Some of the dogs didn’t die from the first shot. My complainant heard the animals crying out in pain before the officer shot them again and put them out of their misery.

I contacted the local newspaper in Nova Scotia and told a reporter what my complainant had witnessed. When the reporter did some sleuthing, she discovered that this had been standard practice in the county for several years. Fortunately, the paper was interested in exposing the cruel policy to a community likely unaware of what had been going on.

The newspaper published the story, including a graphic picture of a dead dog with a bullet hole in his head, and included interviews with me and the complainant. Within hours of this story coming out, the county commissioner chairperson called me and asked my advice on how to rectify this embarrassing practice in an area heavily reliant on tourist dollars.

I would come to learn, as time went on in my position, that money was often the only motivator for politicians to make changes to inhumane animal control policies.

My complainant informed me that there was an agricultural college in the county, and I discussed the situation with the president of the college, who agreed moving forward to allow animal control to bring animals who needed to be euthanized to the college, where they would be humanely put down via an intravenous injection of sodium pentobarbital, the recommendation of virtually every veterinarian.

I was off to a great start with this case, and so I assumed at the time that every case would be quickly resolved and victorious. However, I was wrong.

A few weeks later I received photographs in the mail of a county animal shelter from a police officer in rural North Carolina. The pictures showed a dog unable to move, her head in a puddle. The complainant explained that she had broken the lock on the fence of the facility to rescue the sick dog and keep her from drowning. There were also pictures of dead kittens, some without heads. Apparently the dogs were so hungry, they had been eating the kittens who wandered through the fence into the enclosure.

I traveled with a colleague to the “shelter” (I use that term loosely) and took videos of dogs covered in engorged ticks from head to tail, dogs with huge open wounds, and dogs so emaciated they could barely move.

Oddly, there were also several dogs wandering around in the field outside the facility, while another two dozen dogs were captive behind the fence. Why were some dogs locked inside, while others were just roaming around, getting dangerously close to the highway?

Armed with this evidence, I contacted the county commissioners and requested a meeting. After my success with the Nova Scotia case, I expected to win over the commissioners in this situation as well.

I wanted to convince them to fund construction of a proper shelter, revise animal control policies, and hire more animal control officers. I wanted to help them publicize the dogs confiscated by animal control and develop an adoption program to find homes for the animals.

But when I arrived for the meeting, the men informed me that they were looking into the prospect of firing the police officer who had blown the whistle on this horrifying case, because she had committed breaking and entering when she cut the lock.

“We have children in this county who don’t have food or running water, and you want us to spend money on stray dogs?” they said.

They also peppered the conversation with condescending “honey” and “young lady” comments toward me.

I was new on the job, I was young, and I had always had trouble with confrontation. And, I fell back into my sense of being an imposter: Could these men see through my professional façade and recognize that I was actually a psychiatric patient?

So, I had trouble standing up for myself—and the animals—in a productive way. The best I could do was obtain their permission to return to the shelter the following week with another employee from the animal rights organization, meet with the county’s sole animal control officer (who also served as the county’s litter collector), and offer advice on how to better care for the animals.

I sobbed the entire two-hour drive back to the office.

I returned the next week with Linda, a co-worker with more hands-on experience in the animal shelter field than I had, and we demonstrated to the animal control officer how to clean the facility better, how to assess dogs’ behavior, and which animals to keep isolated to prevent fights.

The officer appeared bored and unimpressed by our advice.

During this visit, Linda and I also discovered that the shelter used a carbon monoxide gas chamber to put down animals.

The gas chamber consisted of a cement box with a metal lid. Peering inside, I saw and smelled feces and urine from animals who had been trapped in this contraption, terrified. There was a cylinder of the gas, and the pipe used to deliver the lethal amount into the chamber, in the shed.

We asked the officer what the euthanasia protocols were, and he informed us that after holding a stray dog for ten days, as required by law, they were gassed to death. Since there was virtually no adoption program in the county, close to 100% of the animals captured by animal control were killed in this way.

In the coming weeks, I succeeded in recruiting a veterinarian in an adjacent county to travel to this shelter twice a month and provide humane euthanasia to the animals. With this arrangement, at least these poor dogs would have a peaceful end to their tragic lives.

Linda and I traveled back to visit the shelter several times to investigate what progress had been made, and unfortunately nothing really changed. The animal control officer didn’t care about implementing our suggestions, the commissioners considered the case closed and wouldn’t respond to my calls or letters, and all my attempts to start a grassroots adoption program in the county went nowhere.

Eventually, I had to close the file, put it away in the filing cabinet, and move on.

Over the two years that I worked in the caseworker position, I encountered at least 50 cases of carbon monoxide gas chambers used by shelters to put down animals. I succeeded in providing training for animal control officers to learn how to euthanize properly, and changing euthanasia practices, in exactly 7 of these cases. The rest of the municipalities are, to my knowledge, still using the gas chambers.

Another case involved a hoarding situation in Illinois. An industrial warehouse had been used to house over 200 animals, most in travel crates stacked on top of each other. There was a small team of volunteers who did their best to clean the crates, but because there were so many animals, most crates were cleaned around once a week. The animals were virtually never exercised or socialized. Some of them spun around and around in their crates or bit themselves in frustration.

One of the volunteers videotaped all of this evidence and sent it to me. As I investigated the situation, I discovered that the owner of the facility had a shelter license and funded the “shelter” with donations from neighbors who believed that the facility’s “No Kill” policy translated as “humane.”

I contacted the District Attorney, and he initiated an investigation. I convinced the volunteers to go public about how bad the conditions were, and they began picketing outside the facility every weekend with posters depicting the horrors.

In retrospect, this strategy may have made matters worse, because now there were no volunteers to help clean and feed the animals inside.

It took almost two years, but eventually the District Attorney succeeded in closing down the “shelter” and bringing cruelty charges against the owner.

This was one of many hoarding situations I came across during my tenure as a shelter caseworker. In virtually all of these cases, I found that the hoarders really thought they were doing the right thing, keeping these animals alive despite the gruesome and unmanageable conditions.

And in all of these cases, the public also seemed to think that just because the “shelters” identified themselves as “No Kill,” they were humane and worthy of their donations.

While my imposter syndrome greatly improved at the animal rights organization as I learned better how to do my job, the long hours and devastating tragedies I dealt with every day took their toll on my mental health. I wound up back in the hospital again, twice, and eventually made the difficult decision to resign.

Some good news: since leaving my caseworker position, I found the right doctor, the right medication, and the right job to keep me healthy. I haven’t been hospitalized in nineteen years, and have been virtually symptom-free during that time.

All in all, I worked on upwards of 250 cases in my two years as a shelter caseworker for the animal rights organization. Some of these cases haunt me, even 25 years later. I sometimes try to google the cases I left unresolved and find out if there have been any improvements. I haven’t found much evidence of that.

Today I have the honor and pleasure of working for a shelter in NYC that is well managed, well funded, and provides excellent care for dogs and cats in need. And there are many, many wonderful shelters nationwide doing their best to tackle the huge companion animal overpopulation crisis as humanely as possible.

But I hope to shine a light on the fact that we have a long way to go in this country to ensuring that all shelter animals are treated humanely. Funding for shelters should become a priority. Animal control officers need better training. And the public needs to wake up about issues pertaining to animal and shelter issues, and stop breeding and buying animals.

Once again, I commend you, the reader, for your bravery in reading this entire essay, which I know is hard to read. Kudos to you for bearing witness to this problem.

As promised, my last two posts will be inspirational and warm. We all deserve a ray of hope after focusing on all the problems.