Robeson Co Animal Shelter in NC recently failed two state inspections due to multiple issues including failing to maintain the shelter in accordance with standard disease control practices and failure to provide veterinary care for sick pets. The shelter manager explained the inspection failures as being due to overcrowding. She further described the arbitrary killing of all dogs under 1 year of age as “merely disease control”. Last week, there was a meeting to update the county on how things are going at the shelter:
Members of the Robeson County Board of Health heard a mostly positive report Thursday about ongoing improvements at the county animal shelter.
Mostly positive? Whaaaaa?
The shelter update, however, did not include details about a recent parvo outbreak that forced staff to euthanize more than 50 puppies last week.
And [shelter manager April] Lowry made no mention of two state inspections the shelter has failed in the past month.
Oh. I see. Well I guess if you leave those minor killing and neglect issues out, the picture does get a whole lot rosier.
When asked specifically about the failed state inspections, a shelter supervisor appeared to be spinning the same yarn as the shelter manager:
[Environmental Health Director Albert] Locklear said most of the violations were the result of overcrowding at the shelter. A new policy requiring adopted pets to be spayed should help when it goes into effect Oct. 1.
How is spaying adopted pets in October going to address current issues of neglect and the spread of disease due to employee laziness? Will spaying pets in October cause the people in charge to quit lying about why they failed state inspections and start doing their jobs? I’m not seeing it.
I think these people have to use a lot of alcohol to be able to stand each other.
About the spaying of pets, I guess the implication is that if the females can’t get pregnant, they don’t have to worry as much about the males still being intact. However, if it increases adoption fees for female cats and dogs only, couldn’t that lead to a preference for adopting male pets by the (regressive-thinking) public — in turn unfairly leading to more female pets being euthanized? After all, how many current marginal pet owners neglect or refuse to get their male animals neutered, because the (resulting) puppies and kittens are “not [their] problem”? That is an attitude that, were I in charge of animal control/welfare in Robeson County, I would not want to encourage.
I think they’re blaming their ‘overcrowding’ problem purely on the fact that there are unfixed animals in their community. I notice a lot of regressive shelters can think of NOTHING ELSE beside S/N as a possible solution to every problem of crowding and low adoption rates.