The Purple Hearted Puppies animal shelter in Summerdale AL has officially been shut down by court order after roughly 200 pets were found dead or starving by police last month. The district attorney is gathering evidence to bring felony charges against the two women who owned the so-called shelter. Of particular interest to the DA is financial information showing the women had the resources to feed the pets but allowed them to starve anyway. This factor goes to intent.
An officer with the Summerdale police department says each of the women will face 20 felony charges and possibly 150 – 200 misdemeanors.
Regarding the issue of ownership, more grim news:
We need to get permanent legal custody of the 109 survivors. There were 58 dogs and 51 cats who survived,” said Sonja Presley, executive director at BARC!
Purple Hearted Puppies described itself as a no kill shelter and solicited donations from compassionate animal lovers. This was not a no kill shelter. Had it been a municipal pound, I would have described it as having a 50% kill rate. And the only reason 100% of the pets didn’t die is because authorities intervened.
Good for the authorities in this case. High praise due them – know it’s been very hard. These animals give nothing but love and are so scared. It’s a shame what some humans can do to animals – imagine what they can do to other people.
Do we know what efforts are underway, if any, to relocate the animals who survived? It would help to have a contact name and phone number. I’ll jump over to Facebook and put it out there, asking folks to circulate far and wide.
The animals have not been signed over yet. Right now, they are asking people to consider adopting the pets already in the shelter.
Thank goodness its been shut down but to get donations by calling youself a NK shelter really annoys me. I hope their punishment is by the fullest extent of the law.
Wouldn’t it be a good idea if all animal shelters had 24 hour web cameras where people could keep an eye on what is happening in them? Same goes for pet day care centers and pet boarding. Then the animals would have some people checking up on them from time to time and maybe catch problems before animals die. Well except in the case of kill shelters where killing is part of their daily or weekly routine.
Thank you for updating! The Baldwin County Humane Society has now been given custody of the dogs but will not adopt out for a few months. They still need monetary donations and, in particular, cat food and litter. Just today, the authorities discovered mass graves of dogs that had been killed. The two owners will be arrested again soon…because of financial discrepancies since they were acting as a “non-profit” shelter. This news story becomes more troubling each day!