Volunteers at the city pound in Pryor, OK have been banned. And in a classy way:
“Lisa and I showed up on Sunday morning to walk dogs and they just said that we weren’t needed anymore, that they were going to have two part time employees and another full time employee and that our help was no longer required,” [volunteer Kathy LaValle] said.
Ms. Lavalle has volunteered at the city pound since 2011, heading up adoption events and networking pets online. She’d like to know why she and the other volunteers are being turned away suddenly:
Kathy Lavalle is exhausting her resources trying to find out why she is not allowed to help out at the shelter anymore.
“I have texted, I’ve called, emailed,” Kathy Lavalle said. “I can’t get an answer.”
Pryor mayor Jimmy Tramel says the vols should quit harshing his mellow:
[Y]eah we could’ve done a better job, but that didn’t happen,” Tramel said.
Mayor Brozilla told the media that the reason for the suspension of the volunteer program is that the city needs “to put a procedure in place” outlining the terms to which volunteers must agree in order to donate their time at the pound. He needs 30 – 45 days to come up with the terms. Ms. LaValle said the volunteers met with the city to discuss these terms a year and a half ago and the matter is long settled.
While the mayor is reinventing the wheel for 45 days, taxpayers will be shelling out $3000 to pay the pound staff overtime as they compensate for the free labor normally performed by vols. The mayor is totes chill with this too:
“Sure it’s tax money, but for the safety of the volunteers, the safety of the employees and safety and well being of the animals, it’s going to cost us some money,” Tramel said.
Hey, it’s only tax money. So FREE CASH basically. Woohoo!
Volunteers are worried that without their free help, more pets will be needlessly neglected and killed at the pound. I imagine the mayor’s response to that concern is something along the lines of “Coulda, woulda, shoulda!”
You know who I would like to shake hands with? Mayor Rice-A-Broni’s campaign manager. You sir, are a genius. A magical genius who somehow managed to put ALL THE LIPSTICK on a pig, sufficient to win an election.
(Thank you Clarice for the links.)
Sorry, but the mayor probably sees some of the founders of rescues that make ANYONE and EVERYONE, including volunteers, sign a confidentiality agreement that states that even if they do see something that ‘isn’t quite right’, animals disappear and no one knows where they go, animals are ‘put down’ for no reason other than they have been there a month and more room needs to be made for ‘new’ rescues (“out with the old, in with the new” donation-value and adoption-for-a-fee animal rescuing), and bunches of other scammer/swindler things ‘retail rescues’ do, so maybe rather than deal with volunteers who may or may not talk about ‘crap’ that happens at animal control, they’re hiring people, paying them a pittance, and making them sign agreements “not to talk”.
This mayor is probably watching some of the scammer ‘rescues’ run their ‘retail rescue’ brokering operations, and how they manipulate the truth, embellish, and outright lie, and pocket a lot of cash in ‘crisis’ and ‘sympathy/pity’ donations, and because they have volunteer-slaves that have to sign confidentiality agreements NO ONE say’s anything negative about the rescues who are running scams, he’s taking a page from that playbook and hiring cheap labor that has to ‘keep’ quiet because of confidentiality agreements.
I’m not defending him, but until the rescues who are profiting personally and greatly from so-called ‘rescue’ when they aren’t truly rescues at all, are held accountable for the money that comes in on ‘designated fundraisers’ as per the law, and are forced to be transparent as they are always touting they are regarding exactly WHERE are all of those animals they’ve been rescuing that are not being shown they were adopted, are not being seen at the rescue facility anymore and people are told they are in the proverbial ‘good home’ or a ‘sanctuary’ but no one can find out where these places are (but when asked questions by various people, the commenters/questioners are bullied, attacked, and then their comments are deleted and the person is banned from posting), so chances are the animal had run through their ‘donation-value’ and then either had issues that made them unadoptable, or they’d been at the ‘rescue’ too long, so they were killed, or ‘disappeared’, then people with tax payer funded agencies probably don’t feel like dealing with people that question them constantly, perhaps drag them through the mud, attack them in various ways, etc, when many people know from having factual documentation of several kinds that just because someone says they are a ‘rescue’ or are ‘rescuing animals’ does not mean that makes anything else they do a-O.K. including killing healthy animals and/or disappearing them ‘somewhere’ and volunteers and others can’t and don’t say a word because of the stringent confidentiality agreements they signed for the ‘rescue’.
A huge racket is being run in CA by some horse rescues participating in keeping the commercial horse slaughter industry operating even though buying and selling horses with the intention of shipping them to slaughter has been illegal in CA since 1998.
The horse rescues could get the horse slaughter trade in CA shut down VERY quickly by doing a few simple things, and also using social media, which by-the-way, most of them are masters at doing, but since that is the foundation for their rescue operations (things being said over and over again by the master manipulator founders and primary players at the rescue of ‘we outbid the kill buyer at the sale’, ‘we bought a horse off the meat truck in the sale parking lot’, or ‘we went to the feedlot and rescued a horse from the kill buyer’), so even though many people in ‘rescue’ are nice people who donate their money, their time as volunteers, etc, many of these same people unfortunately are fairly naïve to the manipulations of the founders and primary players at these ‘rescues’, so not-so-nice people who were originally brokers, breeders, horse traders, worked at animal controls and have euthanized thousands of healthy animals, etc are seeing the much better money to be made when they say the magic words of “we rescue”, and it is causing some people who know precisely what’s going on to disengage entirely because its fighting an uphill battle to expose the ‘losers in rescue’ and/or they cannot afford the mental and financial (having to hire an attorney to defend them if various agencies are ‘sic-ed’ on them) attacks being made on them..
People are so disgusted with “social-club/social-media rescue” where unscrupulous people can literally say and do anything they want because face-to-face interaction, and even over the phone through telephone calls interaction are becoming more and more of a rarity, so the ringleader simply ramps-up a “social media madness mob” (what happened with the Salem Witch Trials was actually dubbed “social madness”) to bully and attack anyone that tries to ‘out’ them, and the followers never think to check anything out because that would take a bit of ‘prying and work’ on their part, they take the chance they will be attacked, and quite frankly, most people simply don’t want to really know what’s going on, and those that do know what’s under the pretty façade of a public rescue facility can’t and won’t talk because of those confidentiality agreements they signed.
We are not talking about horse “rescues” that are nothing more than fronts for kill buyers.
In fact, we’re not talking about rescues at all.
We are talking about a “shelter” that one day turns away volunteers who are just there to walk dogs and help clean. A shelter that already has problems, and now seeks to blind the public from the goings on there. Oh, and btw, it’s going to cost $3k to do that.
Mikken, if you don’t think people who work at animal controls and/or are in charge of them don’t see the $$$ being made by retail rescues, the adulation so many of them get even when they don’t deserve it, and yes, ‘rescues’ that are ‘fronts’ for kill buyers and who also dispose of their unwanted horses through those very same kill buyers, then you don’t know as much as you think you do…..especially about what some of the ‘rescuers’ were doing for a living (animal control officers who cavalierly killed 1000’s of animals while ‘on the job’, horse traders, brokers, ‘trainers’ that worked for kill buyers riding horses during ‘sorting’ before they were ‘trainers’, breeders who dispose of their ‘not good enough’ to sell for the higher dollars horses, dogs, and other animals’ by calling them rescues (and that’s why that adoption fee being called “fair market value” popped up – sorry, that is ‘retail-speak’, NOT rescue-speak), etc before they became ‘rescuers’ and ‘rescues’ and THAT is where they learned to have people sign confidentiality agreements which “seeks to blind the public from the goings on there” at the ‘rescue’ that prevent them from talking to the donating public who would then ask “where are all of the animals you are constantly rescuing using donor money, and what is all the donation money being used for?!?”.
When some of the rescuers who started rescues go from flat broke, home foreclosed on, on disability (one is supposedly unable to go back to their former job at AC but are able to train horses for the public without wearing a helmet when they had a severe head injury that they collect disability for!?!) and/or unemployment, etc to really monetarily, facility and in many other ways enriched in the space of 1 year, something ‘not right’ is going on there, but with handy-dandy confidentiality agreements signed by everyone that steps foot on their property, nearly impossible to find out without a lot of work and asking of questions repeatedly that most people aren’t willing to do apparently as evidenced by comments thinking animal controls and rescue are two entirely separate things.
Did it ever dawn on you that another reason some AC’s don’t want ‘big ears-big eyes’ volunteers at the facility is that they may hear about some of those that work at AC being in cahoots with some of the ‘rescues’, and the rescues paying ‘kickbacks’ to some under paid ACO’s, or them being in collusion on seizures that makes AC look like they’re ‘really doing something’ and the ‘rescue just happened to be there to ‘help’ them” and without that cooperation, those dang crisis and sympathy/pity donations to the rescue so they can pay their AC cohorts will not come flooding in by the thousands of dollars during and after the running of a seizure scam.
Maybe when rescuers who are founders of rescues and their buddies have to disclose their complete backgrounds regarding previous jobs before “rescue is their job” that can be up for public scrutiny, more people will then see just how much this is all interlinked.
Until that happens, unscrupulous people know the mere mention of “I rescue” causes most people to not ask any more questions, and instead, their egos and some of their bank accounts are pumped to the max, and don’t think that animal control managers, officers, and others that are up for public scrutiny already don’t know that and decide they are in the wrong line of work and join the ranks of being a ‘rescue’ that is not scrutinized, but they unfortunately bring their very bad habit to ‘rescue’ of killing and disappearing animals in various ways with them, which then corrupts ‘rescue’ and puts animals in danger (especially when they convince naïve rescuers that not all animals deserve to live, you know, like the ones that have physical and/or behavioral/training issues….).
It really just looks like ‘reverse infiltration’ with those who work for tax payer supported government agencies, probably not being paid a lot of money, being ‘harassed’ by ‘do-gooders’, etc are seeing far less scrutiny and far more money to be made if they quit their government job, become a ‘rescue’, but rather than bring the love of all animals to their ‘rescue’, the long term care and maintenance of some animals that can’t or won’t ‘do’ things for people, they instead bring their ‘devaluing’, ‘convenience killing’, and ‘playing God’ crappy attitudes, and followers allow them to get away with it. Oh, and then of course their is the money to be made because of the lack of scrutiny by hardly anyone, their bottomless pit egos being fed on a daily basis with each new and better ‘crisis rescue’ that comes up, and all kinds of other great perks they rape (oh, I mean ‘reap”) the benefit of as they ‘delete and ban, delete and ban, delete and ban” off their FB pages anyone who questions them barely at all, and then their minions trash the person when they can’t defend themselves. Can we say grade school social structure everyone?
Not everyone just fell off the turnip truck yesterday, so this racket will be exposed eventually through lawsuits, books, blogs, etc when people aren’t so afraid of being attacked that they stay quiet anymore, (of course, more people decide they’d rather be informed on all the angles being ‘worked’ and not just ‘right’ with more limited knowledge will help too), but it would be great for the animals if it was sooner rather than later before the real rescuers not into ‘rescue’ for the $$$, their egos, and other superficial things don’t fold tent and go away because THEY are the ones rescuing for the right reasons; THE ANIMALS, and that means all of them, even the ones that can’t be bartered and sold because they have ‘issues’…….now excuse me why I go out and feed all of our damaged goods animals.