A Las Vegas animal shelter is taking steps to protect its workers from pet owners angered by the shelter's policy on unclaimed pets. "We've had people come over the top of the counter and grab staff," James Seitz, Lied Animal Shelter's acting director, told the Las Vegas Sun. "One day, it took six of us to get a guy out."
The man's dog had been captured and brought to the shelter this past summer, two or three weeks before he showed up.
The shelter must euthanize unclaimed animals 72 hours after they arrive at Lied, so the man's dog was long gone by the time he arrived at the shelter.
When the staff broke the news to him, "he just went berserk," Seitz said.
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Ummm... I'd be enraged too if I showed up at an animal shelter to find they had killed my lost pet after just a few days. 72 hours is an awfully short time to keep an animal before euthanizing it - sometimes it takes pet owners at least a week to determine that their pet (especially a cat) has really wandered off for good, and isn't just on a prolonged adventure. Take this pet owners' experience, described later in the article, as an example:
About 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Marques and her husband drove from their North Las Vegas home to the shelter to look for their cat, Puddles, her indoor-outdoor cat that had been missing for a few days. When Puddles saw Marques at the shelter, "he came to the front of the cage like, 'Oh, she's here to get me,'?" she said.
Told she needed proof of ownership to get her cat, Marques went home and returned to the shelter at 3:40 p.m. with pictures and receipts from a veterinarian.
Too late, she was told. Puddles' 72 hours were up at 3:17 p.m. He was put down at 3:35 p.m.
Marques can barely tell the story, dissolving several times into sobs about the black-and-white feline she had for five years.
"I had told the man, 'Would you please put a statement on the cage not to euthanize? I'm coming back. Don't do anything to him.' He said, 'I'll do that, but he's not up for review until tomorrow anyhow, so there's nothing to worry about. But I'll put a note on the cage.'?"
When she returned to find Puddles was dead, the man told her he forgot to post the note, she said.
I believe that we can make 2 primary conclusions from this story and from similar situations at other animal shelters: 1. Most animal shelters need more funds and resources to guarantee at least a week's worth of care for unclaimed pets before they are put down, and 2. Most animal shelters need and deserve outside help or consultants to improve their daily functions, so that mistakes and miscommunications like this don't happen.
I can think of two ways to address these issues: 1. You can donate more money to your local animal shelter and 2. Universities like mine (the University of Alabama) can partner with local animal shelters to assign business classes to tackle the real-world issues the shelters face. This would help animal shelters succeed and teach students valuable lessons about marketing, management, and other subjects that can't be learned inside the classroom.
Those are my suggestions - what are yours?
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I live here in Vegas and sadly it's not money they need but LEADERSHIP! The place is mired in controversy constantly. The HSUS called them a “house of horrors”. This is nothing new for The Animal Foundation. It's management team includes newspaper heiress Janie Greenspun and Steve Wynn's sister in law Dale. It's a society party not a well run shelter.
That's unfortunately revealing.
How can it be fixed? If so many
people believe that its policies and leadership need to change, why
hasn't there been a general outcry and revolution of positive change?