Persistently overcrowded with cats and dogs, shelter staff struggle to keep up with cleaning and care at the facility, a Daily News investigation found.
Interviews with volunteers and county residents whose involvement at the shelter spans several years, as well as Daily News visits, reveal unclean and unusable housing, aggression, sickness and inadequate heating, cooling and ventilation.
Animal welfare workers, volunteers, county officials and humane society staff agree changes must be made to improve conditions for the animals there.
On Wednesday, he and animal welfare experts from several organizations toured the shelter to assess its conditions.
Kathy Maddox, humane society director, said an outside look could be helpful – an attitude that differs from one several sources described in the past few years.
“There’s a lot of things wrong with the shelter,” Maddox said. “It’s nothing that I’m doing. It’s what I have to work with.”
‘Please step in’
Situated beside the Logan County recycling center, the house that serves as Logan County Humane Society sits back from the road.
On the first day of the year, Heather Dawson drove to the Logan County Humane Society, she wrote in an email to some Logan County magistrates in January. She stayed in the parking lot, noting dogs tethered outside without bedding, food, water or adequate shelter.
A county resident with a state license in wildlife rehabilitation, Dawson is known for her work with animals. That’s why other “concerned citizens” started contacting her about conditions at the animal shelter.
Rebecca Kirby was one of those people. She adopted a puppy from the humane society in 2013 and volunteered with a group a year later. Some volunteers became “physically ill” in reaction to the conditions in the indoor office area they offered to clean.
“People were vomiting,” Kirby said in an interview recently. “The smell of urine was so overwhelming.”
In two subsequent visits in January, Dawson noted scenes that led her to conclude in her email, “There is nothing ‘humane’ about the place I visited!”
She noted dogs housed indoors on concrete without heat (cold enough to see her breath, she wrote), in small crates due to overcrowding and outside in plastic houses on concrete without bedding or other barriers.
She saw dogs with open sores, fighting injuries and illnesses. Many were aggressive. She counted more than 160 dogs.
“I urge you to please step in and do something for the enormous amount of animals suffering at our ‘Humane’ Society,” she wrote.
During one of the visits, she asked about providing bedding for some dogs outside that had none. The director responded defensively, the two argued, and Maddox called the police, Dawson recounted in an interview.
Maddox confirms the run-in with Dawson, saying Dawson visited on a bad day.
“She took a picture of a dog because the straw was dirty. Then she got upset because it was like 0 degrees that day and the water was frozen,” Maddox said. “Me and her got into it, and I asked her to leave. She wouldn’t do it, so I had her escorted. She’s been after me the entire time.”
Dawson left the shelter and took her concerns to the Logan County Humane Society board of directors.
“I couldn’t get anywhere with the board or with the members, and so I took it to the county judge-executive. I gave him all my photographs,” Dawson said. “The matter’s been addressed twice, but I’m not allowed on the property.
“They think I want all their dogs killed. It’s not that. I want them in compliance.”
Chick said Dawson’s complaints didn’t “spark anything” because it was something he already was addressing.
The shelter has “comfortable” capacity for 95 dogs with a maximum capacity of 128, Maddox reported to Fiscal Court in January.
During several visits to the shelter – some undercover – the Daily News found the dogs housed at the shelter are living in every room, apart from the office and cat room, and in a variety of conditions. Several sources said the shelter resembled a “hoarding” situation.
Dozens of dogs live or spend most of the day outdoors on all sides of the shelter. Interviews with former volunteers confirm this is the case even in extreme heat and cold temperatures.
Some dogs live in outdoor enclosures, sheltered with dog houses and straw bedding. Several dozen more live outside on tethers or are brought outside during the day and chained to fences, tractor-trailers, sheds and trees. Many have houses to retreat to for shade or warmth, but five tethered during the day in an open field southwest of the facility, outside the perimeter fence, do not.
Several dogs occupy the facility’s front and back porches.
Inside the lower building, dogs live in narrow, dark kennels. Most large enclosures hold two dogs.
In an “employees only” area, two rooms of small metal cages stacked two or three high hold puppies and small and large dogs, sitting on cardboard and soiled towels or blankets.
Quarantined dogs are kept in another basement room. During one visit, a recently spayed but otherwise healthy dog roamed and interacted with kenneled dogs that had mange, a skin disease caused by parasitic mites (and is contagious to humans).
Dogs tethered outdoors during the day are placed in various kennels and cages at night. Though Maddox denied it, photos and interviews provided to the Daily News suggest large dogs are often housed in small crates.
“In speaking with those that work there,” Dawson wrote in an email to magistrates, “I learned that the many dogs in crates in a hallway that I assumed had been brought in (due) to impending below zero weather were in fact residents that live in the small crates because of overcrowding and ... they are some of the dogs that get put out on chains for a few hours a day in the field by the highway.”
Dogs also are kept inside the house’s upper level, where staff work and cats roam between three rooms.
On the property to address complaints of clogged pipes, Mike, a plumber who requested to use only his first name to protect his business, said several puppies and adult dogs were taken out of the bathroom so he could work.
“I knew the reason it was stopped up,” he said. “There was 2 or 3 inches of nothing but raw dog (excrement) in the tub going down the drain.”
’It’s no excuse’
Trailing Maddox, five animal welfare workers, two county officials and the president of the Logan County Humane Society addressed the conditions they saw at the shelter Wednesday.
The group expressed concerns over the number of dogs, their behavior and housing as well as standing water, structural problems, cleaning practices and evidence of mice in animal cages.
Among the group was Charlotte Blake, a certified dog trainer from Franklin, Tenn., who works with Snooty Giggles Dog Rescue. She said she saw several dogs displaying aggressive behavior out of frustration.
“It’s not that these dogs aren’t adoptable,” she said. Being kept on tethers or in kennels without regular interaction with people or other dogs changes their behavior.
Shelters with resources can care for dogs for extended periods by giving toys or bones, taking them out several times a day and setting up play groups with other dogs so they go back in their kennels tired.
“These dogs don’t know what tired is,” Blake said. A long stay “in this environment is two weeks.”
The group included Pam Rogers, state director for the Humane Society of the United States, and Lorri Hare, director of the Bowling Green-Warren County Humane Society. Hare invited Blake and Shawn South-Aswad, director of Snooty Giggles, who directed Chick’s attention to issues she saw as she toured the facility.
Rogers and Hare have attempted to help over the years but were kept at arm’s length by the shelter and its board of directors.
Now the county has stepped in.
Chick said the shelter appears to be making an effort to improve conditions, including asking Rogers to visit officially.
The same week Fiscal Court established a committee to assess the shelter and within days of a Daily News visit, the humane society posted photos of adoptable dogs on Facebook for the first time since October.
They also called for volunteers to help clean the shelter Tuesday, the day before the group visited.
Chick counted 126 dogs Wednesday – down from 159 in January, he said.
He said he frequently stops by the shelter and remarks on his concerns. He struggled to explain why the county hasn’t stepped in sooner if he knew there was a problem, which he said included an increasing population and worsening conditions.
The county gave the humane society $90,000 for fiscal year 2014.
In 2013, the shelter brought in $126,620 in total revenue, according to tax documents. About $58,500 was spent on salaries. Nearly $30,000 went toward utilities and maintenance. About $37,400 was spent on rescue costs, including medication, microchips, veterinary services and truck expenses, according to documents.
Chick consulted Hare about the shelter prior to forming a Fiscal Court committee.
Rogers said Hare has demonstrated an ability to turn around a shelter, making her valuable to Logan County.
“She’s implemented best practices and she understands nurturing the public-private partnership to make it a success,” Rogers said of Hare. “You can certainly be a small community and create a good shelter that’s a model for other people and meets the laws. ... Lorri’s done that plus more.”
When Hare became the director in Bowling Green 15 years ago, it was a small facility with no volunteers and little community support. The first 5K she put on raised only $4,000, compared to between $25,000 and $30,000 14 years later, she said.
She said rural shelters that compare themselves to Warren County, lamenting low funding and poor community involvement, could learn from her experience.
Chick asked Hare to join a committee of experts who could assess the Logan shelter and recommend changes. Hare wanted guarantees that changes would be made because she has offered help to the shelter in the past.
“I have expressed my fear that if four or five people go in and spent their time and energy ... making recommendations and trying to help and implement change, I have to know … that change is going to happen. Because it would be a total waste of time if we did it and nothing changed,” Hare said.
Chick said he couldn’t make the guarantees she requested.
Instead, the court formed a committee of three unnamed humane society members, Chick and magistrates Barry Wright and Jo Orange.
Chick said they’ll attempt to meet weekly in April and May to put together recommendations that would be included in the shelter contract, which is up for renewal in July.
Preserving the current staff is not “the main effort” of the process, but they’ll work together to reach an agreement “if we can,” Chick said. The committee will have to convince the court of whatever changes it wishes to recommend.
“We’ll come up with suggestions and basically some requirements if they’re going to run the shelter,” he said. “The only thing I want is a good, functioning humane society.”
In Kentucky, the only way to force a shelter to abide by shelter standards outlined in state law is for a taxpayer to file litigation against the shelter. Such a suit has been filed in nearby Edmonson County, where three taxpayers accuse the Edmonson County Animal Shelter of allowing conditions and practices that violate state law.
The suit has been ongoing for two years.
Matthew Liebman, a senior attorney for the Animal Legal Defense Fund – which recently ranked Kentucky worst among the states for its animal protection legislation – wrote in an email that leaving enforcement up to taxpayer lawsuits is “not a very efficient way to ensure compliance.”
“It places a large burden on altruistic residents. Many states have state agencies that conduct routine annual inspections of shelters to make sure they’re complying with animal protection laws. Unfortunately, Kentucky does not,” he wrote. “The solution would be to pass new legislation to establish a shelter oversight agency with a true commitment to animal welfare and the task of regularly inspecting public shelters. But given Kentucky’s last place ranking and the legislature’s reluctance to pass animal welfare laws, I’m not optimistic that will happen. It’s therefore important that taxpayers retain the power to sue counties that blatantly violate the shelter standards.”
‘Nothing to hide’
Inside and out, animal waste is everywhere. In several instances, piles of feces appeared to be days or weeks old.
Maddox said such scenes should be expected at an animal shelter, but she also blames the uncleanliness on too few staff. After jail workers were pulled from the shelter about a month ago, she has no regular volunteers.
The shelter employs three people, including Maddox, who recently stepped down from her second position as the county’s animal control officer. She said she needed to be more present at the shelter. A Facebook post shows the shelter is hiring for an animal control officer and another humane society employee.
In review of conditions at the shelter, Maddox said the animals aren’t suffering, but they’re not comfortable. She puts dogs outside on chains because it’s better than leaving them inside dark narrow kennels.
“I’ve got nothing to hide,” she said. “I promise you, I’ve not done anything to hurt these animals.”
To Maddox, the issues are with the facility, which she believes should never have been converted into an animal shelter.
She raised issues with the county at Fiscal Court on March 24, including a truck needing replacement, drainage issues, electrical problems, water pressure issues and others, according to meeting minutes.
In an interview later, she said the county refused to fix the facility.
Maddox said heat and air haven’t worked in at least seven months – an issue she said she repeatedly brought up to the county because it owns the building and should pay for repairs.
Chick said the county sends workers to address air, heat or electrical issues whenever they’re brought up. The county paid to install a new heater when, during the first cold snap, shelter staff said it wasn’t working.
When the new heater wouldn’t run, Chick said, the maintenance worker found that the shelter was out of fuel.
At the shelter, Maddox showed indoor kennel gates that are patched inexpertly after dogs tore and broke them. The indoor kennels have signs everywhere of improvised fixes, including a wooden pallet on top of one kennel whose occupant jumps. Cracks run through the concrete, allowing space for unsanitary material to stay after cleaning.
Chick said the county won’t fix the gates until the population becomes more manageable because broken gates are a symptom of overcrowding.
He said the shelter is three times the size of the one that preceded it, but it’s still too small for the number of dogs housed there.
“We know it’s not perfect, but you can’t make improvements if overcrowding isn’t going to go away,” Chick said.
Michael Wallace, president of the humane society board of directors, said the shelter has gained the attention of “passionate people,” and he hopes that attention, while negative, will push the community to help the animals.
They’re developing relationships with more rescue groups, rebuilding the website and cooperating with the county’s committee. Recent donations adding up to nearly $300,000 will lead to improvements.
He mentions becoming “a kill shelter” like it’s a threat that lingers over the facility and worries its supporters. But he said he doesn’t think they could ever go back to euthanizing as many dogs as they once did.
“It could be a lot worse than it is now,” he said. “That’s what scares people.”
Five Freedoms
The controversy surrounding the animal population stems from the humane society’s adamant desire to maintain its status as a no-kill facility, which it has maintained since 2009.
In January, two magistrates voted against forming the committee, according to county documents. Magistrate Jack Crossley said he wants to preserve the shelter’s “no-kill” designation and give the humane society director “time to come up with a manageable plan.”
No-kill animal shelters euthanize less than 10 percent of the animals they take in and only put down those with irreversible behavioral problems or that suffer from terminal illnesses, according to several animal welfare organizations.
Bowling Green’s humane society has an 85 percent save rate, Hare said. It euthanizes for aggression and terminal illness.
Maddox told the Fiscal Court in January that 2,163 dogs were taken in from January 2012 to January 2014, and 2,092 were adopted.
According to those numbers, the shelter’s save rate was 97 percent over two years. Maddox said she works with two rescue organizations that connect to several others to transport dogs for adoption in other states.
She said the average stay for a large dog at the shelter is six months to a year. Former volunteers refer to animals that have lived two or three years at the shelter.
Sassy, a terrier/pit bull mix, has lived at the shelter for almost three years, according to pet search sites. Pongo, a Dalmatian/terrier mix, has lived there since 2010.
Maddox said she won’t stay on at the shelter if they start euthanizing dogs.
In the world of animal welfare, thoughts on no-kill facilities are on a spectrum. No-kill facilities emphasize spay/neuter programs and high adoption rates supported by rescue organizations.
However, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals argue that some no-kill facilities with poor, overcrowded conditions are worse than euthanizing animals.
“When ‘no-kill’ animal shelters and rescue groups are filled to capacity, which is almost always, they are left with two options: turn away more animals than they take in or warehouse animals, often in substandard, filthy, and severely crowded conditions, for weeks, months, or even years on end. Most, if not all, of the animals who are turned away from such facilities still face untimely deaths – just not at these facilities,” PETA wrote in blog on its website, where it lists reports of overcrowded shelters and rescues.
The Association of Shelter Veterinarians published guidelines in 2010 describing minimum humane standards for shelter care. For animals staying for extended periods in a shelter setting, needs increase because such an environment is stressful and predictably unhealthy.
The standards uphold the “five freedoms for animal welfare:”
•Freedom from hunger and thirst
•Freedom from discomfort
•Freedom from pain, injury or disease
•Freedom to express normal behavior
•Freedom from fear and distress
The standards have things to say about everything from primary enclosures to sanitation to vaccinations. Rogers includes the guidelines in a pack of information she provides to any shelter she visits in the state.
They set a higher bar than Kentucky state law, making them no more than recommendations.
For example, the guidelines state, “Tethering is an unacceptable method of confinement,” citing the Animal Welfare Act which, in 1997, forbade tethering in regulated industries, such as laboratories and exhibitions.
The guidelines also address overcrowding, saying all shelters have a maximum capacity they should not exceed. Factors – such as the number of appropriate housing units, staffing, training, average length of stay and the total number of reclaims, adoptions, transfers, release or other outcomes – should determine that capacity.
Operating over capacity leads to “unwanted outcomes,” including substandard care, disease and behavioral issues.
Rachel Newbury, assistant director at Logan’s humane society, said the shelter has had trouble with parvovirus in the past. Parvo is a highly contagious, life-threatening viral disease.
Instances of disease seen at the shelter, including parvovirus in puppies, aren’t unusual, but the volume of dogs makes it more difficult to treat or prevent, Dawson said.
“Passing on sickness happens at other shelters. ... That’s a risk everywhere,” she said. “But fewer numbers and better cleaning practices cut down on that tremendously. Overcrowding is the No. 1 cause of disease. It runs rampant when you’re overcrowded.”
The guidelines also recommend spaying or neutering animals kept at the shelter for more than a few weeks because it cuts down on behaviors like fighting and marking.
Most of the dogs at the humane society are unaltered. A recent partnership with RePets, which raises money, and the Fix Foundation in Simpson County has allowed the shelter to fix 25 animals, as of March 25.
Leah Lawrence, adoption center manager at the Warren County humane society, said unaltered animals experience added stress.
“It’s kind of mean, honestly, to put unspayed female dogs a few feet away and make a dog stare at her for years and years and years and not be able to do anything,” Lawrence said. “I just don’t see the point in it.”
‘We finally had to stop’
Rebecca Kirby, a Logan County resident, visited the humane society looking for a puppy. Her family had moved onto larger property, and she’d promised her boys a bigger dog.
The black lab mix they chose to adopt was covered in excrement, she said. A volunteer was sent to wash it, but the smell lingered, leaving Kirby to believe the puppy was only rinsed.
After a couple days at home, the puppy developed symptoms of kennel cough and worms. Later, it developed symptoms of parvo. In the first couple months, Kirby said she spent about $1,000 at a veterinarian.
A year after she adopted the puppy, Kirby brought a few adults and kids to voluntarily clean the office, wanting to improve the area the public uses because she’d been struck by the smell.
The conditions made some of the adults sick, and she wouldn’t let the kids work inside, she said in March.
“I didn’t feel comfortable having kids in that environment,” she said. “I didn’t go back. I wanted to go back but I just felt as one person, I could have helped but I didn’t think I could have done much. They didn’t keep up with basic cleanliness, so you have to start from scratch every time you go.”
Maddox denied that the conditions prevent the community from volunteering at the shelter, explaining their absence as a lack of concern.
Staff at the Bowling Green humane society said they made multiple attempts over the years to help the Logan County shelter address the issues it faces, which they said stem from the number of animals.
Two employees spent a year volunteering in Logan County on their days off. Both stopped going eventually because, over time, their effort felt ineffective. The Warren County shelter pulled some animals and donated supplies.
“We finally had to stop,” Hare said. “You felt as though you were enabling their behavior.”
Lawrence volunteered two years ago and describes conditions similar to those sources have witnessed recently. She remembers the facility being dark, holding standing water and smelling horrible.
She offered to take animals, but the staff turned her down.
“They weren’t really open to the idea of adopting them out or letting me adopt them out. ... They’d been there so long, I think they knew they were a liability, and that’s why they didn’t really want them to be adopted out,” Lawrence said. “They had dogs sitting there for two, three, four years. If they’re in a kennel that long or on a chain that long, they’re going to get aggressive. Most of them, if not all of them, have behavioral issues.”
Lawrence brought Rogers on an unofficial visit to the shelter in 2013.
Pam Baird, a former board member, said Rogers was in touch with the board, but never made an official visit.
Rogers said she offered help multiple times, but she has to be invited to visit officially.
“It never went anywhere,” Baird said.
Lisa Henderson, who worked for 13 years at the humane society in Bowling Green, went along with Lawrence in 2012 on a hot summer day. When she went inside, the smell “overtook her” and made her lightheaded because of the lack of air or ventilation.
She spent about a year volunteering, taking pictures of the dogs to update the shelter’s social media sites. She remembers dogs living on wet straw covered in mud and excrement. In December 2012, she emailed Rogers of HSUS, attaching pictures of dogs chained outside without shelter in mud and excrement.
Eventually, Henderson went to the humane society board to try to help make changes, but the members rebuffed her, she said.
“They kept saying, ‘We don’t have the resources Bowling Green has, the volunteers Bowling Green has,’” Henderson said. “I kept telling them it was just one small building and we did have to euthanize a lot, but in 13 years, it’s completely changed. Every shelter has to start somewhere and build their volunteer base and improve their situation.
“They want to call themselves a no-kill shelter, but they don’t have the resources to be a no-kill shelter.”
(Bowling Green Daily News - April 5, 2015)
