Part One of Two -- Rescuers claim Summit County animal control facility perpetrates numerous atrocities against animals in its care, while county officials claim these allegations are lies with a political motive.
Special to the Legal Animal Photo: Llew is pictured in his intake photo at Summit County Animal Control. Lori Ballenger remembers being captivated by the “big, sad eyes” when she first saw the picture of “Llew” on Petfinder.
“It was love at first sight,” she recalls.
Unable to get the two-year-old bull mastiff out of her mind, Ballenger traveled 1 ½ hours to the Summit County, Ohio animal control facility on July 13, 2006 to adopt the dog.
When she arrived at the shelter, Ballenger recalls, the stench from the kennels was overwhelming, and when she first saw Llew he was stuffed into a kennel that was not tall enough to allow him to stand upright. Although he came out of his kennel bouncy and happy, Ballenger says he was a walking skeleton after more than two weeks at the shelter, and when she got him out of the shelter he ate and drank ravenously.
Ballenger took the dog home with promises of a long life full of love and fun. He was seen by a veterinarian, but quickly developed signs of severe illness. After just a few days of pampering, Llew was dead.
“For us, it was like bringing home one of our children from the hospital – a lifetime of hopes and dreams and plans. . . .Llew could have lived a long, happy life in a family where he would be loved and cherished,” she writes. “Instead, he lies in a cold grave, at two years of age.”
Ballenger says her vet’s diagnosis was poisoning, and she suspects that Llew was starved, received chemical burns, and was poisoned by cleaning fluids while he was in the custody of Summit County animal control.
“The conditions existing at Summit County Animal Control are criminal, monstrous and deplorable,” she alleges.
Ballenger’s claims are among the latest in a long line of accusations against the animal control facility located in Summit County, a county of more than 500,000 people in Northeast Ohio that includes the city of Akron.
Going back about five years, the charges include allegations that animals were given inadequate amounts of drugs during euthanasia and subsequently froze to death in the shelter’s freezers, that sick, injured and underage animals are left to suffer and die in their cages, that animals are killed in mass euthanasia sprees despite the availability of space at the shelter, and that animals are routinely deprived of adequate food and water.
Charges have resulted in years of open warfare. These charges have resulted in years of entrenched warfare between a group formed to reform the shelter,
Summit County Animal Rights Enforcement (SCARE), and the officials of
Summit County. It is a war that has received generous press coverage over the years in Akron and Cleveland, and become notorious throughout the region.
Neither side seems ready to give an inch of ground.
Members of SCARE have launched a
campaign to recall powerful Summit County Executive James McCarthy before he comes up for reelection in 2008, alleging that he is running a regime of dirty politics in which the animals are the victims. Far from pulling punches in its anti-McCarthy message, the SCARE website features an altered portrait of McCarthy dressed as Hitler.
“It is only getting worse, because the county executive knows he can get away with it, and the animals are suffering. It is just like [the county officials] are doing it out of spite, enjoying it,” says Heather Nagel, co-founder and director of the rescue group
Heaven Can Wait, and an active member of SCARE.
For his part, County Executive James McCarthy denies almost all the allegations, calling them “ridiculous,” and claiming that they are the result of about six people making a lot of noise.
“They lie, and they are evil, and they are people that I do not trust,” he says. “For all of their so-called good intentions, they are the exact opposite.”
No wonder that in a recent evaluation of county animal control services, a team from the National Animal Control Association (NACA) was “distressed by the level of conflict that currently exists between Summit County Animal Control and some members of the animal welfare community.”
Although NACA executive director Johnnie Mays found conditions at the shelter much improved from his first inspection in 2004, he told the Summit County council that the disputing parties need to find a way to “sit in a room and just talk.”
No chance, says McCarthy.
“I won’t work with them, I won’t sit down with them, ever,” he says, about the prospect of engaging a mediator to bring the two parties together.
Dispute arises over hiring of new shelter director. One of the latest battles in the Summit County war is over the hiring of Christine Congrove (now Christine Fatheree), as director of animal control.
Fatheree, daughter of city councilman Dan Congrove, was hired to run the shelter in February at age 23, despite the fact that she didn’t have any animal control experience – and the job specifications outlined before her hire required at least five years of such experience. Further adding to the controversy is the fact Fatherlee was hired at a salary of $61,000 a year, $8,000 more than the previous animal control director and than the advertised salary for the position.
Fatheree, who does not have a college degree, had served as a former secretary at the pound, and later, as a county sheriff’s deputy and executive assistant to the director of public safety. Because the post of animal control director is categorized as “unclassified” within the county, McCarthy had the absolute freedom to hire whomever he liked, regardless of qualifications.
Fatheree follows in the footsteps of one shelter director accused of conducting dog fights on the shelter premises and engaging in deliberate acts of cruelty, and another charged with administering inadequate amounts of euthanasia drugs and putting dogs in the shelter freezer before they were dead.
Critics allege that the hiring of Fatheree was nepotism at its worst, and that she serves merely as the puppet of McCarthy and Summit County Administrative Services Director Craig Stanley.
“She is fairly sweet, but very timid, and completely overwhelmed,” says Deanne Christman-Resch, director of the local Pet Welfare Coalition. “She is politically connected so they create jobs for her…but she is in effect a puppet, while Craig Stanley runs the facility.”
In return, Christman-Resch says, Stanley is responsible for many of the problems at the shelter.
Fatheree’s hiring prompted numerous protests from the local animal welfare community – including a barrage of emails, protests at city council meetings and a demand for her removal, and a demonstration outside the shelter.
But McCarthy has refused to budge, labeling the opposition to Fatheree as simply a matter of sexism and age bias. Despite her lack of management experience, he says that what is important is her management ability.
“She happens to be young, and she’s blond, and she’s female,” McCarthy says. “No experience? So what, she can make decisions. We’ve had people in there with animal control experience who were awful, they were totally useless… She cares, she can make a decision, she can enforce a decision.”
Nagel, who is herself only 26, and obviously, female, says the objection to Fatheree isn’t to her age and sex, but because she is ill-equipped to do the job and provide a better environment for the animals.
“I don’t care what age, sex or race you are if you are qualified and educated,” Nagel says. “But when people like here are appointed to positions they have no right to be in, and they are entrusted with the care of living creatures, then I have a problem.”
Fatheree did not respond to numerous attempts to speak with her for this article.
However, Richard Farkas, director of the nearby Humane Society of Greater Akron, says that despite her inexperience, Fatheree has been willing to learn.
In addition to attending numerous training seminars in animal control and euthanasia, at county expense, Farkas says Fatheree has frequently leaned on the humane society for assistance.
“She has not only been open to that help, she has called for it, especially when she was first hired,” Farkas says.
However, opponents of the shelter management are adamant. Fatheree, Stanley, and McCarthy all must go.
“The public is outraged,” says Nagel. “Animal advocates and taxpayers are fed up with county government money being sunk into salaries for political lackeys who are hired because of who they know, and who have no experience.”
Coming next from The Legal Animal. Charges Past and Present: Has Summit Cou., nty cleaned up its act?