Part Two of Two --Critics and county officials continue to clash over current and past allegations of abuse and neglect at the Ohio facility.
Special to the Legal Animal Photo: A rescued puppy is pictured at a demonstration against Summit County Animal Control. To some degree, it depends on who you believe.
If you believe the worst, Summit County animal control is a
“House of Horrors,” which over the years has been accused of giving animals insufficient euthanasia drugs to ensure death before they are put in freezers; conducting dogfights within shelter walls; and euthanizing animals in mass numbers using cruel methods.
More recently, the shelter has been charged with depriving cats and dogs of food and water so the staff would have less mess to clean up; poisoning and burning animals by cleaning their cages with toxic fluid while they were still inside; and allowing sick animals to languish without veterinary care.
Summit County Executive James McCarthy denies almost all of these allegations, and to the extent he admits any of them were ever even partially true, he says the shelter has dealt with the problems.
However, McCarthy is quick to note that the county does not run an animal shelter, but instead an “animal control” facility. In fact, the county changed the name from Summit County Animal Shelter to Summit County Animal Control earlier this year, presumably to lower expectations for the services that would be provided to the animals in the county’s care.
Not a shelter, but a “disposal facility.” Sometimes, McCarthy refers to the shelter as a “disposal facility.”
“That is more accurate than calling it a shelter. The reality is people bring animals there for us to dispose of, and we do that and we charge less than a vet,” McCarthy says.
“If I could give it away to somebody, I would give it away. I don’t want to run one, but state law requires us to have one. But we are in the business of protecting people from animals, not animals from people.”
Indeed, if you believe only the information offered by the county, Summit County Animal Control is hardly progressive. It is an underfunded facility housed in an old carriage horse barn, which kills more than half of the animals entering the facility, releases animals without altering them, has no volunteers and limited adoption hours, and justifies mass euthanasia on cats and kittens if they have fleas.
Even so, McCarthy says that Summit County euthanizes a lower number of animals per capita than surrounding counties, and that the numbers look pretty good when compared to the county population.
According to numbers provided by McCarthy, Summit County animal control took in 3,962 animals in 2005, and euthanized 2,230 of them – about 56 percent. However, that figure is only 4.15 animals euthanized per 1,000 human residents of Summit County, much lower than the estimated national average of 16 animals per thousand residents.
McCarthy says that these numbers mean that although animal control’s euthanasia rates are high, it is because the facility is getting a large number of sick and unadoptable animals – which the county’s rescue community as a whole is doing a pretty good job.
However, Deanne Christman-Resch, director of the Pet Welfare Coalition, says the numbers cited by McCarthy are "pure fabrication."
She says that in 2001, the last year that verifiable records were kept, Summit County killed 4,767 animals, including 1,512 cats and 3,136 dogs -- and that was before the shelter had a cat facility and the city of Akron passed a law banning outside cats. Since then, she says, the facility has been taking in thousands more cats, and public records show that more than 80 percent of cats and kittens are killed.
"If it weren't for local animal rescue, the kill ratio would be 90 percent plus," she says.
Christman-Resch says she is going to pursue the source of McCarthy's latest statistics, which show only 2,230 total animals killed in 2005.
"I'd like to see how they came up with such a ludicrous count," she says.
Whatever the accurate numbers, McCarthy says he has no interest in a no-kill approach, and that many of the animals are better off euthanized than waiting around for homes. He is very critical of the nearby Humane Society of Greater Akron, whose policy is to euthanize animals only if they are too aggressive and cannot be trained, or have untreatable and serious physical problems.
“Many of the animals we get are better off being euthanized than having the inhumane treatment of being kept in cages for months,” McCarthy says. “It’s hard, I don’t even want to say these things, but it’s the truth.”
Serious charges against county animal control persist. For many people, even the county’s picture of the facility is not good enough.
“They are 60 years behind. They don’t want to do the right thing, they don’t want to do what the citizens of the county think they should do, or what the law says they should do,” says Heather Nagel, director of the rescue group Heaven Can Wait, which rescues animals solely from the animal control facility.
But Nagel and other critics of animal control say they don’t expect it to turn into a no-kill paradise for animals overnight. They just want the facility to adopt basic humane practices.
“Ideally we would like every county to be a no-kill environment, but that is not going to be the case. All we are asking is that the animals are treated in accordance with the minimal animal cruelty laws Ohio has in place,” says attorney Polly Sack, who volunteers her services on behalf of Summit County Animal Rights Enforcement (SCARE).
Sack and others claim that the county’s treatment of the animals violates Ohio cruelty laws, and they want an investigation to be launched into the shelter.
One of the most serious charges is that in November 2005, then shelter director Anthony Moore ran low on sodium pentobarbital, the solution used for euthanasia. SCARE claims that euthanasia logs show that Moore administered only 2 ccs of the solution to each of 18 dogs, regardless of their weight. Since the required dosage is 1 cc per 10 pounds of body weight, and several dogs weighed between 60 and 100 pounds, vets contacted by SCARE confirm that it is likely that these dogs were not killed by the drugs, but may have frozen to death in the shelter’s freezers.
McCarthy acknowledges that the logs show the dogs were given insufficient doses, and says that Moore was reprimanded, demoted, and took a pay cut as a result of the incident.
However, McCarthy says he does not believe Moore would have put the dogs into the freezer alive. He also says that the shelter has stopped using intercardiac injections for euthanasia, which SCARE alleges were frequently administered without the required sedation.
More recently, SCARE alleges that the cats and dogs are not given food and water twice a day, as required by Ohio law, and are routinely denied food and water for extended periods of times.
Christman-Resch says that food and water bowls are routinely empty, missing, or full of mold when rescuers visit the shelter, and that dogs and cats pulled from the facility are often dehydrated and ravenous.
“We know that they are not providing food and water to the animals because they don’t want to clean up the waste – it is an ongoing practice,” she says. “We hear so many horrible stories of animals coming out of there being so hungry and thirsty.”
Although the county has recently hired a part-time veterinarian, animals at the Summit County facility are not given any routine veterinary care, even vaccinations, deworming, or flea treatment. In addition, Christman-Resch says that sick and injured animals at the facility have frequently been left to suffer. She cites records that show that 53 animals were found dead in their cages during an 18-month period in 2005 and 2004.
Shelter director Christine Fatherlee did not respond to repeated attempts to contact her for this article. McCarthy denies that animals are deprived of food, water or appropriate veterinary care, and points to a recent evaluation by the National Animal Control Association (NACA) as proof that the facility has reformed.
In its first performance audit of the facility in 2004, NACA made 132 recommendations for improvement, including that animals be removed from their cages when they are cleaned, feeding schedules established, food and water bowls disinfected daily, and animals not be euthanized in front of other animals.
When NACA made a return trip earlier this year, it reported that 62 of the recommendations had been met, 37 had been partially met and 33 had not been met – 19 of these 33 were found to be as a result of budget constraints and an antiquated facility.
McCarthy says the NACA study is proof that the shelter has improved and that “everything’s fine.” He admits the facility is antiquated and inadequate, but says the money has already been allocated to build a new shelter, and the county is currently just looking for a location.
He says the criticism of the facility by the “nutsos” is making it difficult to find a spot for the new shelter.
“If you make this a big issue on a regular basis, as soon as you want to put a facility up someplace, people are going to scream, ‘Not in my backyard,’” he says.
SCARE requests special prosecutor. Critics say the NACA report only proves that the shelter staff is able to clean up its act when it knows that inspectors are going to be in town.
They are calling for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate allegations of cruelty.
The Humane Society of Greater Akron is responsible for doing cruelty investigations in the area, and is also the agency with the authority to appoint a special prosecutor. However, director Richard Farkas says he has looked into SCARE’s allegations, but hasn’t found any evidence of criminal cruelty.
“It is extremely difficult to investigate something going on inside a cinderblock building,” he says. “We went into the animal control facility, and did an investigation on what we could see, and interviewed all the employees, and when we got done no one gave us any evidence. It was as if nothing had happened.”
Farkas says that he was assured that eyewitnesses to the acts of cruelty would step forward and help with the investigation, but that none ever did.
“If we could get witnesses to step forward, we would have absolutely no problems moving forward, but without eyewitnesses, our hands are tied,” he says.
Members of SCARE contend that witnesses to cruelty have stepped forward, and that the humane society has a conflict of interest in investigating the county facility, because the county has the power to shut the humane society down.
Farkas denies this, and says that on the contrary, the humane society has a strong motivation to put an end to the rumors about animal control.
“We have nothing to lose by pressing forward, nothing, in fact we have everything to gain, because we want to be viewed as serious in this community,” Farkas says. “More than anything we want them to have a smooth running operation, because we are confused with them, and when things go badly for them, they go badly for us.
Will rescuers be kicked out? The most recent fear is that the county is going to retaliate against its critics by making it harder for rescuers to pull animals from the facility.
In August, Fatherlee sent out a letter to rescue organizations demanding to immediately see the records regarding the animals pulled from animal control, and stating that failure to comply with the demand within two weeks would jeopardize rescue contracts.
Attorney Sack responded on behalf of the rescue groups, pointing out that the letter demanded records not covered in the rescue contract, that there was no obligation for the rescue groups to copy and deliver the records, and that the time limit was far too short. Sack says she has not received a response to her letter, but is concerned that when the annual rescue contracts come up for renewal, the county is going to cause trouble.
Asked why the county requested the records, McCarthy confirmed that he is looking for reasons to discontinue the contracts that some rescue groups have with animal control.
“They have lied about the number of animals they have gotten from us, they have lied about the conditions of animals they have gotten from us, so I want to see their records, because I want to put it out to the public and say, ‘This is a lie,’” he says. “If they don’t give me the records, they aren’t going to get any more animals from us.”
Rescuers fear that if McCarthy takes this next step in the battle, the animals will suffer even more.
“We think the reason they are doing this is that these rescue groups have spoken out about a lot of these abuse and neglect cases,” says Mary O’Connor-Shaver, a statewide animal activist and leader with Columbus Top Dogs, a group that sells pet products and donates the profits to the pet rescue community. “I’ve never seen anything like it, the whole time I’ve been involved in rescue work. It is clearly a case of ugly politics, and the animals are caught up in it.”
O’Connor-Shaver says that more pressure needs to be applied to Summit County by citizens both within and outside the county.
“We need people to contact and write every council member in Summit County, to continue to say that we want real reforms, and put more and more heat on the individuals involved. We also need people to continue to put pressure on the Humane Society of Greater Akron to investigate, or to hire an independent investigator,” she says.
[i] Please click
here to read Part One of this series.
To find out more about the Summit County controversy, visit the
SCARE website, and the
Summit County animal control website.