On Friday, animal rescue volunteers went to a South Carolina animal shelter to pick up some dogs, when they noticed something unusual.
The shelter seemed a little light, not as many dogs as I expected, Animal Rescue Volunteer Deborah Farhi told Fox News-Charlotte.
The prison inmates who work at the shelter looked upset, she said. She asked how many animals were euthanized that day. An inmate told her 22, and that they’d been taken across the street to a landfill and shot to death.
So they grabbed a shovel and came over and wiped away some of the dirt and found the first dog who was shot at point blank range, in the side of the head, and then the second dog, and then the third dog, says Animal Rescue Volunteer Whitney Knowlton. Several freshly killed dogs were discovered around some paw prints in the hardening mud, as was a plastic bag stuffed with dead puppies and a kitten.
This was probably not the first batch of animals who died in this nightmarish way in this terrible setting. Bones of other dogs have subsequently been discovered there, and there’s fear this could have been going on for months, according to KRISTV.com.
Ironically, it was just last year that the shelter stopped using the gas chamber to kill pets. And that was apparently like pulling teeth for the cash-strapped shelter, according to the blog, YesBiscuit. The Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Department, which claimed last year that without more funding, the shelter couldn’t afford to switch from gas to lethal injection, has launched an investigation. Depending on the investigation’s outcome, the sheriffs office will pursue it as either a criminal or an administrative matter. (Administrative? Really?)
Between this terrible situation and last week’s Dogster article about the shelter that killed the puppy who “came back to life,” we’re really seeing the rotten underbellies of some of our shelters.
