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A publicly funded animal shelter in Indiana—Indianapolis Animal Care Services (IACS)—recently fired two employees because of their efforts to protect animals from being placed with violent individuals, including those with a history of cruelty to animals. The two were reportedly fired for doing some due diligence by screening potential adopters to help ensure that animals weren’t being released to individuals who had been criminally convicted of “domestic battery, neglect of a dependent, sexual violence, or murder convictions up to three years prior to the desired adoption date.” One of the employees said that she had become alarmed when she “learned a dog, named Champagne, was adopted out to a couple with five animal cruelty or abandonment violations on MyCase [a court case database]. The dogs had also been previously adopted by the same couple and later confiscated before the two came back in to Animal Care Services to re-adopt them.”
After the firing, IACS reportedly released a statement saying that screening had been implemented after the facility gave another dog, named Deron, to an individual who tortured him to death. Just days after Deron was adopted in 2022, evidently free of charge, authorities were called and talked to witnesses who saw the dog being hanged by a leash on the adopter’s front porch and repeatedly stabbed. In an interview, one of the IACS former employees explained that Deron had been stabbed and mutilated and was being tossed into a trash bag when authorities arrived.
IACS’ statement said that it had stopped screening at the behest of Best Friends Animal Society (BFAS), which the agency started partnering with earlier this year. BFAS is a national organization that claims all animal shelters in the U.S. will become “no kill” by 2025, an absurd, myopic goal that altogether ignores the reality of animal overpopulation and homelessness and aims to lower euthanasia by simply refusing entry to animals who depend on shelters to keep them safe and warehousing the ones who are accepted for months, years, or their entire lives.
“The Best Friends Society generally just wants to ‘save them all,’ even if that means that the quality of life isn’t very good or if that means they live in a crate for months on end.” —Makenna Chittister, former Indianapolis Animal Care Shelter adoption counselor, Animal Welfare Investigations Project (AWIP) Podcast, August 11, 2024
“They have, like, 12-year-old-dogs there who are probably going to live in those kennels the rest of their lives. They’re [management] just not making the right decisions about humane euthanasia. They’re just going to ‘save them all,’ even if that means they’re going to die in their kennels.” —Makenna Chittister, AWIP Podcast, August 11, 2024