Dear Friends,

Please allow me to begin by thanking you for your support recently. Quite a bit has been said in the press, much of which is inaccurate, sadly, and although I know many of you saw our press conference transcript, I would like you to also please visit http://www.helpinganimals.com/f-nc.asp and see a handful of photos from our NC photo albums.

Please know that it was a compassionate police officer who first alerted PETA to conditions at a North Carolina pound (in Bertie) in 2001. The officer’s visits to the tiny outdoor chain link structure consistently revealed animal suffering: we were sent photographs of, among other horrors, a large white dog drowning in a pool of water, lying on her side and too sick and weak to lift her head (she later died), a starving dog eating a dead kitten, and a dead puppy found in a gas chamber shed. Our visit confirmed that the County needed help. We found sick, injured animals in need of veterinary care, a leaky, windowless, rusty gas box (see photos at above link)in which animals were crammed and killed, and a facility that had no electricity and no covering for its cages. Every winter, the water hose froze.

PETA immediately offered aid to Bertie County and to the City of Windsor, which operates its own facility within the county limits. There, animals were restrained on a metal pole and shot with a .22. Shortly after this, we found out that Hertford County’s homeless animals were also gassed. We made arrangements to pay a local veterinarian to euthanize those animals by painless injection. PETA to this date subsidizes humane euthanasia at the Hertford facility, and has so far paid nearly $9,000 for this service. In Northampton County, animals were being killed by injection with a paralytic agent that causes suffocation. All these practices have stopped since PETA volunteered to provide a peaceful painless death, euthanasia, free of charge. No secret was made of the fact that we euthanize animals and that the animals retrieved from the pounds would be provided with a humane death. In fact, it was I who met and spoke with officials, and not one of them ever even asked me about adoption. The pounds don’t have an adoption program or an adoption rate, and never have.

The pounds that we have helped are in impoverished counties where animal control is at the bottom of the list. They are located in remote locations, have no open hours at all—not even for adoption—and no staff except one animal warden whose job is to respond to dog bites and stray animal calls. In Bertie County, the animal warden is also in charge of litter control. We have only improved living and dying conditions for unwanted animals, whose fate was to die by a bullet, to fight to claw out of a filthy gas box, or to suffocate to death. We could not let those things go on, even it meant doing the sad work ourselves. Performing euthanasia affects our staff deeply. Gallons of tears have been shed for North Carolina’s homeless animals, but we are thankful to have been allowed to spare them a terrifying, painful end.

PETA doesn’t just pick up animals from the pounds. Over the last few years, PETA has worked with these struggling agencies to clean and build, help personnel with training and provide supplies and services. We have spent more than $250,000 on veterinary and other services in one North Carolina county alone. Each dollar spent means a needy animal helped, cold abated, shade provided, water, medicine and food given, and suffering relieved. We have also delivered hundreds of free dog houses and straw to dogs chained to metal barrels or not so much as a tree, and we have paid to spay and neuter countless animals already in homes.

PETA submitted several proposals to officials and attended several meetings where we offered (and begged) to be allowed to implement, among other things, an on-site adoption program. We have pushed for such a program since 2003. Officials were not interested in our offer.

Many of you attended the House Interim Committee meetings and saw the video footage of Yadkin County piling animals one layer atop another in a metal gas box. This is still going on. If PETA had allowed that to go on in a jurisdiction that welcomed its help—unlike Yadkin—simply in order to avoid bad press or having to get dirty or dealing with the grief of feeling the life go out of an animal you’ve just fed and loved and whose likely never known kind words before…well, we would not be doing our job.

A terrible mistake was made with the dead bodies. But the ones who remain at the facilities are alive, and I am worried. The fact that these shelters may terminate the relationship we have with them likely means that these facilities will return to their old ways. Please don't let that happen and encourage officials to allow us to continue servicing their county. Thank you again for your support and for all you do for animals.

Regards,

Daphna Nachminovitch

PETA