Caswell Co Pound and Transport
February 18, 2013
The Caswell Co pound in NC has a website that’s rather, uh – brief. The reason I looked it up was that a reader sent me two screengrabs from Facebook which allegedly show puppies at the Caswell Co pound just before they were loaded for transport to NJ. The kennel appears to be wet and a patch of what looks like suds may have washed into the space from beneath the guillotine door. Were there other dogs on the other side of this kennel and if so, were they healthy? Is that diarrhea on the floor? Did these puppies have health certificates for their trip?
If shelters are going to transport vanloads of puppies, it needs to be done legally – that is, in compliance with the laws of every state the dogs are being transported through; and ethically – with attention paid to the health status of the dogs (as well as those they’ve been exposed to) and with careful consideration of the local dogs being displaced by the imports. I hope Caswell Co is attending to the legal and ethical considerations regarding the transport of any pets.
I used to be more in favor of mass transport for shelter pets but I’ve modified my view in the past couple of years. There seems to be no shortage of transport horror stories – pets escaping en route, pets getting sick and dying after arrival, pets who don’t sell quickly being killed or warehoused in sub-standard conditions, etc. Then there is the notion that northern shelters and rescues “need” to import high value pets such as puppies and lapdogs because the ones they have get adopted quickly and all that’s left is big, black mixed breeds, Pitbull types and others who are challenging to adopt out. This idea goes against the most basic tenet of no kill – that every individual pet has a right to live and that right must be protected. If some of these importing shelters and rescues won’t put in the hard work to find the right matches for the least adoptable pets in their own communities, who will?
Screencap from Facebook
Screencap from Facebook
February 18, 2013 at 5:22 pm
My best guess is those aren’t “suds”, but sudsy vomited water. It’s symptomatic of allowing a pup to drink without limit while under stress or while excited. “Drink, drink, drink”…”Uh oh, here it comes right back atcha!”.
Transporters — perticularly PAID transporters who do mass transports — ought to know better.
February 18, 2013 at 5:26 pm
Were they drink-drink-drinking out of that thing that looks like it was used to bathe a horse’s feet?
February 18, 2013 at 8:49 pm
The link for Caswell County Pound only lists a single phone number, that number is to Animal Control. There are two ACO’s. they never answer the phone. They drive around in brand new trucks. If you leave a message, your lucky if they call back. They are separate from the animal shelter..And I see the shelter has a new web site. http://apscaswell.org/. FB page..https://www.facebook.com/APSCaswell?fref=ts
There Petfinder page lists 28 dogs.. check it out the zip is 27379. a few are puppies which most likely left on the last transport to NJ. Humm.. 28 dogs listed.. 33 puppies left on transport .. all in a shelter that has they have 12 kennels on each side and 3 isolation runs and 5 crates outside. That’s a lot of dogs.. BUT… 3-5 kennels must be kept empty for AC for strays being brought in.
February 19, 2013 at 12:36 pm
My transport foster, Corky, is one of those individual pets who has a right to live–but he arrived at the TN shelter he came from intact, blind, with an umbilical hernia, and in need of a dental. He had zero chance of being adopted or even offered for adoption at that shelter. Once he was tagged by rescue, though, he got neutered, the hernia repaired, and they even did the dental. He arrived in my home ready to learn how to be a pet.
The two shelters near me do adopt out pit bulls and other Scary Dogs and black dogs, and dogs who have manageable health problems, and they put training time and effort into dogs that arrive with behavior problems. The area rescues don’t all take every kind of dog, but they refer or transfer dogs of types they don’t handle to the groups that do. It’s very common for one rescue to take a dog, to get it out of its situation, and then hand it over to a better equipped group. The pit bull folks will take a small fluffy and hand it over to the folks that like dealing with them, and vice versa.
That’s not to say that no dogs fall through the cracks, but yes, the dogs that come here on transports are filling a real gap and not displacing local pit bulls from potential homes.
It IS important that transports be well run and well coordinated, and when they’re not, that makes problems for everyone, including the local shelters that wind up picking up the pieces. When they are well run, though, they save the lives of the transported dogs, and the comparatively quick and easy adoption fees for most of them help fund the dogs who need more time and work.
I don’t say this is the case everywhere that takes transport dogs, but it’s the case here.