Pets Alive Blog

Matt’s letter to the Jersey Journal

Hi Melissa,

I have to say that I was disappointed to read your coverage of Liberty Humane Society.

I’m not sure where to start. First off, I am the President of Pets Alive Animal SANCTUARY in Middletown, NY and Elmsford, NY. While we are by definition a shelter, we act as a sanctuary for animals. We have been no-kill for 35 years and will continue to be.

The article characterizes the “board” of Liberty Humane Society as victims that no one will help. And Pets Alive as an out-of-state organization that is going to sue them into being no-kill.

Neither of those are in any way true.

We contacted Liberty Humane very early on in this debacle and asked how we could help. We took two dogs immediately, and I arranged with the SPCA of Connecticut for them to borrow some outdoor runs to get the dogs out of the kennels, making it unnecessary to kill them, at least for the time being.

We then offered to sit down with them and help them map out the right way to be no-kill. We can’t SUE them into being no-kill any more than they can write a 5 year plan for becoming no-kill. Either you are going to kill the animals in your care or you are not. No-kill has not failed Liberty Humane. Liberty Humane has failed no-kill, and has abdicated their moral responsibility in the stewardship of these animals.

We are talking about a comprehensive plan that includes best practices for adoptions, training, fostering, working with rescues and anything else we can think of to help them get animals out the door instead of in the ground.

The boards, past and present, are textbook examples of the mindset chronicled in Nathan Winograd’s book Redemption, where he proves a theory that the egos of boards and shelter managers are the reason dogs and cats are being killed in places like Jersey City. Why is it that no-kill has worked or is working in San Francisco, Reno, Las Vegas, St. Paul, Tomkins County, NY, Austin and individually in thousands of shelters around the world? Is Jersey City that unique? No…it just has leadership that would rather kill animals and stroke their own egos than accept being wrong and make things right.

LHS is hiding behind temperament testing as an excuse to kill dogs that could be in rescues or in homes. We’ve seen it a million times and certainly we’ve seen it before from Liberty Humane. Take a look at Moet….http://petsalive.com/moet.jpg

Moet is a senior dog (11 years old) that was deemed “aggressive” by the testers at Liberty Humane. Volunteers were outraged, and pleaded for the life of this dog. Liberty Humane refused. At the time the idiotic policy of the shelter was that “pit bulls” like Moet could only be adopted to rescues anyway. So that ensured the deaths of many of them BEFORE the temperament tests get them. A group of Pets Alive volunteers pleaded with us to take Moet, so we did. Moet was adopted a few weeks later and is still in a forever home. That picture was used for our Holiday card last year because it so perfectly depicts the love between animal and caretaker.

Where would Moet be at the hands of these people at Liberty if not for the volunteers that cared so much about the dog? DEAD…a fate that is befalling more and more animals at Liberty Humane. And that doesn’t have to be.

No-kill is what the volunteers at LHS want. It’s what the community wants. It’s the reason they got the contract from the Mayor of Hoboken. Yet they would rather kill dogs and cats.

We offered to work with them for free to come up with a plan to save the animals of Jersey City and Hoboken. We will bring in other experts where we need to, including Best Friends Animal Society, Nathan Winograd, the Tomkins County SPCA and anyone else whose advice would help make this a success. As the old adage says…if you want to be successful hang out with people who are. We are, and we can bring people to the table and work this out.

The board refused.

Someone told me that one of the board members felt like we we’re giving them an ultimatum. Actually, I guess we are. Either stop putting your own egos before your moral responsibility to those animals or get the hell off the board.

We are not going away. I have twenty or so emails from volunteers, ex- and current employees and concerned members of the community and in looking at them a pattern emerges rather quickly…Liberty Humane is disorganized, unresponsive, incompetent and hostile to those who simply ask for information or question what they do. I would be happy to share some of these with you if you wish.

In fact, until the light was shined on them, LHS was refusing to return phone calls from organizations and shelters (including ours) who wanted to take animals from the crowded cages they were stuffed into and waiting to be killed. This is not the behavior of an organization dedicated to the lives of these animals.

Pets Alive has put LHS on notice that we’re watching. We, unlike them, are listening to their volunteers and employees and even the Mayor(s) who trust them with their constituents’ animals. They want transparency. They want to know about the disposition of specific animals. They want cogently articulated policy on which animals are being killed, and they want to know when an animal is about to be killed so they can work with rescues to commute that death sentence, even if LHS won’t. All of this information is arguably required to be provided by New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act (OPRA). We are collecting the requests that they have not responded to, and we may consider a class action lawsuit to get the information on behalf of the citizens of New Jersey who want to know. Those are the kinds of lawsuits we are contemplating.

It’s about right and wrong. Killing these animals when there is another alternative is wrong.

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Tomorrow we are going to step up the pressure and work harder to get the word out. Please help.

Matt

Filed in Uncategorized by Admnistrator on Aug 29, 2010.  There are 2 Comments