A successful shelter director I have been mentoring contacted me recently about a job offer they received from one of the wealthy, national organizations of which I have been critical.
I am so impressed with your honesty and the backbone you have in standing up to these deceptive, dystopian so-called animal welfare groups. I am a licensed vet tech with 25 years of experience and I made the mistake of my life in 2017 by going to work for The Animal Foundation here in Las Vegas, the largest intake shelter in the country. The supervisors took a dislike to me for "spending too much time with the animals" so I was assigned to the foul and disgusting task of sedation tech, which requires one to inject an aggressive animal using a long pole syringe with a 16 gauge needle, with drugs that can cause seizures, vomiting and diarrhea. When the dogs lose consciousness they fall down into their own waste. I was brainwashed by TAF supervisors that this is a "humane" method of pre-euthanasia sedation. I started buying bags of treats for the dogs, which I would drop into their kennels just prior to giving the injection; it felt like the darkest, most vile deception as I watched them happily devour the treats. Most of them never even felt the needle, and to me this was a humane thing. I received a award for "360 degree compassion" by several colleagues and animal care staff. Two days after receiving the award, 2 things happened which opened my eyes forever: an animal care worker called me a "stupid bitch" because I moved a dog scheduled for sedation from the dirty, feces-filled side of her kennel to the clean side so she would not fall onto a filthy floor in her last conscious moments. This worker said "she's gonna die anyway so what does it matter?" Then I was written up because the supervisors found out about me giving treats to the dogs prior to sedating them (I bought these with my own money, not the shelter's); they said "you need to work on your sedation technique" and also because I had stayed late one night to clean the ringworm kitten nursery; they were short staffed and at 7 pm the kittens had not been fed, cleaned or medicated so I did all of that. The Animal Care supervisor came in while I was there and was so grateful for my help that she wrote a nice email to my supervisors, who added this info to the write-up, saying this was not my job and I was abusing overtime. I walked out of that place with tears in my eyes for the animals I was abandoning to these abusers. If you have followed TAF recently you will see where they are now, a filthy hellhole where all of the vets and most of the medical staff have quit, leaving animals to die in their cages. News 13 did an expose of them, showing that for all their fancy funding and marketing, they are hell for the very helpless creatures they have promised to take care of. Nathan, yours is the clarion voice of truth and advocacy and I pray that it will permeate these awful places and bring about the change that is so needed to solve the crisis of animal abandonment and human indifference to this atrocious suffering.
Dogs love and trust humans so much that they believe we would never kill them. The magnitude of the betrayal is beyond comprehension.
About half-way thru my reading, I planned a question to ask; BUT, you came to it in the latter part of the article -- you already knew ////// so, we continue with our NO-KILL mission speaking out at every opportunity -- the other road that could be taken to solve problem of Shelter KILLERS is FORCE itself -- but, I wonder how would that work? -- Laws, enforcing them, etc.?
I am so impressed with your honesty and the backbone you have in standing up to these deceptive, dystopian so-called animal welfare groups. I am a licensed vet tech with 25 years of experience and I made the mistake of my life in 2017 by going to work for The Animal Foundation here in Las Vegas, the largest intake shelter in the country. The supervisors took a dislike to me for "spending too much time with the animals" so I was assigned to the foul and disgusting task of sedation tech, which requires one to inject an aggressive animal using a long pole syringe with a 16 gauge needle, with drugs that can cause seizures, vomiting and diarrhea. When the dogs lose consciousness they fall down into their own waste. I was brainwashed by TAF supervisors that this is a "humane" method of pre-euthanasia sedation. I started buying bags of treats for the dogs, which I would drop into their kennels just prior to giving the injection; it felt like the darkest, most vile deception as I watched them happily devour the treats. Most of them never even felt the needle, and to me this was a humane thing. I received a award for "360 degree compassion" by several colleagues and animal care staff. Two days after receiving the award, 2 things happened which opened my eyes forever: an animal care worker called me a "stupid bitch" because I moved a dog scheduled for sedation from the dirty, feces-filled side of her kennel to the clean side so she would not fall onto a filthy floor in her last conscious moments. This worker said "she's gonna die anyway so what does it matter?" Then I was written up because the supervisors found out about me giving treats to the dogs prior to sedating them (I bought these with my own money, not the shelter's); they said "you need to work on your sedation technique" and also because I had stayed late one night to clean the ringworm kitten nursery; they were short staffed and at 7 pm the kittens had not been fed, cleaned or medicated so I did all of that. The Animal Care supervisor came in while I was there and was so grateful for my help that she wrote a nice email to my supervisors, who added this info to the write-up, saying this was not my job and I was abusing overtime. I walked out of that place with tears in my eyes for the animals I was abandoning to these abusers. If you have followed TAF recently you will see where they are now, a filthy hellhole where all of the vets and most of the medical staff have quit, leaving animals to die in their cages. News 13 did an expose of them, showing that for all their fancy funding and marketing, they are hell for the very helpless creatures they have promised to take care of. Nathan, yours is the clarion voice of truth and advocacy and I pray that it will permeate these awful places and bring about the change that is so needed to solve the crisis of animal abandonment and human indifference to this atrocious suffering.
Dogs love and trust humans so much that they believe we would never kill them. The magnitude of the betrayal is beyond comprehension.
About half-way thru my reading, I planned a question to ask; BUT, you came to it in the latter part of the article -- you already knew ////// so, we continue with our NO-KILL mission speaking out at every opportunity -- the other road that could be taken to solve problem of Shelter KILLERS is FORCE itself -- but, I wonder how would that work? -- Laws, enforcing them, etc.?