Community Action for Animals

These puppies were photographed by Memphis Pets Alive last Tuesday.

These puppies were photographed by Memphis Pets Alive last Tuesday. They have since been euthanized.

For more than a year, volunteers with Memphis Pets Alive have photographed every animal in the public viewing areas at Memphis Animal Services (MAS) each Tuesday evening. But last week, volunteer Dani Rutherford was asked to skip over the dogs in the shelter’s “healthy hold” area.

The healthy hold area is where potentially adoptable animals that have been at MAS for less than 72 hours are held. When a stray or owner-surrendered animal comes into the shelter, it is put under a 72-hour review. After 72 hours, if the animal isn’t claimed by an owner, MAS’ staff decides whether or not it will have a chance at adoption or be euthanized.

Since Memphis Pets Alive, a volunteer-run group that tries to market animals at MAS by posting pictures of the animals on Facebook, was formed last year, the technician who escorted the group around the shelter let them photograph those animals under the 72-hour hold.

But now MAS administrator James Rogers claims the group has been violating a policy that bans photographs of animals in the healthy hold area. Rogers was not available for interviews, but he posted a statement about the policy on the city website.

“Sharing photos of animals housed at MAS prematurely may create an unintentional reality of misleading a potential adopter into thinking that an animal is available when the pet may belong to another pet owner,” reads the statement. “MAS views the emotional trauma of such an unfortunate misunderstanding too great a risk and therefore asks rescuers and MAS partners, such as Memphis Pets Alive, to allow the 72-hour holding period to expire before taking and sharing photos of those animals.”

But Linda Baxter, president of Memphis Pets Alive, said they weren’t marketing the pets from the healthy hold area as being up for adoption but rather letting people know the animals are there. In fact, she said there have been cases when people who had lost their pets found them at the shelter through photos posted to the Memphis Pets Alive Facebook page.

“Our Facebook page clearly states that these animals are located at Memphis Animal Services. We do not say they are up for adoption,” Baxter said. “This is just a method of getting these photos out there in the community for people to see them so that, at the end of 72 hours, if the owner hasn’t claimed them, rescue networking can already be done.”

For the animals that may be euthanized at the end of the 72 hours, those few extra days of networking can be crucial.

And according to statistics from Save Our Shelter, a group aiming to reform MAS, the instances of owners reclaiming their pets from the 72-hour hold aren’t very high anyway. In March 2014, MAS took in 879 animals, and only 47 were reclaimed by their owners.

Baxter said, unless the policy is changed, her group will honor it, but rather than photographing animals once a week, they will try to send a volunteer every day to take pictures of animals as they’re released from the 72-hour hold. If those animals are to be euthanized, however, there won’t be much time to market them to adopters before it’s too late.

“This [policy] is going to directly lead to the death of animals,” said Cindy Sanders, co-founder of Community Action for Animals, another shelter reform group. “Mr. Rogers is always saying he is going to make MAS a world-class shelter. This is so counter-productive to being a world-class anything.”

Dog fighting is big business in Memphis, but the bloody sport rarely happens here in a large-scale organized fashion. Rather, its instances are more underground, with spontaneous street-dog fighting and a barbaric practice known as “trunking.”

“Dog fighting is one of the worst things you’ve ever seen, and a lot of people can’t stomach it. So people who want to participate pull up in a parking lot somewhere, place two dogs in the trunk of a car, close the lid, and throw down bets,” said Cindy Sanders with the Memphis-based animal advocacy group Community Action for Animals. “When they can’t hear dogs fighting anymore, they open the trunk and the dog that’s alive is the one that wins.”

If a bill working its way through the Tennessee General Assembly passes, the people who show up to place bets and watch those fights would face increased penalties.

The Animal Fighting Enforcement Act of 2014, HB 2120 and SB2366, would make spectating at a dog or cock fight a Class A misdemeanor, which carries a fine of up to $2,500 and a maximum sentence of 11 months and 29 days in jail.

Under current law, a spectator at a dog fight in Tennessee can be fined up to $500 and sentenced to no more than six months in jail. One caught watching a cock fight (more common in rural parts of the state) can get off with as little as $50 in fines and up to 30 days in jail.

“Spectators’ admission fees and gambling dollars help finance these illegal dog fights,” said John Goodwin, a Memphis native who know works as the Director of Animal Cruelty Policy at the Humane Society for the United States in Washington, D.C. “Sometimes people pay up to $100 to attend dog fights. If we can take away the spectators, that’s a lot less money going to the fight organizers. And where there’s less money, there are fewer dog fights.”

Goodwin said many states charge spectators at dog fights with felonies, but he’s glad to see any increase in penalty in Tennessee.

“It’s still a pretty moderate bill to compare with where most of the country is,” Goodwin said. “But it would be a dramatic improvement and, hopefully, it would make Tennessee less of a destination for those on the dog fighting circuit.”

Goodwin said increasing penalties for spectators will also help close a loophole in the law.

“At the first sign of a raid, anyone who has brought a dog to a fight will abandon their dog and act like spectators to avoid a more meaningful penalty. They’re using weaker penalties for spectators as a loophole to avoid serious fines or prison time,” Goodwin said.

Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich said dog fighting in this region tends to be tied to gang crime, and she supports the proposed increased penalties for spectators.

“We hope the first person who gets caught spectating at an animal fight, gets sent to the penal farm for the weekend, has to write a check for $2,000, and hire a lawyer to get the word out that we’re not going to tolerate this in our community,” Weirich said.

The bills, both “caption bills,” meaning they started off as bills about a totally different issues, are expected to be voted on by the General Assembly by April 10th.