Tag: Memphis Pets Alive

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Pets of the Week

Each week, the Flyer will feature adoptable dogs and cats from Memphis Animal Services. All photos are credited to Memphis Pets Alive. More pictures can be found on the Memphis Pets Alive Facebook page.

Meet Tunchie. His previous owner surrendered him to Memphis Animal Services (MAS) last weekend because the family moved into a new apartment that doesn’t allow dogs. Here’s what the previous owner told a volunteer at MAS that day (and that volunteer later recounted on Facebook): 


Busy day at MAS today. Not so much adoptions. More in terms of owner surrenders and people turning in strays. At the end of the line – Tunchie and his dad. We started chatting a little and he told me that they had Tunchie for almost 2 years. His 6 year old daughter would hold him like baby when Tunchie was still a small puppy. Unfortunately the family just moved into an apartment (to save money) where dogs are not allowed. The kids are upset (the youngest is 3) and he admits that he’s worried that they will put Tunchie down. He keeps telling me what a good dog he is: housebroken, kid friendly and dog friendly. The entire time during our conversation Tunchie is calm and relaxed, doesn’t care much about the other dogs around him but he keeps looking up to his owner who didn’t even bring a leash because he’s so mild mannered and obedient.
Before I left I checked on Tunchie who is now ‪#‎A285188‬ . Needless to say he’s confused and sad.

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Memphis Animal Services May Cut Hours

Dani Rutherford protests the proposed MAS hour cut on Sunday.

  • Beth Spencer
  • Dani Rutherford protests the proposed MAS hour cuts on Sunday.

Come August, Memphis Animal Services may be open nine fewer hours per week.

Memphis Animal Services director James Rogers made the announcement last week that the city shelter may be cutting its business hours due to budgetary concerns.

The news came during the quarterly public Memphis Animal Services Advisory Board meeting. Rogers said the shelter is looking at changing its hours to noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and noon to 2 p.m. on Sunday and Monday.

Currently, the shelter is open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday and from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesday and Friday. It is currently closed on Sundays and Mondays.

Although Rogers cited the city’s budget woes as the reason behind shortened hours, there has been no reduction of staff or staff hours at the shelter. Rogers said that by shortening the shelter’s public hours, he hopes to make time for more spay and neuter surgeries on adoptable animals.

“We are dedicated to making sure we give the best service with the budget we are given,” Rogers said. “What we are trying to do is increase the number of adoptions out. How we do that is have more time for our surgeons to complete adoptions within a certain window.”

Shelter reform advocates at the meeting argued that under the new MAS hours, those with 9-to-5 jobs will not be able to retrieve a lost pet. They said the new hours also give a lost animal less of a window of time to be retrieved before being euthanized.

“MAS … [has] to follow a protocol that keeps an animal alive for at least three business days while the owner tries to locate them,” said Cindy Sanders, co-founder of Community Action for Animals. “Under these new hours, with Sunday and Monday being open for only two hours, if a dog comes in on Friday and the owner can’t make it to the shelter in that small timeframe, the pet could be euthanized on Tuesday.”

The reduced hours at the shelter will also make things harder for Memphis Pets Alive, a local group that posts photos online of shelter animals up for adoption. Volunteers from Pets Alive take the photos every Tuesday from 5 to 7 p.m., but under the new hours, the shelter won’t be open then.

Memphis Pets Alive Executive Director Linda Baxter said her organization had no idea a change in hours was being made. She’s also concerned that MAS’ adoption discount days, Wag Along Wednesday and Yappy Hour, which are held in the evenings, will be affected by the new hours.

“We have more than 5,000 followers on Facebook, and we work rigorously to network our photos of adoptable animals around the country,” Baxter said. “Not only are the highly successful Wag Along Wednesday and the Yappy Hour programs being eliminated under these hours, but the small window that we had to get photos of all available animals at the shelter is now closed.”

The MAS Advisory Board passed a motion recommending the shelter to stay open on Tuesdays and Thursdays until 7 p.m., but the final decision on the hours rests with city Parks and Neighborhoods Director Janet Hooks. She expects to make a decision by mid-August. Sanders and Baxter feel that this is the latest in a series of mistakes made by MAS.

“The lack of knowledge, lack of training, and lack of sympathy has led to a lot of really bad decisions by Mr. Rogers, but this is by far the worst decision he has made,” Sanders said. “The fact that he states it’s a budgetary decision is insulting. He blames this on the budget when he admitted at the meeting that he was not cutting personnel or people’s hours.”

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Memphis Animal Services Enforces Policy Banning Photographs of Certain 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.”