I live in Destin, Florida and am very involved in our local dog rescue/volunteering community. I am faced with a really difficult situation in that one of the shelters I've volunteered at in the past is basically a cesspool of animal neglect. I wrote about it in detail in the Pensacola, FL forum ([url]https://www.city-data.com/forum/pensacola/1720613-paws-animal-shelter-fwb-cesspool-animal.html[/url]), but I didn't want to crosspost my entire original post because, well, most of you probably don't live in this area and a lot of it would be foreign. The bottom line is this, though - there are some horrific things that go on in that shelter, and they continue to go on because the shelter has deep connections within our twisted little community. I know people in the past have gone to our small local newspaper with evidence of animal neglect and have been told that the newspaper is not interested in it because they don't want to rock the boat. The shelter has a board of directors whose members are all prominent people in our local community which is another reason why no one wants to rock that boat.
When I volunteered there I eventually went to the director with my concerns and quickly realized she did not care about the animals and didn't want to hear about how they were sick, injured, or not being cared for. I then tentatively went to one member on the board of directors, but he was very defensive and instead of being concerned about the animals, he was upset that I was speaking negatively about the shelter and that the pubic might catch wind of it. I didn't say anything else after that because I was afraid of being banned from the shelter and not being able to help the dogs. (That is not uncommon here - just recently a group of volunteers requested the euthanasia rates for a local high-kill shelter in Bay County under the Freedom of Information Act and instead of providing the information, the shelter permanently banned ALL volunteers from its facilities. They said it was for the safety of the volunteers but it was of course just retaliation because the volunteers dug too deep and were too insistent.)
I eventually stopped going because I couldn't take seeing the animals in those conditions anymore, but I hear through the grapevine that things are still the same and they're even getting worse.
My question to you all is this - what would you do in our situation ("our" meaning myself and other volunteers and rescue groups) if you knew this was going on but you couldn't expose the organization on a local level? Would you try to take the story to a national news station? I unfortunately don't even think it's scandalous enough for them to pick up since it's not like they're hanging dogs or anything like that. Plus our strange little community is very efficient at blocking out outsiders - sad but true.
Any advice? Suggestions? I have tried to forget it but I can't. This organization has money coming out of its ears and they put very little of it back into the shelter. The dogs are sick and scared and treated so poorly, and there's really no reason it should be that way. How do you go about getting new board members and a new director in place when you're not in a position of power yourself?
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