SC State Sen. Kent Williams Defends Dumping Pregnant Dog at Kill Shelter
Wed Apr 09, 2008 at 01:19:42 PM PDT
I'm a contributing editor and blogger for a nationally syndicated pet feature, and I do a lot of coverage on the ongoing movement for animal control and shelter reform in the United States. So when I saw an April 1 diary from adigal alleging that South Carolina State Senator Kent Williams had dumped his pregnant German Shepherd at a local animal shelter, where she'd given birth to her litter, it grabbed my attention.
I wasn't able to find any confirmation on the story, and there was no follow-up here on Daily Kos. Then I got the flu, and it chewed up my vocal cords, and it was a few days before I was able to get back on the story. But when I did, what I found out was even worse than the original post suggested.
Crossposted from Pet Connection.
It's undeniably true that some people don't give their pets the kind of care and commitment I'd like to see. Still, I get tired of the endless blaming of pet owners who bring their animals to shelters when they can’t keep them anymore, given how few resources most communities have to help them find ways to do that, and the increasing housing and foreclosure crisis that’s devastating this country right now, leaving people and their pets without much in the way of options.
But here’s one guy who gets absolutely zero sympathy from me. He’s Democratic South Carolina State Senator Kent Williams, also the deputy administrator of Marion County, and the dog lists and blogs have been buzzing for a week with reports that he had dumped his pregnant German Shepherd at the local kill shelter.
However, not everything you read on the Internet is true (shock!), and I couldn’t find any corroboration of this story. None of the people reporting it responded to emails asking for more details, and since I lost my voice three days ago to some hideous respiratory virus, I wasn’t able to follow up with phone calls as I had planned.
Friday the story was published in a South Carolina news outlet, and picked up by Yahoo News. And far from being not as bad as reported, it’s worse.
Marion County’s deputy administrator, said he was only trying to help when he adopted three animals from the Marion County Animal Shelter late last year.
Williams said his brother has one of the dogs, his mother has another and he kept a female German shepherd. His dog was kept in an enclosed fenced area of his yard, he said, with an automatic feeder and watering device for the dog’s comfort.
But things did not go well for the dog and Williams.
The dog soon became a nuisance and jumped the fence frequently. Williams decided around March 19 to have the county animal control officer pick up the dog and return it to the Marion County Animal Shelter, from which he adopted it.
Once Williams returned the dog to the shelter, it was evident it had become pregnant. Just a few days after its arrival, it delivered eight puppies.
It turns out that state law requires all pets adopted from shelters be spayed or neutered after adoption (hint to South Carolina: that needs to be before adoption, ya think?). Why didn’t the good Senator comply with the law?
Williams said he did not have the dog spayed because he hoped to breed her.
Williams said he didn’t just dump the dog out, he was trying to find someone to care for her. He also said he fully intended to retrieve the dog if she was not adopted.
"I stand by my decision (to return the dog). I don’t know of a better alternative. I love dogs, but believe I was doing the right thing to return it to the shelter so it could be readopted. The action I took was in the best interest of the dog ...," Williams said by telephone earlier this week. "It could have gotten killed along the highway. And if I truly didn’t care about the dog, I probably could have just let it roam. As a citizen, I exercised my right to surrender the animal to the shelter."
This man is an elected official, making decisions for the state of South Carolina. He adopted three dogs, gave two of them away, threw his unspayed female GSD out in an insecure pen in the yard with an automated watering and feeding system, wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to keep her from escaping her pen, and oh yeah, apparently is deputy administrator of a county that has an animal control system that sounds like the poster child for the shelter reform movement:
(Shelter director Jerry) Coleman said he would like for everyone to understand that no one wants to ever put a dog to sleep, but that the population of animals gets out of control and it is the only viable control option.
Others disagree and say finding the dogs home, educating the public about the state’s laws and having responsible pet owners spay or neuter animals are the only viable control options.
[...]
The Marion County Animal Shelter is off U.S. 76 behind the Marion County Prison Camp. It has one part-time employee, and inmates work at the site to help keep it open. Built in March 1997, it is under the direction of Coleman, who also serves as the Marion County public buildings and grounds director.
There are 27 pens for dogs and several cages for cats upstairs in the old potato barn redesigned for use. This past year, the county spent about $16,000 in improvements to the shelter.
The dog, now named Gretchen, gave birth to her puppies in the shelter, and they all got into the hands of rescue and are by some reports doing fine, and others, not so fine. One news story ran saying the new mom bit one of her rescuers, and her rabies vaccination record (also a requirement in South Carolina) was nowhere to be found, not even at the shelter where she was adopted.
As the political blog FITSnews.com pointed out:
Assuming these accusations are true, this could develop into a really serious problem for Williams. How come? Well, for starters, the last time we checked people really, really like animals. As in a lot.
Yeah. We do.
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