TUSCUMBIA, Ala. - "Harley, sit!" Richie Michael tries to get his little Pug to sit still. Taking Harley outside in the front yard is a morning ritual. "Want a treat?" he asks Harley. Harley seems to want attention more than a doggie treat. "Ah, you just want lovin'," Michael tells his pup. "Is that what you want?"
After man and his best friend share their morning ritual, it's off to work. Officer Michael is supervisor at Colbert County Animal Control. He loves his job except for one disturbing duty. "I don't get out of bed every day coming to work wanting to do that," he tells WAAY 31 FirstNews.
Michael often makes friends that won't be around long. When he goes into the shelter, Michaels heads straight to a familiar kennel. "Bryson! What you doin' Baby? What you doin'?" Bryson is playful Pit Bull.
There's still hope for Bryson. But, last year, the shelter had to euthanize more than 2,500 animals.
Tommy Morson is director of Colbert County Animal Control. We stop at a pen with two puppies and ask Morson, "Looking at your numbers, one of these will be put to sleep and one of these will make it out?"
"More than likely," Morson says. "We're running probably a ratio of 50 percent."
The shelter is packed with unwanted pets. "We've got at least two in every kennel," Morson explains.
Someone dumped ten puppies at the door before the shelter opened for business.
"It's sad." Morson tells us. "Look at that little puppy. How could you get rid of something like that?" Sadness turns to anger. "It makes me mad is what it does. If people will do what they're supposed to do, spay and neuter animals, keep them up, we wouldn't have this problem."
Like shelters across the country, dropoffs have turned the Colbert County facility into a death row for dogs. Pet owners are often the ones handing down the death sentences.
Morson takes us on a tour. Outside the kennel area, there's a room with two freezers. "There's a freezer full and another freezer," Morson shows us. "Now, that's already been emptied," he explains. "This was empty when we started Monday morning."
The freezer is packed with body bags. "These are dead animals, probably 25 in there."
When a pet owner drops off their animal at the shelter, they could be condemning it. "The ones they drop off," Morson tells us, "we hope they don't end up here. But, in fifty percent of the cases, they do."
Convenient and easy. That's what a lot of people think about dropping off an unwanted pet. But, the word 'easy' is not in the vocabulary of shelter employees who have to inject poison into a animals' veins.
"Of course, this is the next to the last stop right here," Morson says. This is where the work gets grim, the euthanasia room. "This is where we euthanize all of our animals."
Morson wants people to know how deadly serious the problem has gotten. "I want people to see what they're doing," he says. "That's exactly what I want them to see."
Dead dog walking. In this case, just a puppy. Morson simulates how his crew has to put down an animal. "We're either holding it or euthanizing it," he shows us. "Takes two people to do it. One's holding and one's euthanizing."
Death comes with compassion. They first tranquilize animals. Then, they inject them with Sodium Pentobarbital.
Poison shoots from the syringe and races through the pup's blood stream.
"So, I give you the animal and I stick a needle in it," Morson lays out the heartbreaking details. "It dies in your arms and you're looking at it. What's the feeling in your heart?" he asks.
Supervisor Michael often helps putting down the animals. "To be able to take an animal and hold it and inject it with a legal injection to put it to sleep and stay there with it until it takes its last breath is a very hard thing to do," he tells WAAY 31.
Director Morson gets emotional. "To have to stick that needle in it and end its life, and I hate to say, because of some idiot out there." Tough language fueled by frustration.
Morson figures 90 percent of people could take care of their animals if that's what they really wanted.
Back in the kennel, Morson shows us what's at stake. "This is a dog we've had probably for two months," he says. "He's a big dog. And that hurts his chances of being adopted. You can see there's not a thing wrong with that dog."
At the Colbert County Animal Shelter, human hearts hurt. Every other dog here will pay the price with its life. "More than likely, one of those won't make it," Morson shows us as we pass a pen with a pair of puppies inside.
The animals aren't the ones to blame.
"We have a little saying," Richie Michael sums it up. "We don't have a pet problem, we have a people problem."
If you want to help, please visit the
Colbert County Animal Shelter's Facebook page or
their official website.
