The situation at the Toronto Humane Society is dire. The volume of reports of animal neglect and abuse coming from former and current staff and volunteers at the THS is overwhelming. It isn’t just one person that is complaining, or a few disgruntled employees trying to get back at management. There are hundreds of credible reports coming from veterinarians, volunteers, animal care workers, vet techs, and admin staff. Some of these people still work there and are risking their jobs to speak out against animal neglect.
It is difficult for people to believe that animals at the Toronto Humane Society are suffering. When the front doors to the building open to the public at 12pm, one can walk around and everything looks okay. There might be a few dogs with some waste in their cage, or a couple of cats without water, but overall the animals appear to be well taken care of.
There is a reason that the doors don’t open until noon. Try to walk into the building at 8am. The kennels and cages are so dirty that the stench would bring tears to your eyes. “You would see dogs in cages covered with feces, urine, and sometimes vomit” (former volunteer). You would see cats with dry water bowls because nobody has given them fresh water in the last 12 hours sitting beside an overflowing litter box. This article is going to explain how the dogs at the THS are neglected. There will be another article on cats and small domestics at the Toronto Humane Society.
You would see kibble being dumped into plastic bins. Cans of dog food are then opened and dumped in with the kibble. Unfortunately, these cans are often dented, rusted, expired, or without labels. Sometimes they are covered in mice feces. A little bit of water is added to the mix and then it is stirred together.
Animal care workers feed the dogs in an assembly line. Food isn’t measured to make sure that the nutritional needs of each animal are met. A big dog gets a big bowl, and a small dog gets a small bowl. The animals are fed once a day. There is no chart to mark whether or not a dog ate.
“You would see animal care workers scooping food into a bowl, opening a kennel door, kicking in the food bowl, and then closing the door again. The food bowls would often land in a pile of feces or urine because the staff aren’t allowed to clean the kennels until the dogs have been fed. Would you put your dog’s breakfast in a pile of vomit and expect them to eat it?” (former THS employee)
If there is enough staff, and there are two animal care workers cleaning a room, everything in the cage/kennel is removed (more on what happens if there is only one animal care worker later).
”Once the kennel is empty, it is sprayed with a cleaning chemical, or the animal care worker just mops around the dog while it is still in the kennel. If the dog is still in the kennel while it is being mopped, it gets to stand in dirty bleach or chemical water until it dries. Now the dog has chemicals on its paws.” (former THS employee)
Four kennels usually share the same drain. Because of this the walls of the kennels don’t meet the floor at the back of the kennel.While mopping, dirty chemical water gets into the three other kennels that share the same drain. If one of the kennels sharing the drain has already been cleaned, staff members don’t go back to it to mop up the dirty water. There simply isn’t time. This means that their blanket soaks up the dirty water, and remains their blanket for the day. If the drain backs up (it happens all the time) there are now dogs standing, sitting, or laying in a puddle of a combination of chemical, feces, urine, vomit, and water. Some of the dogs drink it.
Once the kennel is clean, a blanket is tossed in the kennel and a bowl of water.
When there is only one animal care worker cleaning a room, staff are instructed to flip over obviously dirty blankets when pressed for time. Urine soaked blankets often go unnoticed. Dirty mop water is then spread around each cage, which in turn spreads disease and parasites.
Why are the kennels allowed to get so filthy overnight? If the current board of directors weren’t so fixated on suing organizations like the Hamilton Humane Society, there would be enough money to staff the overnight properly. If there were enough staff on the overnight, dogs would have access to fresh drinking water 24 hours a day. Vomit would get cleaned up in a timely manner. If the dogs were taken care of properly 24 hours a day, the shelter would be open to the public earlier because the frantic morning cleaning spree wouldn’t have to happen. These animals shouldn’t have to sit in dirty cages all night. The level of care that the animals receive shouldn’t change drastically at 7pm because the shelter is closed to the public. The level of animal care should be consistent.
Why is there no change of forms on the kennels? Shouldn’t the staff be recording that a dog didn’t eat? That it hasn’t eaten in 3 days? That it vomited? That it is has diarrhea? That it’s lethargic? How is the medical staff at the Toronto Humane Society supposed to assess the overall health of an animal if there is no daily records? If people aren’t keeping track of the ins and outs of an animal, medical issues like urinary tract infections, diabetes, renal disease, and parasites can be easily missed.
Why is the food not being measured to ensure that the nutritional needs of the animals are being met? Look on the back of any bag or can of dog food. The amount of food needed varies depending on the weight of the animal. The amount also varies with different brands of food. Feeding an animal the right amount of food is important.
Why are animals being fed expired food? There is an expiration date for a reason. Donors give the Toronto Humane Society their hard earned money to make sure that the animals are being fed properly. If the money isn’t being spent on food what is it being spent on?
Please join us at 2pm on Saturday June 20th at 11 River Street. These animals need a voice. Together we can put enough pressure on the board of directors and upper management at the Toronto Humane Society to make animal care at the THS the number one priority.
We aren’t making this stuff up folks. Here are two photos of animals at the THS that were published in the Globe and Mail. Notice the filthy cages and the lack of water in the images.
Tags: Animal Abuse, OSPCA, toronto humane society, Toronto Humane Society Protest
June 17, 2009 at 2:46 am |
This is so terrible; the THS can and needs to do so much better for these animals. Not only is this sad for the animals, but I’m also very sad for the animal care workers who have to face this day in and day out, along with I imagine, a profound sense of helplessness.
It takes a special person to be able to work with animals; especially ones living under these appalling conditions. The unfortunate animals who wind up in a shelter are scared, depressed, often times sick and anxious; a HUMANE society should be doing all it can to provide the animals with a healthy and comfortable environment until a permanent loving home is found for them. My heart really goes out to the animals and those that tend to them each day. Let’s hope better days are not far off…
June 18, 2009 at 5:04 am |
When I worked at the Toronto Humane Society a couple of years ago we used power washers to clean the dog runs. First we would feed the dogs. We weren’t allowed to clean up the dog runs before we fed them, which meant that we would kick bowls of food into whatever bodily waste was in the kennel. My first day on the job I almost puked. Some dogs would dive into their food. It didn’t matter if the bowl was sitting in a pile of diarrhea. They were really hungry. Other dogs wouldn’t eat at all. I tried to keep track of what dogs didn’t eat that day but we didn’t have time to write anything down. There weren’t any forms to track who ate or didn’t eat when I worked there either.
There was a huge giardia outbreak when I worked there. The dogs would be left overnight to sit in cages covered in bloody diarrhea. I mean some of the kennels were actually covered in bloody diarrhea. The dogs got used to it over time and would step in it, or worse, eat their meal in it. I wanted to cry. The room was so gross when my shift started. Some of the dogs were so sick, and the parasite was spreading like crazy.
There was only one staff member working the overnight at that time. She was the only staff member in the shelter from 12am until 7am. She was responsible for all of the cats, dogs, small domestics, wildlife, as well as making sure that the kitten feeders were okay, doing any intakes that came in, and answering the phone. There was no vet in the building on the overnight.
Spot checks weren’t really done because she didn’t have time. When I got to work in the morning most of the kennels would have a dried on layer of shit, or water bowls with puke in it, or blankets saturated in urine. The giardia dogs would be in kennels that were covered in bloody diarrhea. Dogs would step in their own feces, and would leave shit paw prints all over their kennel overnight, including the walls (from jumping up).
We would be in a huge rush to feed the dogs (they all had to be fed by 8am and the morning shift started at 7am. This hour included the time it took to open the cans of wet food and mix it all up with the dry food.The dry food was never expired, but the wet food was expired all the time. Sometimes the canned food would be discoloured, without labels, or in dented rusted cans. I complained to my supervisor about the expired food several times and was told to feed it to them anyway. I started throwing out the expired food and was caught by that same supervisor. That was my first and only verbal warning.
I’ve personally kicked thousands of dog food bowls into disgusting kennels. You kind of distance yourself mentally from what you are doing when you work in a place like that. When I think about how many times I have watched a dog wolf down its food while it is sitting in a pile of dogshit, it makes me so angry. I had no choice. It was do it or get fired.
Once the dogs were fed I would tie the dog to a chain on the wall, remove everything from the kennel, saturate the kennel with bleach, and then power wash the kennel. The power washers also sprayed Virkon, which created a chemical reaction with the bleach. Sometimes there was this awful burning smell. I asked my supervisor about it and he told me not to worry about it.
I was also instructed to pour bleach (right from the bleach bottle) down the drains to kill flies, and to make the room smell clean. I trained new animal care workers, and instructed them to clean this way as well.
We were never given instructions on what ratio of bleach to water to mix. We would just guess. There weren’t any measuring cups or anything near the chemicals. Sometimes I would leave the room to grab a new pair of gloves. When I came back into the room I would realize that I had mixed the bleach way too strong.
I’ve always wondered what the long-term effects of those strong chemicals were on the lungs of those dogs. I’ve also wondered if I have damaged my own lungs because of my exposure to the mixture of Virkon and bleach.
I really hope that things change drastically at the Toronto Humane Society. I don’t know what the solution is, but things aren’t working the way it should. The THS has so much potential. I don’t understand how things got this bad. I know that a lot of people don’t believe that this level of neglect could happen in a place like the THS. It did when I worked there in 2006, and by the looks and sounds of things, animals continue to be neglected at the THS. I’ll be at the protest. This has got to stop.
June 18, 2009 at 11:12 pm |
So WHAT exactly is the THS doing with the millions of dollars it receives every year!!!! What are they doing with the money that should be used to feed the animals the right amount of food and the proper (not expired) food?? What are they doing with the money they should be using to staff the shelter properly? ONE person on an overnight shift for all those animals and no vet?? It’s so hard to understand how this has been allowed to go on for so long. I hope the powers that be get to the bottom of this and figure out just WHO IS BENEFITING from all of these donor dollars the THS is always begging for… apparently it’s not the animals who are benefiting…
June 19, 2009 at 3:00 am |
Im madf at the vets that wont help the sick animals when their owner dosent have enough money for emegency care they should lower their prices
August 2, 2009 at 5:59 am |
The first former animal care worker had it easier then the ones in late 2007 to the present. For some reason the THS stopped using high pressure hoses, having the audacity to call them unsanitary. They didn’t even say it was for sanitary reasons they just said “Guelph”, as if to imply that any vet in their right mind would consider that sanitary. They actually dismantled the whole system, except in one spray room. I defy them to provide any credible veterinarians who actually recommended this.
When you mention high pressure hoses to people they become bored with hearing about such supposedly mundane things. These mundane things are just the sort of things that are the profound concerns of an animal shelter. It is just the type of thing that cuts down on labour power, and exponentially increases the degree of sanitation.
Following the dismantling of the high pressure hoses the dog kennels became from April 2008 to the present were atrocious. Getting rid of the high pressure hoses should have meant hiring more workers, instead in a couple of months the animal care workers were cut down to maybe 2-3 per 24 hours to walk, clean and feed the animals. Dogs got walked a couple of minutes. Most of the kennels were sealed from public view to hide the unsanitary conditions. Then they fired the volunteer dogwalkers or made it miserable for them, and strangely, hired more supervisors so that there were two supervisors for every employee. Then they stopped buying dog food and fed dogs a mix of whatever half-full bag the public gave them. The putrid leftovers were fed to the dogs the next day. Most of the dogs had constant diarhea, vomitting from being fed various types of dog food with different proteins, irregardless of age, special diets, etc…
Because they weren’t walked those that were housetrained became untrained and spoiled there cages. They had been firing vet techs (all the RVT’s since January 2007), and this continued until there was one vet tech, or none, and the vets were no where in sight.
Because of the poor sanitation, poor diet, lack of vet care, there were constant disease outbreaks. There was almost never a well animal there. Not to mention the fact that I had been caring for the same animals for a year or more, that many had been there for many years. There was almost constant Giardia, flea-bitten dogs, dogs with burns from the industrial-strength bleach, ringworm, distemper, mange, coccidia. Then what followed was antibiotic resistnat Staphylococcus.
They never got rid of these diseases, they just became more adept at hiding them by not putting up medical charts.
Managers and supervisors close to Tim said it was because he wanted to make the animal care workers work harder, he liked to see them sweat. Certainly he took great pleasure in his exercise of power – yelling and screaming, making accusations, indiscriminate firing, verbal and sometimes physical abuse. He relished hearing about employees who were mauled by animals. I had heard rumours before I worked at the THS about Tim’s antics, the abuse of staff, the animals dying in their cages. Like many I assumed disgruntled employees vilifying their former employer. My goodness I could not have been more wrong. Tim was an absolute sadist, his supervisors not much better then soldiers of fortune.
Getting rid of the high-pressure hoses was a dirty tactic to get rid of employees by making their job so difficult, by purposely submitting them to constant animal neglect that they could not bare which would cause them to quit. Employees who towed the line were permitted to use the high-pressure washers until they were dismantled. Eventually, to justify not using high pressure hoses, because it was obvious to most that he did it to purposely piss off employees, he had to follow his perverse logic and dismantle the whole system. Tim and his vicious cronies just covered up their incompetence and negligence with more lies.
I hope that Ontario will never see a clearer case of animal negligence and abuse as at the Toronto Humane Society. They did almost everything they could to purposely make it miserable for the animals. It didn’t really matter to Gary, vijay, romeo, Tim, chaz, shannon, glenda, liz, wil, laura, derrock, bernard, roman, manuela, sheridan, rob. They were immune, a little club of animal abusers who backed each other up like some street gang. They were paid off handsomely for their silence and complicity. They received generous pay, full benefits, paid and lengthy vacations, their share of the donations, a gas card courtesy of the THS, use of the THS van for their junkets, free lunches and dinner and coffees. They were immune, or so they think, in their little world with this silly and criminal attitude that they have no responsibility. It was the 1 or 2 animal care workers who were responsible for the disease, lack of food and vet care, they would make you feel guilty.
And, fact is, I do feel guilty and sick that I worked there at all. But for the fact that I noted what I saw and can now testify to the OSPCA, I would feel horrible for participating in this at all.
These bastards are going to pay – they will be held up for criminal charges of animal neglect and abuse. Not because I am a disgruntled employee, but because they criminally neglected and abused animals, betrayed the public trust. Because they wifully neglected and abused animals with careless and reckless disregard.