Part 4 - Healthy, Happy, Tail-Wagging, and in line to die.

Trigger Warning: This blog contains content related to euthanasia, shelter conditions, and the emotional toll of animal sheltering. Please take care while reading. If you’re not in the headspace for it today, I understand.

The Not-So-Butterfly Parts: My First Day at Palm Valley.

I’ve went back and forth about writing this one for a long time.

This blog isn’t going to be easy. It’s not one of those warm and fuzzy shelter stories. It’s not about a miracle rescue or a happy reunion. I’ve been lucky to be part of many of those too. But this one is about something different. Something heavier. And if you’ve worked in animal sheltering long enough, you already know that not every story comes with a clean, happy ending.

I want to talk about my first day at Palm Valley Animal Center. I want to talk about what I saw, what I felt, and what I learned. And I want to be honest about all of it, especially the parts that still sit with me today.

When Best Friends Animal Society first reached out to me, they were starting something new. It was called the EMBED program, short for Embedded Shelter Support. The idea was simple but powerful: take someone who had already helped lead a shelter to over a 90 percent save rate, someone who understood the grind and the heartbreak and the strategy behind lifesaving, and place them directly into a shelter that was struggling. Not as a consultant. Not as a guest. As part of the team.

Not to watch from the sidelines. To do the work.

That’s how I ended up at Palm Valley.

“How Have I Never Heard of This Place?”

When that call first came, I told them to send everything they had on the shelter they were asking me to consider. I’ve spent years tracking major shelters across the country, not just out of curiosity, but because I wanted to learn from the ones that were handling massive intake and still managing to innovate.

So when Brent Toellner told me about a shelter in South Texas taking in 34,000 animals a year, I was stunned.

How had I never heard of it?

And then it hit me. This shelter wasn’t just overwhelmed. It had been hidden. From the media. From the national conversation. Even from people like me who live and breathe this work.

Brent told me they found out about it through a few viral YouTube videos. Hidden camera footage from one of the shelters rescue partners, taken Inside the shelter. I watched them all.

Even with nearly a decade in this profession, those videos were hard to get through.

This wasn’t just overcrowding. These were kennels with seven, eight, even nine large dogs together. There were fights. There were dogs that had already died lying next to those that were still alive. My stomach turned upside down.

I couldn’t imagine what it felt like for the public to watch that.

After watching those, I knew I had to go.

Somebody Had to Go

As soon as the last video ended, the questions flooded into my head.

Was the place even fixable?

What kind of staff could possibly survive working in those conditions?

What kind of community allowed this to happen?

Who was leading this organization?

But then I realized. If I was offered the opportunity to help, and the full support of a national organization behind me, how could I not?

I’m not saying I was the only person who could have helped. But I was the one being asked. And if leaders at Best Friends believed I could make a difference, I needed to at least try.

That night, I talked to my sons.

And in less than 30 days we packed up our life in New Jersey and moved to the southernmost tip of Texas. To a place I couldn’t stop thinking about.

A Walk Through Heat, Smell, and Silence

I moved in on a Sunday and started work that Monday.

My first stop was the Laurie P Andrews, PAWS Center, a bright, quiet, well-maintained building. This was the “no-kill” shelter mentioned in news articles. What I soon realized was that it wasn’t really a no-kill shelter at all.

Here’s how it worked. Animals came into the older Trenton facility. The best of the best , the highly adoptable, young, healthy animals were transferred to the PAWS Center.

But here’s the kicker. If they stayed too long or developed issues, they were sent back to Trenton to be euthanized.

This wasn’t transparency. It was a mask. I’ll talk more about this at another time.

Then we drove to the Trenton location.

When I first pulled up, I saw one large building. I immediately thought that there was no way it could hold 34,000 animals a year. Inside, the smell hit me first. And not the kind of shelter smell I was used to. This was different. I later learned it was from the drains. The building had been built in the 1970s and hadn’t been updated since.

The building was two levels. Downstairs was a cat adoption room, a group cat housing room, and two adoptable dog kennel rooms. There was also one room that at one time was designated to house puppies. Then there was a couple office spaces. The Directors office, a foster office, and a medical room. Upstairs, was a small conference room and a storage area.

Right outside of that building was the rabies quarantine area. Dogs in cages held together by duct tape and zip ties. Big box fans trying to cool rooms that felt more like punishment than quarantine.

Outside of that was even worse. There were outdoor kennels ,rows and rows, stretching out in every direction over the rest of the 5-acre property.

The heat was crushing. Dogs were packed in. Seven, eight, even ten per kennel. Large dogs. German Shepherd-sized dogs. Not just puppies. Not just small breeds.

One row was labeled “Pit Bulls Only.” All the kennels were double-locked. They were kept one per kennel and only kept in that kennel for a short time. Once they’re stray hold was up, they were euthanized. The silence in that area felt different.

We kept walking. Until we reached the back of the property, intake row.

Intake Row: The Flood That Never Stopped

Intake row was a tin-sided, sally-port style structure with 5 rooms attached.

The kennels. Three cat rooms. A small medical intake room. And the euthanasia room.

We arrived just in time to see the daily unloading. Animal control trucks rolled in, one after another, delivering animals from every town and contract city in the area. Some of the animal control officers had full uniforms, nice trucks, badges, and all the gear, while some arrived in a pickup truck with a rusted metal crate that had been haphazardly welded into the bed.

This shelter was receiving 75 to 150 animals a day.

And they were just being shoved into kennels. No sorting. No matching. No system.

Small dogs with large ones. Puppies with adults. Sick with healthy.

The fights were immediate. The raw urge that I had to just scream STOP! Was almost too hard to for me to stop myself.

Cats were crammed into wire crates, stacked on top of each other, outside of the medial intake room, in the blazing heat. Some were swaying. Some were leaking. Some were crying. Some were silent.

Then we toured the cat rooms. Just three small rooms tasked with handling 15,000 cats a year. In aneffort to create space, metal cage banks were topped with wire dog crates. Crates on top of cages. Cats from different neighborhoods, different cities, different conditions, all shoved together.

Sick cats were placed with healthy ones. Intact males next to nursing moms. There was no time to assess. No space to isolate.

Right as we walked into the third room I saw a cat defecating from the top row of crates. The waste fell straight down into the cages below.

And then I found out, There was one person scheduled that day to clean that whole room.

The Carts

After the cats, our last stop for that day was the euthanasia room. After speaking the vet techs and getting a run down on a what they’re day usually looks like, I stepped outside to take a breath.

That’s when I heard it.

The metal wheels. The high-pitched squeaks. The clang of rusted hinges.

It was the euthanasia carts.

Every day , a list would go out. The list was bigger or smaller based on the intake of the day prior. Kennel staff would gather the animals marked for euthanasia and transport them across the five-acre property using rolling carts.

I saw a line of carts coming.

These weren’t just aggressive dogs. These weren’t just medical emergencies.

Most were healthy, happy, tail-wagging dogs. Dogs who, in most northern shelters, would have been adopted the same day.

But here, because of where they were born and where they landed, because their stray hold was up or maybe because they were owner surrendered that day, they were going to die that day.

And the people pushing those carts? They weren’t cold. They weren’t callous. They were people who loved animals. Who wished they didn’t have to do this. Who just spent the day caring for this animals in 100 degree weather. Who were tired of being forced into impossible choices.

This wasn’t cruelty.

This was under resourced.

This was over capacity.

This seemed impossible.

This was a system buried under numbers that no one had planned for. And that too many had stopped looking at.

And That Was Just Day One

All of that. Everything I’ve written here. Happened on my first day.

I don’t know what you think of me after reading this. I think a lot of people would’ve made that their first and last day.

But if you had met the people I met, if you’d seen what I saw , you might have stayed too.

They wanted change. And because of them, I knew it was possible.

Plus I had seen it happen before. Not nearly to this level but with Best Friends behind me, I truly believed we could do it. And spoiler alert: we could!

This is just one story. One day. I have more.

If you want to hear them, I’ll keep writing.

And if this was too much, I get that too.

Either way, thank you for reading.