Chief Says Staff is Adequate But He’ll Investgate Charges
(PRICHARD, Ala.) Aug. 18 — Jake Baldwin and his mother-in-law Donna Tucker are looking for their dog, his name is Chopper. “He’s been missing for a couple of days now,” says Jake.
They’ve been looking, a search that’s taken them to the Mobile County Animal Shelter and the Mobile City Animal Shelter. Then Jake and his mother came to the Prichard Animal Shelter still looking for Chopper. They went inside around noon Monday. They didn’t find Chopper inside, but they say what they found inside left them upset and even disgusted.
“As soon as you walk through he door there’s feces everywhere and just excrement from dogs all over,” says Jake.
“It was horrible,” says Donna Tucker. “The dogs were laying in it, the ones that couldn’t get up.”
A lasting impression, for sure. But what Jake says he saw next cause him to usher his mother out of the building.
“When we got around to the back we saw a dog who had been laying there a couple of days and had kind of been rotting like it had been left 4 or 5 days at least,” he said. “It hadn’t just died. There were animals crawling all over it. There were dogs in the kennel with it, and it’s jaw where the gums were had rotted out of the face and eyeballs were kind of falling out. It wasn’t a good sight. I had to get the rest of my family out of there.”
Jake, his wife and his mother-in-law took their concerns to the Mobile chapter of the ASPCA. Elizabeth Flott says she’d already received a complaint a week before, “That the animals weren’t being fed on a schedule,” says Flott. “That they were losing weight, those that were coming in sick or injured were not being euthanized in a timely manner.”
Flott is quick to admit the building is old and ill-equipped for it’s current use, which is why she harbors this opinion: “I would really like Prichard to get out of the animal business,” she said.
We took our concerns to the man who is ultimately in charge of the Prichard Animal Shelter, Prichard Police Chief Lawrence Battiste.
“I’m not concerned about the care,” he said. ”We have four full-time staff working here in the animal shelter,” says Battiste. He says the four people are scheduled to share shifts on Saturdays and Sundays, and that each morning their first duties are to clean the cages and care for the animals. But Jake says his visit came on a Monday at noon. The Chief says he’ll investigate.
“We wouldn’t want our employees to work in an environment where there was feces and the possibility of illness floating around,” Battiste said. “Because it subjects our employees to those types of things!”
Meanwhile Jake will keep looking for Chopper. and they hope he’ll turn up soon. If you think you’ve seen him call 689-5985.
Chief Battiste says he plans to interview the staff at the shelter and appoint someone to oversee the situation to make sure it runs appropriately.
