The County Vet Tech’s View

Aiken County Animal Advocates

THE VOICE OF PAWS

(Palmetto Animal Welfare Services, Inc.)

By Joya DiStefano


“The one thing about this job,” she began, “is that you can never get up thinking you are going to the same old job.”

Sandy Larsen is a senior vet tech at the Aiken County Animal Shelter.

She may arrive at the gate early in the morning and find a box full of kittens or puppies or a dog tied to the fence.

The gate is on heavily trafficked Wire Road, where the speed limit is 55 mph. Sometimes the box is empty, or the leash chewed in half. Maybe the temperature dipped into the 20s that night. This is how a workday may begin.

Sandy remembers when the shelter was built and meant to hold 100 animals.
The number impounded at the shelter this October was 467; the previous October was 485, and the October before that was 491.

In the last 10 years, only October 2007 saw the intake number under 400 at 362.
Otherwise, the average for Octobers is 450 animals, the last three years being the highest of four in 10 years.

Intake is much higher from April to August.

What does a veterinary technician do in this environment? Nearly everything, except bring the animals to the County Shelter.

If Sandy’s week starts on Monday, she is up at o’dark-thirty to come and get the been-here-too-long-pet-of-the-week and take it on television.

She has not missed a Monday in years. Her spot airs at 6 a.m.

“Sometimes I have even brought that box of abandoned puppies or kittens to show what some people will do.”

SANDY LARSEN

At the shelter, first task daily is to check the dogs on “the adoption floor;” the current shelter does not actually have a separate wing like the new shelter will provide.

There is a wire gate separating the “5-day holds” from the adoptable animals, all sharing the same air, the same open drainage trenches, the same smells and sounds.

“We check the floor for kennel cough and diarrhea, and medicate accordingly,” said Sandy.
Next, the 5-day holds are reviewed so see who might be eligible to move up to the adoption floor on a space-available basis. These candidates will be checked for heartworm.

If positive, they are not eligible for adoption and will be euthanized if a rescue cannot be located who will take them.

If negative, they get wormed and shots and another chance at a good home.

The strays with mange, the cats with upper respiratory infections (URIs), the dogs disabled by age or injury find their final rest in the compassionate hands of a vet tech like Sandy.
The two county vet techs field calls from the foster families calling with health concerns for puppies or kittens in their care.

And before the county added a custodian position a year ago, they supervised the county inmates who work cleaning and feeding and dong the routine maintenance, if anything can be called routine in such an overcrowded, understaffed facility.

Three days a week, people who’ve adopted puppies and kittens bring their pets back to be spayed and neutered.

The vet techs assist the county vet with surgeries Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. They order and maintain records on all medications, for the sick, surgery and those being fostered.

They do paperwork for intake, adoptions, transfers and disposal. They help volunteers keep the Petfinder website up to date. And for 6.5 hours a day the doors are open to the public.

The dog-walker volunteers arrive and want to know who got adopted since they were last there.

“What happened to Jake, or Millie, this one, or that one? They know all the dogs so well,” Sandy said with appreciation.

Things have changed in Sandy Larsen’s world since Friends of the Animal Shelter helped establish the volunteer, foster and transfer programs beginning in 2009.

Referring to the recent adoption special for November, “Back-in-Black really helped with adoptions,” Sandy said.

A lot has changed for a shelter staff that saw only 265 animals re-homed out of 5,717 impounded in FY04.

In FY13, 1,581 animals were either adopted or transferred out of 4,794 impounded. Or put another way, in 2004 less than 5 percent of the impounded animals were saved; last year it was 33 percent.

Tired after another long day in another busy week, Sandy turned to a particular heartbreak.
Hard to bear that people will abandon helpless pets, unwanted and unnecessary puppies and kittens, but worst of all for Sandy are those who sacrifice their elderly pets saying, “I don’t like this dog anymore.” “I just don’t want it,” because it can’t do what it once could, because it doesn’t suit their needs.

“We live in a world where everything is so disposable,” Sandy says sadly thinking that, if she retires, she may give one or two of these seniors a very loving home.

Aiken County and our animals are blessed to have public servants like Sandy Larsen.


A retired organizational problem-solver and radical educator, Joya Jiménez DiStefano is an artist, Servant Leader, and co-founder of FOTAS, Inc.

County Officer Gets the Message

Aiken County Animal Advocates

THE VOICE OF PAWS

(Palmetto Animal Welfare Services, Inc.)

By Joya DiStefano

His first assignment involved picking up a half-dozen cats.  The area around the single-wide mobile home indicated young children in residence.  A small white dog barked in one window; a black and white cat sat looking out another.  A young man came out and helped load three adolescent cats and three kittens, all black and white, into the cages.  The one that got away was not that hard to catch.

 

“He says they were dropped off on his property,” Officer Miller said as he climbed into the truck.  Next calls were pick-ups: a cat in a county trap, then a puppy on a porch, both north of I-20.  Almost as an aside he said, “I brought in 33 animals last week,” adding, “That was just me.”

Officer Miller is one of four animal control officers working for Aiken County Animal Services.  These men, along with Chief Bobby Arthurs, cover all of nearly eleven-hundred square miles, including acting as occasional auxiliaries to the cities of North Augusta and Aiken.  Their primary responsibility is public safety, but as the public-private partnership between county government and Friends of the Animal Shelter, Inc. (FOTAS) developed, bringing more resources to an overextended staff,  the role of the animal control officer and shelter staff has been broadened while still upholding the public trust.

  

“You can be a dogcatcher or you can be an animal control officer,” Bobby Arthurs says he told the new officer last year during the ride-along as part of his training.  And Officer Patrick Miller must have gotten the message.

Last spring Officer Miller was instrumental in arranging private help for a family who had moved and needed a fence to confine their dogs, all spayed and neutered with current rabies vaccines.  On another case, a couple in very hard times, upgraded the care of their five dogs, got the rabies vaccines, and needed help getting dogs’ weight up.  Officer Miller arranged temporary food donations.  And that is not the only case. 

There were the six dogs in the Valley.  They were so thin that when the elderly woman, receiving her warning, took them to the vet for the rabies shot, the vet called Officer Miller to have him investigate the case.  “I try to work with people,” he said, and has been assisting with donated food to help fatten up the dogs.  He remained quiet a moment then said, “Where is the cut-off point?”  He meant the line between compassion and fostering an unsustainable dependency, a boundary that an animal advocate as public servant must confront, or anybody, for that matter.  He will find it, rest assured.

As we rode along the county roads, Patrick Miller talked about the job more than himself.  We picked up the big beautiful gray cat in the trap.  He talked about the emaciated horse that was in the road and no owner was ever found.  There was the Billy goat that kept getting out while the owner was out of town.  He and another officer caught the butting creature that, once captured, went meekly back to his pen, again.  When we came to the puppy on the porch, I asked if I could ride her on my lap.  He offered me a pad to separate me from the fleas.  I could feel her bones through the filthy fur.

 

Riding the animals back to the shelter, Patrick confides that sometimes he lets an obviously good dog, one whose owners can’t be located, ride shotgun with him for company before taking it to the shelter.  Patrick ruminates over a case involving multiple pit bulls. Throughout his involvement, the number and color of the dogs keeps changing.  Maybe the guy is selling them.  Yes, dog fighting is illegal in South Carolina, “But like everything else, you have to have proof,” he added.

At least the conditions provided those dogs have significantly improved.  In fact, Patrick makes routine rounds to places he calls “trouble spots.”  They have all improved.  And, in the month of September, 436 animals came into the county shelter; 252 were cats and 182 were dogs; 236 cats were euthanized (93%) and 87 dogs (48%).  Obviously, we need more animal advocates.