Members of Support Roswell Animals hold a protest Saturday morning in front of the downtown Chaves County Courthouse to bring attention to their concerns about the treatment of animals at the city's animal services shelter. Anna Edwards, one of the organizers of the group, said that members work to support spaying and neutering and better conditions for shelter animals. The group sent a letter to city officials in June documenting their concerns.
Lisa Dunlap PhotoRepresentatives of a group of Roswell residents frustrated with what they see as a failure to implement and update policies at Roswell Animal Services said despite a lack of contact from the city, they will not give up working to make changes at the city shelter.
The group, Support Roswell Animals, includes Megan Telles, a former interim supervisor of Animal Services. A public Facebook group has more than 200 members, some of whom attended a peaceful rally Saturday afternoon on the Chaves County Courthouse lawn.
Telles and member Anna Edwards said they were among a small group of residents who started Support Roswell Animals, which sent a letter on June 28 outlining their concerns to Mayor Tim Jennings, all 10 city councilors, City Manager Joe Neeb, Director of Special Services Jim Burress, Deputy City Manager Mike Mathews and City Attorney Parker Patterson. The letter was posted to the Facebook group.
The women said in a Wednesday interview with the Roswell Daily Record they have not had any contact from the city acknowledging their concerns or even that the letter was received.
A statement from the city provided by Todd Wildermuth, public information officer, confirmed the city had received the June 28 letter and was investigating its allegations.
“Roswell Animal Services has a difficult job and must deal with dogs and cats that have often been mistreated, abused and forgotten by uncaring individuals within the community,” the statement said.
The statement mentioned that the city, with the help of several animal rescue groups, rewrote its animal control ordinances in 2019 and codified them in January 2020.
“Any inconsistencies in the implementation of the city laws and policies that are discovered by the city's investigation will be corrected quickly. The city intends to schedule a meeting in the near future with representatives of the group that submitted the complaint,” the statement said.
Telles said the group has concerns that the city ordinances make references to Animal Services policies that might not exist, however.
“When we rewrote the ordinances, there were a lot of things that the ordinance states to look into the policies and procedures for those particular items,” she said.
For example, under the section on unclaimed animals, city code reads, “Such animals shall be retained by animal services until such time as space is no longer available or the animal is deemed unadoptable, based on animal services’ standard operating procedures.”
Telles, who was still with Animal Services at the time, said she put together some makeshift policies based on those of Las Cruces, Albuquerque and other cities, but she said she believes they were never acted on.
Telles said Support Roswell Animals would like some solid numbers put in writing regarding how many kennels the shelter needs to keep open and how long animals can be kept for rescue groups.
“We want them to put that in writing, something that’s for sure and not something rescue (groups) have to guess every week,” she said.
“We want a policy for euthanasia. We want to make sure that it’s humane and the citizens feel that it’s been done in the best way, which we don’t think it is currently. I think the city is trying to do it as cheaply as possible, and if they’re going to have a shelter in place, they need to be providing humane care for the animals,” she said.
In the letter, the group provided documentation and photos of a dog and cat taken into the shelter in April that were not immediately treated by a veterinarian despite observable symptoms of illness or injury.
The dog, a female boxer, was emaciated and its overgrown claws were embedded in its paws. The dog was not taken to a veterinarian until eight days after it was brought to the shelter when it had a seizure. An X-ray by a veterinarian also showed an old injury with a bullet in one of its back legs. The dog was euthanized.
“The way her leg is, the vomit down the bed, those are all signs that she is in some kind of distress,” Telles said.
Burress said in April that he did have a standing order for all animals that appear to need medical care to be taken to a veterinarian but it was not followed. He said staff was concerned if they took the dog to a vet it would be euthanized despite being on a court-ordered hold.
The dog did receive in-house treatment from staff, Burress said, including getting its nails trimmed, paws treated and soft food to eat.
The group’s letter also documented the case of a cat brought to the shelter in April that initially appeared OK but declined in health. After 18 days, a rescue group volunteer pulled the cat from the shelter to foster and sought treatment for it.
The female cat was found to have a fractured or dislocated hip that required surgery and an upper respiratory disease. The volunteer adopted the cat, which she named Poppy, and reported in a Facebook post included in the letter that she is recovering.
Telles and Edwards said those cases, along with a dog brought in June 1 that they said was not scanned for an identifying microchip, delaying its return to its owner, are evidence that existing directives at Animal Services are not being enforced.
Sammye Leflar, president of Friends of Roswell Animals (FORA), agreed and said staff inexperience has led to dogs being euthanized unnecessarily.
“They have people down there that have no experience at all that are making decisions about putting dogs down saying that they’re aggressive when they are not,” Leflar said.
“They have unexperienced, overwhelmed people that are making decisions that aren’t for the well-being of animals,” she said.
Leflar said she wrote her own letter of concerns about Animal Services to city officials last month and also has not had any response. She said communication with the city and her rescue group has broken down “immensely” since last October, when Neeb, Mathews, Burress and Rogers met with her and representatives of Peace of Mind, a Santa Fe cat rescue group, to work out various issues.
She said her rescue group has had difficulty communicating with the staff to tag animals for rescue and has been given short notice to pull animals or they would be euthanized because the shelter was running out of space, but inconsistent hours have also made it difficult for volunteers to get into the shelter.
She said FORA has pulled animals that have not been treated for fleas or mites and that had microchips that were traced back to the animals’ owners.
City Councilor Juliana Halvorson is the chair of the city council’s Public Safety Committee, which reviews animal control policies. She told the Daily Record on Wednesday that she was to meet later that afternoon with Deputy City Manager Mike Mathews and Animal Services Director Nicole Rogers about Support Roswell Animal’s concerns. She said she hoped to be able to get the various groups together to work out the issues.
