Tuesday, June 5

Animal Control - The COURIER - May 31, 2007


Puppy thrown from speeding pickup was one man’s solution
Ron Schaming - New Editor - The COURIER - May 31, 2007 pg-1

Standing in front of the Savannah Animal Shelter, Roy Franks and Mary Davis watched in horror as the puppy was tossed from the passenger window of the speeding red pickup truck.

"We had to put it down. We think it broke its back," said Franks, a worker at the city facility which serves Savannah residents exclusively. "I didn’t want to see him suffer no longer."

The puppy "just bounced off that pavement" and "looked like it was broke all to pieces," said Davis, who runs Tennessee River Rescues in Crump, a small private animal welfare operation.
"When it hit the ground," she said, "it just started screaming."

Davis said that if she "had a gun, I would have shot the truck. I’ve never had anything make me so mad in my life."

Davis said she suspects the perpetrators live outside Savannah and know the shelter would not take the dog so they just flung it to its death when they saw the group of people outside the door.

"That’s why we get so many thrown in the Wal-Mart parking lot. It’s in the city limits," she said.
Over the past several years, Hardin County scaled its animal control budget down to the point where there is now effectively no animal control service outside Savannah.

Franks agrees that many––perhaps most––of the dogs he sees at the shelter are from county residents.

"We don’t do nothing in the county because they have no animal control whatsoever," he said. So during the night, "people throw them over the fence and everything else. That’s inhumane."

"All that’s connected. Every bit of it," Davis declares. "I hope and pray that this will open someone’s eyes."

Franks said when he has to refuse to accept unwanted animals from someone who is not a citizen of Savannah, he advises they "take them to a vet and be put down."

He wants to see whoever cruelly threw the puppy from the truck prosecuted, but said he didn’t report the May 21 crime to local law enforcement.

"It wouldn’t have done no good," Franks believes. "They never would have found them."

[End of Article]