11/15/2021
LAS VEGAS - Since Covid struck, everyone in the animal community has become aware of the lack of services offered by The Animal Foundation, from refusing strays, closing the adoption kennels, discontinuing vaccine clinics, and basically shutting down the shelter to public access for almost a year.
Starting in spring of this year, another more serious problem developed. The Animal Foundation experienced grave staffing issues in all of their departments, including losing 7 of their 8 veterinarians, 60% of their animal care specialists and half of their executive level management team. Here's part of the reason why: In April, TAF's new COO terminated their lead veterinarian and essentially left 100 plus employees shocked that a respected leader and advocate was fired. The veterinarian, who was well liked, and had spent the last 3.5 years recruiting, developing, and leading the medical team and support staff across all departments. People started to quit including six of their veterinarians. TAF continued to lose more staff members all throughout the summer and up to the present day.
This lack of staff profoundly overburdened the remaining employees, creating a dangerous situation for animals, and a psychological torture for the workers who remained there. In my mind it is clear that this has brought unnecessary death and suffering to the animals that have ended up there. I have heard stories of animals not being fed regularly, kennels uncleaned, animals waiting 24 hours just to be processed, people being told at 11am that they are too busy to adopt any more animals, phone calls that are, as a practice, never answered, a kitten accidentally being thrown in the trash and over 2,000 animals leaving the shelter without being fixed.
The dog in the photo on the left died of heat stroke this Summer after being mistakenly locked out of the air conditioned area of his kennel. He died trying to fight his way back through the metal plate that was keeping him in the sun. Another dog died the same way just days later. (I wish I did not have to share such graphic photos, but the public needs to know what is happening).
This was a tragic human error that no one intended to happen, but the real responsibility lies with the executives of The Animal Foundation and their complete mismanagement of employees and resources. The real issue is that TAF's executives have fostered a toxic culture where people are over-worked, under-paid and their ideas to make things better are not welcome. A company cannot retain employees in that kind of environment.
I also feel the need to set the record straight on rumors that have been going around about TAF blaming another organization for stealing their veterinarians. This is completely not true. The loss of TAF's entire vet services staff was a such a colossal mistake that they did not want to own up to, so they tried to say another rescue stole their vets. I personally spoke to the lead vet who told me TAF fired him, and to the recently resigned COO of TAF, who confirmed he terminated this vet. TAF is 100% responsible for the loss of their vet staff and all of the other employees who have quit. The terminated vet did end up being hired by the other org, along with two more former TAF veterinarians, however, this would have never occurred if the beloved vet had not been terminated. All other former veterinarians secured jobs elsewhere.
To make matters worse, I learned last week that the ONE remaining vet at TAF gave her 30 day notice and will be gone by the end of November. To put this in perspective, TAF has had only one full-time vet, for the last six months, to care for 600-900 animals on a daily basis, and now, even she will be gone very soon.
What we are experiencing right now as a community is the almost complete breakdown of animal services. If it wasn't for the rescues and ordinary citizens in our community stepping up it would be a lot worse.
So where do we go from here? How do we fix this problem? I do not feel a practical solution is getting rid of TAF, we have tried that before and the circumstances that prohibited it last time still remain.
The main problem right now is staffing, so we need more good people like you who are willing to work there. But before we do that we need to get new management in place, otherwise the turnover problem is just going to continue. The good news is that most of the management has already left. Carly Scholten the longtime former COO left this year, Christine Robinson will be resigning at the end of this year. Their fundraising director quit last month and as I mentioned, their most recent COO quit last week. If we can get the right people into management positions at TAF we can start to see real, immediate change.
Vegas is full of passionate, intelligent animal-loving souls, many of who have operated successful rescues for years. We need them running TAF.
Their new CEO will ultimately be chosen by their Board members who are probably unaware of how bad the situation is at TAF. We need to contact them to let them know what is happening and offer them a solution. Perhaps you know of someone who would be a good fit for the position. Let them know the community will help them turn the shelter around if they choose a leader from amongst the animal community.
As we know, in order to get their attention, we also need to reach out to the local media. Below you will find their contact info. Write to them and tell them your story, about your experience, or share some of the info I have given you. Let them know we need a local leader from our rescue community to run the shelter.
Although the situation at TAF is dark, I hope we can use this opportunity to try to finally change things for the better for our pets and our community.
Bryce Henderson, President
No Kill Las Vegas
EMAIL:
Animal Foundation Executive Committee
Kevin Murkami - Chairperson
[email protected]
Rikki Tanenbaum – Vice Chairperson
[email protected]
Vanessa Teeter - Secretary
[email protected]
MEDIA:
KTNV - [email protected]
KLAS - [email protected]
KSNV - [email protected]
KVVU - [email protected]
