By Marie Leotta
It’s a beautiful Sunday and I am sitting in the Essex Junction Police Department attending a seminar for VACA (Vermont Animal Control Association). As the Waitsfield Dog Warden, I am a member and I do this every October. Today we are not as well attended as in years past and we have two speakers today!
The first is a veterinarian whose work is well known both here and in North Dakota, where she is originally from, and the second is the vice president of Chittenden County ASPCA here to discuss people who own pets.
The veterinarian’s discussion was mainly about horses. Their stories are sad. Horses are most often neglected due to the owner’s inability to feed, shelter and vet them and yet continue to keep them. Left to wallow in paddocks with inadequate water and lacking dry land, their feet suffer as does their health. It’s tough to watch this happen and most times giving them up or having them euthanized is an option owners are unwilling to address until they are confronted by an animal control officer (ACO) or health official.
But it was when the talk turned to dogs that we really had to soul search as to what is going on with our friends and neighbors that concerned us. The vets’ biggest and most heart-wrenching questions of the day were “What do you think about all of the dogs being brought up north from the South?” and “How do you feel about no-kill shelters?” Many of the people in the room were longtime animal control officers who are seeing hoarding and overbreeding on a local level, but the new trend is starting a whole new dilemma of diseases that we, here in Vermont, are just now becoming aware of. That disease is heartworm. Heartworm is easily treated with the proper medication, but in order to do so a trip to the vet is necessary to test your dog to determine if the dog has it. Then there is the problem of dogs being warehoused within various rescue groups and no-kill shelters due to a lack of humans able to adopt or foster them!
In the years past, it was seldom if ever we heard of this problem as most people have been diligent in getting their pets spayed and neutered. But this new trend of importing dogs from the South is overburdening even the best of intentions within our communities.
I see this firsthand here in Waitsfield. We have people breeding and hoarding and although they keep their activities on the downlow, I and others know who they are. Their breeding and hoarding conditions are often unclean, flea and feces ridden, coupled with a total lack of veterinary care. The breeders are not licensed and do not keep track of who is buying their pups. The buyers are not vetted and the breeder only cares about who can come up with the purchase price which is often hundreds of dollars.
So my major concern is why are we allowing these rescue groups to bring these dogs up north and how can we do a better job of ensuring they are being sold to homes that can care for them? I would like to discuss this situation openly among us here in The Valley as it pertains specifically to us and prefer that all responses are suitable for print. If you want to defend, expose or talk, I ask that this sensitive subject be discussed in a respectful manner.
Marie Leotta is the Waitsfield dog warden.
