Transforming animal shelter from shadow of death to beacon of hope

THE first day Courtney Proctor Cross walked into Huntington, West Virginia's municipal animal shelter as its new director, she saw a dog in a crate barking frantically, standing up to his ankles in urine.

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Dogs and cats were crammed into overcrowded wire crates, many with no water in the late-summer heat. Some of the cats had already died; others were barely hanging on.

"It was a nightmare," Proctor Cross said of that day in 2018. "We had no idea we were going to find this horrific scene, but that's what it was."

She helped ensure that barking dog got adopted and thousands of others.

Before Proctor Cross arrived, the shelter was euthanizing between 50 to 75 percent of the animals that came in, she said, many of them healthy and adoptable, because they didn't have the funding or space to care for them.

In Huntington, a city where more than 27 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, public services have long been financially strained, including for animals.

"I couldn't even stand to drive by the shelter," said Proctor Cross, who had been an elementary schoolteacher for 30 years. "Just looking at their little faces and knowing what was going to happen to most of them, it was really painful to think about."

Before becoming the executive director of the Huntington Cabell Wayne Animal Control Shelter, Proctor Cross volunteered with One by One Animal Advocates, a local rescue group that often clashed with the shelter's leadership.

"They would put a lot of restrictions on us," said Heather Aulick, president of the rescue group. "There were times they said our rescue couldn't pull any animals at all. They wanted to keep it all under wraps because most people didn't realise how bad it was."

Volunteers walked dogs at the shelter, only to return later and find the animals euthanised, Aulick said.

"You would walk a happy, wonderful dog one day and go back the next and they would have killed him for no reason," Aulick said. "That was just how they operated."

Proctor Cross who has seven dogs of her own decided to apply to run the shelter.