The US Humane Society has some excellent suggestions on how to handle this situation listed here. Pet-Abuse.Com is only in a position to provide assistance to individuals whose animals have been victims of criminal abuse and unfortunately cannot assist with other vet care bills at this time. Additionally, due to inadequate funding, we are unable to offer financial assistance of any kind. We hope that with your continued support and financial contributions, that may change in the near future.
Pet-Abuse.Com is a regsistered California non-profit, and as such, we want to let you know where your money is going.
Whenever a case is submitted, we must contact the Police Dept, Dept of Animal Control, or DA's office to verify that the case is valid, and to hopefully get some updated information on trial dates, sentencing dates, etc. With hundreds of new cases added every month, long distance phonecalls add up quickly - however we are committed to making sure that the information we present is as accurate as possible. Additionally, if we post information that is *not* correct, we open ourselves up to a bevy of lawsuits, etc. Also because of the volatile nature of our content, we need to pay for legal counsel to make sure we're not inviting disaster.
The server solution by which the public site and the administrative site (for selected case workers to administer the information with) costs money every month to both use and maintain. Also, our Live Online Support service (the button located on the upper left side of every page) allows us to provide immediate online support through private chat. The Live Support service costs monthly fees as well, and although I have been able to appeal to the provider to give us a slight break, they will not consider offering that to us for free in exchange for advertising, etc. That service is invaluable, since animal control offices close at normal hours, and our live support chat is oftentimes available well into the wee hours of the morning.
The printed materials we put out are used for many different purposes. Here's a quick breakdown:
Sending letters/informational literature to shelters in the US to let them know about the resource we provide (specifically the ability to do background checks on potential applicant so they know they are not adopting to someone with a history of animal abuse). A good example of this is Shon Rahrig, who started off in Ohio, adopted kittens and then cut their paws off, poked their eyes out with sticks, etc. He was then later cited in Southern California at an adoption event! He's presently located in Florida, but his patterns make a good case that he may well try to adopt from a shelter there. The more shelters that know and use our database, the harder it will be for a repeat offender to adopt more animals. And conversely, the database is less effective when shelters aren't using it. Many shelters are just now beginning to bring their operations online, so they don't know about the resources we offer - therefore we have to resort to the grassroots methods of actually sending out letters via mail.
Sending introduction letters to local animal control/humane law enforcement depts to invite them to participate as administrators. Clearly, the more administrators we can get involved who work directly with the cases, the more accurate and thorough the information will be. (For example, if someone has been convicted twice for leaving their dog in a hot car in the summer, its not going to make the evening news - however they *should* be listed in the database, so that adoption resources will think twice before adopting another pet to them.) The more local resources we have, the better the information will be, since they have better access. Ideally, we hope to have every animal control/ humane law enforcement dept across the county tied into this to add their cases every month, etc. And even more ideally, we want to get as many police depts involved as possible as well, so that we can find out if an animal abuser has been brought up on charges later down the line for domestic abuse, punctuating the Abuse Connection.
Its also important to realize that there is so much more we *can* do, but simply don't have the resources for. We would love to be able to attend adoption events and animal conferences to let people know about what we're doing - but as it stands now, we simply do not have enough money coming in. Additionally, we have wanted to establish the Bert Fund, which would offer financial assistance for vet care to people whose animals had been victims of abuse (in memory of our own cat Bert, who was the reason for the organization being founded in the first place).
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