Dear Sir,

We want to let our clients and supporters know that we are disturbed by the publication of a letter in the September edition of a monthly Lakeside English-language magazine.

The letter writer tells of an episode concerning her pets which she brought to our shelter (which she misnames the Humane Society). We recognize the incident and our volunteers well remember when she came to our door. It was a miserable day for all involved.

She wanted us, as she tells in her letter, to take in her three pet dogs. She says shelter volunteers were rude to her and spoke contemptuously of pets. This is unlikely as our pets enhance our lives. What she was told is that our Shelter does not take in people’s pets. Our work is on behalf of needy, homeless cats and dogs. Our shelter is full of them. We expect (hope) that responsible pet owners will move heaven and earth to find new homes for their animals if the need arises. We don’t know what efforts she made to find homes for her dogs. She came to us just one day before she was to leave the country. She was told that if we accepted her dogs that day our only recourse would be to have them put down. There was no room in the shelter even if we wanted to break our rules. The sad result was that she paid us to have her pets euthanized and left it to the volunteers to get the dogs to the vet. I suspect that what seemed like rudeness to the letter writer on the volunteers’ part was actually sadness and resentment at having no choice but to take on this unfortunate task. The letter writer now asks if somehow one of these volunteers acted to save her pets.

At the end of her letter, the editor says responses with another “point of view” are welcome. Of course, they can’t be published until one entire month goes by. A better editorial approach, in our opinion, would have been to contact our shelter (it is not impossible to tell which shelter the letter speaks of), ask for our version of this encounter and print it alongside this woman’s letter. To us, that would have made a provocative piece of reporting worthy of readers’ responses.

We thank the Reporter for its help in getting our response before its readers, many of whom are supporters of our shelter whose good opinion matters to us.

Thetis Reeves,

Public Relations,

the Animal Shelter