For years, Paulette Dean prayed that she would never have to see an injured animal. That prayer was answered “for a long time,” she said, until one night 43 years ago.
She was driving down a back road at night in 1983 when she noticed a beagle that had been hit by a car. Before cellphones, the only thing she could think to do was go to the nearest house and ask to use the phone to call the number on the beagle’s tag.
Dean said she stayed with the beagle until it died from its injuries.
This experience, and a lifelong love of animals, inspired her to volunteer at the Danville animal shelter, she said. She joined as a volunteer the next day and became a member of the board that same year.
That was the beginning of Dean’s time at the Danville Area Humane Society, which has been in and out of the spotlight for decades since then.
Troubles have mounted this year, with the latest coming during a Friday hearing, when Dean pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor offense involving record-keeping.
Danville’s shelter has faced backlash primarily for its historically high euthanasia rates — which were the lowest they’ve been in years in 2025, when 59% of animals were euthanized — and much of the controversy has centered around Dean herself.
She has been director of the shelter since 1992, leading the nonprofit for 34 of the 42 years that it’s been Danville’s municipally contracted animal shelter.
In that time, criticism of the shelter has moved beyond its euthanasia rate.
In recent months, residents and animal welfare groups have questioned why adoption is more difficult at the Danville shelter than at others, and they’ve raised concerns about euthanasia and sedation practices and the shelter’s perceived unwillingness to collaborate with other organizations.
Much of the flak eventually comes back to Dean, who, along with the shelter’s board and staff, makes decisions about adoption policies, collaborations and euthanasia.
“It feels personal,” Dean said of the criticism.
She maintains that all animals are treated with care and that the shelter is doing the best it can in the face of high intake and public backlash.
“I think we have chosen the path of right, and that’s never an easy path,” Dean said during an interview in May.
In the minds of some others, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Three and a half decades as director
Dean began volunteering at the Danville Area Humane Society in 1983, less than 10 years after it opened in 1975.
“From the time I was a little girl, I loved animals,” Dean said. “I would always, always feel sorry for animals in any show.”
Every night she prayed for her parents, siblings, grandparents, other family members “and all the animals in the world,” she said. As she grew older, she began praying, “Please, please, please don’t let me see any animals that are hurt,” she said.
She served on the shelter board from 1983 to 1992, when she became director. The position doesn’t require any credentials or licenses, Dean said.
Her compassion for animals contributes to her open-admission policy at the Danville shelter, she said.
An open-admission shelter accepts every animal, regardless of the animal’s health or space and resource constraints. This has resulted in a high animal intake in Danville, which contributes to its high euthanasia rates.
Still, Dean has remained staunchly committed to the open-admission model, saying there’s nowhere else for animals to go if shelters turn them away.
This policy has been questioned by residents and animal welfare groups throughout Dean’s time as director, though she has received continued support from Danville’s local government.
Despite recent controversy — a microchip mistake, a scathing shelter inspection, recordkeeping violations and Dean’s guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge — the city maintains that its relationship with the shelter is “in good standing.”
City Manager Ken Larking is the only city official who has spoken to Cardinal News about the animal shelter. City council members and the mayor either did not respond to a request for an interview or passed the inquiry along to Larking.
“I have confidence in DAHS leadership and their commitment to proper protocols and legal standards,” said Larking earlier this year.
Larking said the city is supporting the shelter with increased funding — about $440,000 — for the current fiscal year.
Tanya Joye Martin, a resident who has been outspoken against the shelter for years, said she and other community members are “heartbroken, outraged and exhausted by the refusal of our city leaders to take meaningful action while animals continue to suffer” at the shelter.
“Despite the facts and evidence placed before them,” city leadership chose to increase the shelter’s funding while it “remains the worst-performing animal shelter in Virginia,” Martin said.
Shelter trends have changed since 1992, but open-admission policy remains the same
A lot has changed in the sheltering world in the more than three decades that Dean has been shelter director — as has modern technology — but only some of these changes have been positive in her eyes.
When Dean became director, there was less conversation around open- versus limited-intake shelters, she said.
“It wasn’t really an issue,” she said. “Everyone just assumed a public shelter would accept every animal.”
Danville’s policy is broader than that of some other open-admission shelters, however. Many open-admission shelters accept every animal from their own jurisdiction, whereas Dean chooses to accept every animal, regardless of where it came from. About 30% of animals at the shelter come from outside of Danville, said Dean in a 2024 interview.
That’s part of what keeps their animal intake so high, Dean said, but she isn’t open to becoming a limited-admission shelter.
The limited-admission model means shelters can and do turn away animals, usually reserving euthanasia for sick or dangerous animals. On the other hand, it’s not uncommon for healthy animals to be euthanized at open-admission shelters due to space or resource constraints.
The open-admission policy comes up often in board meetings, but the shelter has never seriously considered changing it, Dean said.
“The question is actually a very easy one to answer,” she said. “No, we can’t go limited-admission because what happens to the animals if we do?”
Over the years, the public has become more aware of animal welfare issues, and spay and neuter have become a universal goal, Dean said. Both of these changes are positive in her opinion.
There are other changing trends that Dean disagrees with, like lowering barriers to adoption.
The shelter has resisted lowering barriers, citing a commitment to making sure animals only go to good homes. But several residents have said that they were denied adoptions for what they believe were minor reasons, like having a pet door.
Technological challenges at the Danville shelter
Technology has also evolved dramatically since 1992, though Dean has been criticized for seemingly resisting — or struggling to use — technological developments that make adoptions and shelter operations more effective.
Most shelters use computers and the internet to market adoptable animals and to keep track of their own records.
The Danville shelter, however, kept all of its records manually until January. Intake forms, euthanasia logs and other documents were handwritten and filed, rather than computerized.
Dean said the shelter is beginning to digitize its records. The shelter originally planned to do this by January 2025, Dean said in an interview last year. She said “glitches” prevented the shelter from computerizing its documents until 2026.
“We have all of our intakes on the computer from January until now,” Dean said. “There are some glitches and we’re working out the kinks, and we are searching for maybe a more comprehensive system. We don’t want anything where our information is shared with a national database without our knowledge.”
There have also been “glitches” using Petfinder, Dean said. Petfinder is one of the largest online adoption sites in North America, with over 12,000 shelters and rescue groups using it to post adoptable animals, according to its website.
The shelter is now using Petfinder again, after not using it for many years due to what Dean said were technical difficulties. The shelter still primarily advertises adoptable animals on Facebook, usually posting them several times a week.
As of Monday, there were no animals posted on the Danville shelter’s Petfinder site, despite the continued high animal intake at the shelter.
A group of residents, including Martin, who have been calling for improvements at the shelter for years, have criticized the shelter for being behind the times when it comes to digitizing records and posting animals on Petfinder.
The residents have put the shelter’s manual records — which they call disorganized and inconsistent — on a website called dahsfacts.com.
The Virginia Board of Pharmacy has also found fault with the shelter’s recordkeeping. The board fined the shelter $500 in June for recordkeeping that violated state code.
Recordkeeping issues came up again this summer, though they pertained to Dean’s former role as the city’s humane investigator, not as shelter director.
On Friday, Dean pleaded guilty to fraudulently altering or destroying public records in her role as the humane investigator after falsifying reports of animal investigations to the Danville Police Department.
Earlier this spring, the shelter’s technological difficulties extended to microchip scans and searches.
A mistake in this process in April resulted in the euthanasia of a beloved dog named Eve, who should have been returned to the Lynchburg Humane Society based on her microchip information. The dog had been adopted from Lynchburg but returned to the Danville shelter.
Employees had recent training on the procedure for microchip searches, Dean said,
“Now everyone knows how to check [for microchip information] online,” she added.
Despite the recent mistake, Dean said that her employees are better versed in looking up microchips than she is.
“I honestly never call the chip companies,” because the employees have a better understanding of the process, she said.
Martin said each of these instances is a failure of the shelter and the city.
“These are not rumors, exaggerations or personal disagreements,” she said. “These are documented failures. … No ordinary citizen would be excused for conduct that violates animal cruelty laws, and a taxpayer-funded city contractor should not be excused either.”
She questions how much it will take for the city to review its 15-year contract with the shelter.
“How many violations, how many warnings, how many dead animals, and how much public trust must be lost before our city leaders admit that this contract has failed?” Martin said.
Dean: ‘No-barrier adoptions’ will never happen in Danville
Dean has also come under fire for the shelter’s strict adoption guidelines. Even Alexis Adams, who founded the shelter in 1975, said in a 2024 interview that adoptions are needlessly difficult under Dean’s leadership.
Adoption fees vary, according to the shelter’s website: $100 for both cats and dogs, and between $15 and $100 for small animals like rabbits and guinea pigs, depending on the species.
Applicants must print out the form and take it to the Danville shelter in person. There is no option to fill out the application online, and “no exceptions to this rule,” according to the website.
There is also a 24-hour waiting period after submitting the application, so shelter employees can check with landlords and veterinarians and confirm that the home has a fenced-in yard or dog lot, if the applicant has indicated that there is one, the website states.
In addition to yes or no questions like “Is everyone in your household aware that you want a new pet?” the application also has open-ended questions like “Where will your adopted dog sleep?” “Why do you want to adopt a dog?” “What will happen if the dog continually has accidents in the house?” and “How do you intend to handle the difficult stages of adjustment or behavior problems?”
The website says that shelter employees work to ensure that each adoption match is a good one.
For example, if a potential adopter mentions that they want an outside dog, they will not be allowed to adopt a smaller breed like a chihuahua or dachshund, the website states.
“The director is responsible for making the adoption decisions. In some cases, potential adopters will be asked to visit the shelter for a visit with the director or an assigned volunteer adoption counselor.”
The shelter’s FAQ page goes into immense detail about the dangers animals face outside, describing specific situations like cats falling to death from a tree limb or getting their heads stuck in a discarded jar, and dogs getting hit by cars.
Other shelters in the area, like the Pittsylvania Pet Center, offer same-day adoptions and do not require landlord checks. These policies expedite the process of moving an animal out of the shelter and into a home.
“As far as no-barrier adoptions, with the current board and under the current director, that will never happen,” Dean said.
Potential adopters need to be thoroughly vetted to ensure that an animal is going to a good home, she said.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals agrees with Dean’s stringent adoption guidelines, said Daphna Nachminovitch, PETA’s senior vice president of animal cruelty.
In 2019, PETA awarded Dean the Gregory J. Reiter Animal Rescue Award, which recognizes individuals and organizations with a commitment to making “the world a kinder place” for animals.
The guidelines protect animals from being adopted by abusive owners, Nachminovitch said.
“[PETA] does home visits for every animal we place,” she said in a 2024 interview. “We can’t all sit around pretending that everybody does a good job having an animal.”
The Danville shelter’s website also previously listed a fenced-in yard as a requirement for dog adoptions, though Dean said in a 2024 interview that that was inaccurate. Adopters have never been required to have a fenced-in yard, but dogs can’t roam freely, she added.
“Back in the early days of strengthening the adoption guidelines, we may not have been as diligent as we are now of saying that you don’t need to have a fenced-in yard, you just need to be out with the dog on a leash or you need a dog lot,” Dean said.
But some residents have said they’ve been denied adoptions for exactly this reason.
Chad Lee Roach said that when he was a kid in the 1990s, his family was denied adoption for a dog because they didn’t have a fenced-in yard, even though his father had built a dog lot on their land.
Donna Kaye said her 2021 application to adopt a cat was denied because she had a pet door that could have allowed the cat to go out into her fenced yard. The shelter requires that adopted cats be kept inside.
“I think I jokingly wrote on the application that I will keep the cat indoors, unless it figures out how to use my dog’s pet door,” Kaye said.
When she went to the Pittsylvania Pet Center several weeks later, she was able to adopt two cats, Ollie and Fran, that day.
“I’ve had cats most of my life, and they usually will learn to use my dog’s pet door,” Kaye said. “They love being out on the back deck with me. I read a lot out there and sit on my screened-in porch, and they love being out there with me. It’s been five years, and they’re healthy and happy.”
‘They don’t play well with others’
The Danville Area Humane Society is the only animal shelter in the city. Under Dean’s leadership, the shelter collaborates with some other shelters in the state for animal transfers, like the Richmond SPCA, but not many.
Shelter directors in nearby localities said they’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to partner with Dean.
Jill Mollohan, director of the Lynchburg Humane Society, said that she’s offered to accept transfers from Danville to alleviate space crunches at that shelter, but the offers were rejected.
Dean said this is because Lynchburg’s shelter has less stringent adoption guidelines and allows adopters to take their animals home the same day.
“Our guidelines for rescue and transfer partners are that they must have at least our adoption guidelines,” Dean said.
Tonja Reynolds leads the Pittsylvania County SPCA, a foster-based animal rescue group in the county that surrounds Danville. Reynolds said that Dean “will not work with us” for transfers.
After years and years of trying to collaborate and getting turned down, “you eventually stop trying,” Reynolds said.
Olivia Reid, a veterinarian and former Danville resident who now lives in Richmond, said in a 2025 interview that many vets, shelters and animal welfare groups in her area are unaware of the Danville shelter.
“It’s shocking to me,” she said. “They have been essentially off the grid for the last several decades.”
That’s unusual, she said, because animal rescue and sheltering is typically considered “a collaborative sport.”
“It takes all facilities working together to see improved outcomes,” Reid said. “I think that’s something that the current administration of the Danville shelter is just fundamentally not interested in. They don’t play well with others.”
