Danville residents should soon have two options for animal shelters, for the first time in the city’s history.
After years speaking out against the city’s embattled municipal shelter, resident Tanya Martin decided to open another facility in a South Main Street building, saying she wants to “do things better.”
Martin is in the process of opening Poppy’s Place, which will be a private, nonprofit and open-admission shelter named after her Boston terrier.
Martin adopted Poppy in May, after the dog was brought to the city’s municipal animal shelter, the Danville Area Humane Society. Martin said Poppy was emaciated, covered in fleas and vomiting. The former wildlife rescue owner and longtime Danville resident wanted her immediately.
Paulette Dean, the longtime director of the municipal shelter, said she “disputes the narrative being posted” about Poppy and “welcomes the opportunity to have all the facts known,” though she wouldn’t provide further details, citing ongoing court issues.
Five months later, Poppy is healthy — Martin had kept her wildlife rescue supplies on hand, even though her organization closed in 2020. She nursed the dog back to health and took her to the vet to have several cancer lumps removed.
When she decided to open a new animal shelter in Danville earlier this month, naming it after Poppy was the obvious choice, she said.
She hopes to see Poppy’s Place open by early 2027.
It would be the first time there’s an alternative to the municipal shelter, which was founded in 1975 and has always been the only such facility in the city.
The Danville Area Humane Society has been embroiled in controversy for years for its high euthanasia rates, which were 59% in 2025 compared to a state rate of 9%.
This year, the shelter has also come under fire for an inspection that found unsanitary conditions, lack of veterinary care and incorrect medication dosages, and longtime director Paulette Dean pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of falsifying public records in a different role as the city’s humane investigator, from which she has since resigned. The shelter was also found liable for recordkeeping inaccuracies by the Virginia Board of Pharmacy in June.
Martin has called for change at the shelter for years, but she’s no longer confident that things will improve there, she said.
“I know doggone well that this is not going to change,” Martin said. “I decided that if it’s not going to change, I’ve got to change it. The only thing I can do is compete with that organization and do the very best I can … and show everyone what it should be like and give people some hope.”
Martin said it was on Oct. 1 that she decided she wanted to open a shelter. By the next day, she said she had created a board of directors, filed for nonprofit status with the state and filed with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to be able to accept charitable contributions and grant funding.
Her offer on a building has been accepted, and she said she’s in the process of filing special use permits to allow the building to operate as an animal shelter. She’ll soon be raising money for its purchase, and Martin said she’s prepared to put some of her own money into the purchase.
She wants Poppy’s Place to be another option for residents who find a stray animal or need to surrender their pet.
Still, she doesn’t envision a relationship with the city shelter, because she said they’re often unwilling to partner with other animal welfare organizations. Nearby groups, like the Pittsylvania SPCA and the Lynchburg Humane Society, have echoed this, though Dean maintains that the shelter has strong partnerships with a few organizations, like the Richmond SPCA.
“I doubt there will be any kind of amicable relationship,” Martin said.
However, Dean said she would be open to it.
“When Ms. Martin operated a wildlife center, we had a mutually respectful and beneficial relationship with her,” Dean said. “We are hopeful such a relationship can happen with a private shelter.”
Both women agree on at least one thing — animals in the area need a place to go.
“The sheer numbers of animals who are unwanted, abandoned or neglected in this area are staggering,” Dean said.
Martin said that all she cares about is “giving the animals in this area a safe place.”
Poppy’s Place: the origin story
When Martin first started speaking out about the Danville shelter, she said she wasn’t planning to open a new one.
At first, she wanted the city to cancel its contract with the Danville Area Humane Society and put out a bid for different leadership, she said.
But she’s been frustrated with the city’s response to resident concerns about the shelter, she said.
Until recent candidate forums, city council members have remained mostly mum on the animal shelter, and City Manager Ken Larking has said that the city maintains support of the shelter, despite controversies.
In March, VDACS waived a $750 fine resulting from violations during a shelter inspection after Dean, with Larking’s support, submitted a letter demonstrating “a good-faith effort to reach compliance,” according to correspondence records obtained by Cardinal News.
That was the second time in two years that VDACS has waived a fine for violations at the shelter. A $1,000 fine for a critical violation for euthanizing four puppies before the end of the state-mandated minimum stray hold in December 2024 was waived after a similar good-faith promise.
“The city did absolutely nothing,” Martin said.
In an April interview, Larking said this refrain from residents is not a fair characterization.
“Any time someone wants to provide constructive criticism or ideas to help, we’re happy to listen,” he said. “I’m not aware of any time that I haven’t been responsive.”
Martin said she’s not confident in the city’s planned comprehensive assessment on local animal welfare services because the shelter did not implement recommendations from a 2021 assessment.
Her disillusionment with the city’s response and the shelter’s unwillingness to change prompted her plans to open a new shelter, she said.
“Things we will do better”
The location of Poppy’s Place is a former daycare near Sovah Hospital on South Main Street. The 30,000-square-foot building is on 3.5 acres, Martin said.
“It’s fan-freaking-tastic,” she said. “The building is perfect. It’s got a giant parking lot, it’s got tennis courts with high fencing, and tennis courts are dig proof, so it would be a perfect play area for dogs.”
There’s a walking trail behind the building that goes by the Stratford House, a retirement community.
“We could walk puppies over there, and the residents could see them and hang out with them,” Martin said. “It could also be stress relief for the hospital staff. I know when I was a paramedic, I would have loved to have been able to come out of a bad call and go walk or play with some puppies.”
Martin envisions a strong team of volunteers, community engagement and robust animal welfare programming.
She also wants to partner with other organizations to provide resources to prevent owner surrenders.
“If someone becomes homeless and can’t take their pet, I intend to have partners who could say, ‘Hey, we can put this person and their pet up for a while,’” she said. “Or if you lost your job and you can’t afford pet food, I can help with that. Or if your dog is not trained and is tearing up the house or using the bathroom in the house, I have a trainer for that. It’s free, and you can get some training classes. There’s ways to help people.”
She said she’ll work hard to get animals adopted. The Danville shelter has been criticized for making adoptions unnecessarily difficult, with strict applications and little promotion of adoptable animals.
There is only one animal — a cat named Gizmo — posted on the Danville shelter’s Petfinder account. 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 primarily advertises adoptable animals on Facebook, usually posting them several times a week, but it has drawn criticism from residents for not doing more to promote adoptable animals.
“I have a whole list of things that we will do better,” Martin said.
Like the Danville shelter, Poppy’s Place will be open-admission, though unlike the shelter, it will not accept animals from other jurisdictions.
Dean has attributed the shelter’s high euthanasia rates to its immense animal intake. The shelter operates on an open-admission policy, which means it takes in animals regardless of space and resource constraints or the animal’s adoptability.
Dean has also made the decision to accept animals from anywhere, not just the Danville area, saying there’s nowhere else for animals to go if they’re turned away. About 30% of animals at the shelter come from outside of Danville, said Dean in a 2024 interview.
In 2025, the Danville shelter took in 3,184 animals, a disproportionately high number for its population of 42,000. For context, the public animal shelter in Fairfax County, with a population of 1.15 million, took in 5,472.
About 59% of the animals taken in by the Danville shelter that year were euthanized. This is the shelter’s lowest rate in years — it peaked at nearly 80% in 2023.
Euthanasia for healthy animals is more common at open-admission shelters than at their counterparts — limited-admission shelters — which can and do turn animals away and generally reserve euthanasia for sick or dangerous animals.
At an animal welfare candidate forum earlier this month, each of the six city council candidates who attended said that the Danville shelter’s policy to accept animals from other localities should be reviewed.
First-time candidate Dustin Whittle said that under no circumstances should the Danville shelter “accept animals from every other community.”
“Our system is strained, and I think it’s causing our system to break,” he said. “If we’re overwhelmed all the time with our current system … why are we taking more animals from other communities?”
Martin said that Poppy’s Place will be “open-admission with sense.”
Larking, the city manager, said that a second shelter could be beneficial if well planned and coordinated, though he said he’s not familiar enough with Poppy’s Place to form an opinion.
“Ideally, the effort would avoid duplicating services or spreading resources too thin, and the partners would collaborate to improve efficiency and effectiveness,” he said in an email.
Expectations for community support
Martin said she’s confident in her abilities to run a shelter, given her background in wildlife rescue.
She closed her rescue in 2020 for financial reasons, saying that she paid for most of its operations out of her own pocket and “I was going to go bankrupt if I continued to go the way I was going.”
She had no intention of working in the shelter or rescue space again, she said, although she calls her time at the organization “the best part of my life, short of having a child and a grandchild.”
The wildlife rescue took in between 1,200 and 1,500 animals a year, she said.
“I had 1,500 animals that I had to mix special formula for, I had to fix their wings, I had to pick maggots off, and I did that with 28 volunteers. Not one person was ever paid, and we were on a $50,000 to $70,000 budget a year,” Martin said. “I got to see every species of wildlife, and I got to fix things and nurture things, and it was a beautiful time in my life.”
She expects to take in about the same number of animals per year at Poppy’s Place, and she also anticipates community support.
When she announced that she had a building for Poppy’s Place, she got dozens of positive responses and offers for volunteering, she said.
She plans to have some paid staff along with a network of partners, volunteers and fosters.
Homeward Trails Danville, a local branch of the Northern Virginia-based animal rescue group, said that this kind of collaboration is essential to shelter work.
“All resources available should be actualized to provide the best outcomes for animals,” said Robin Young, director of Homeward Trails Danville, in an emailed statement.
The organization is not involved with the opening of Poppy’s Place, but it did have a role in bringing Martin and Poppy together.
Homeward Trails Danville visits the municipal shelter weekly to pull animals and relocate them with fosters or transfer them to its facilities in Northern Virginia. Poppy was one of those animals.
Martin said she hopes the community comes through with fundraising, too, she said. She needs to raise about $600,000 within six months to finalize her purchase of the building and property. Poppy’s Place has a pending nonprofit status, and once that is approved — probably in a matter of weeks, Martin said — she can begin fundraising.
Martin has been a central figure in speaking out against the Danville shelter, obtaining thousands of shelter records through the Freedom of Information Act, sending complaints to state agencies and speaking with residents about their experiences there.
Despite that, she’s not opening Poppy’s Place to “take down” the Danville shelter, she said.
“It’s not my responsibility to shut them down. That’s the city’s responsibility, and they failed. They refused,” she said. “I just want to give the animals another alternative. If that means that they go down, then that’s whatever. If that means that they don’t, and they change, that’s even better.”
Still, she doesn’t envision a relationship with the shelter. Nearby animal welfare groups, like the Pittsylvania SPCA and the Lynchburg Humane Society, have said that the Danville shelter is often unwilling to partner, though Dean maintains that it has strong partnerships with a few organizations, like the Richmond SPCA.
“The joke is, if I even get in the parking lot of that place, there’s going to be cops there before I even get out of my car because everyone there knows what I drive, apparently,” Martin said. “So I doubt there will be any kind of amicable relationship.”
In the years she’s been speaking out about the Danville shelter, people have told her many times, “If you think you can do it better, just open up a new shelter.”
“That’s what I intend to do,” Martin said.
