Betty Buttons, a brown and white beagle, wore a Halloween harness during a kayak ride with her adoptive family earlier this fall. About three months ago, her life looked completely different.
She was found in Danville in July, running with another beagle named Bows, and taken to the Danville Area Humane Society, the only animal shelter in the city.
Betty Buttons and Bows both had long toenails and other signs of neglect, said Robin Young, executive director of Homeward Trails, an animal welfare group with a new presence in Danville.
“They probably lived outside,” Young said. “Betty had pneumonia and some other respiratory issues.”
Young pulled both Betty Buttons and Bows from the city’s animal shelter and placed them with local foster families in Danville, where they got the medical care they needed.
Resident Megan Hoover fostered Betty Buttons for about a week until the dog was transported to Northern Virginia, where Homeward Trails is based, and adopted.
“Now she’s a pampered indoor dog,” Young said.
Homeward Trails staff members have traveled to the Danville area for years to perform spay and neuter clinics.
As of June, the group has a permanent and physical presence in the city, with the goal to alleviate some of the pressure on the city shelter, which has received national and local criticism for its high euthanasia rates.
“Betty was an older beagle that might have been overlooked or not given a lot of time to find her perfect home,” Young said. “Having a rescue or foster program where you can take the time to learn more about a dog, medically care for them, we really feel like it saved Betty and gave her another chance.”
Young left her job running a municipal animal shelter in Richmond earlier this year after 10 years working there. When she came to open a new foster and rescue organization in Danville, she knew she was “walking into a firestorm,” she said.
Controversy over animal welfare in Danville has ebbed and flowed for decades, with a spurt of intensity in the last 18 months.
A year after an impassioned clash with a national animal welfare nonprofit over high euthanasia rates in Danville, the city’s only animal shelter continues to see both fierce opposition and strong support.
“Homeward Trails has been working in the Danville community for 10-plus years, trying to bring down the high euthanasia rates from afar,” Young said. “With all the extra attention over the past year or two, it was decided that a full-time, local presence would make a bigger difference.”
Most of the criticism for the Danville Area Humane Society comes from its high euthanasia rates, which are far above the state average.
In 2024, the Danville shelter had a 65% euthanasia rate — 2,213 of the 3,362 animals taken in were euthanized. Across all shelters in Virginia that year, the euthanasia rate was only 9.5%.
The Danville shelter operates on an open-intake model, which means it takes in every animal regardless of space and resources available. It’s not uncommon for healthy animals to be euthanized at open-intake shelters, which can run out of space before homes can be found for them.
Still, even when compared to other open-intake shelters, Danville’s shelter far exceeds the state euthanasia rate. In 2024, about 14% of animals in open-intake shelters in Virginia were euthanized. The Danville rate is more than four times that.
Contributing to the problem: the Danville shelter has an abnormally high animal intake for a community of its size. This is partially because the shelter takes in animals from other jurisdictions, not just from the city of Danville.
It’s a practice that used to be the norm among municipal shelters but has become less common over the years, said Paulette Dean, executive director of the city shelter. About 30% of the animals at the Danville shelter come from outside the city, said Dean.
The shelter in Danville, a city with a population of about 42,000, took in 3,362 animals in 2024, according to data from the Virginia Department of Animal and Consumer Services, which oversees the state’s shelters.
The municipal shelter in Fairfax County, which has a population of 1.15 million, took in about 4,900 animals in 2023.
The shelter has 53 cages for dogs and 52 for cats, both including isolation areas, with another eight cages that can be used for smaller cats and dogs, Dean said.
Pockets of Danville residents have been critical of the high euthanasia rates on social media, and some have filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain shelter records. After receiving the records, three residents sent a complaint to two state agencies.
Some of the items in the complaint overlap with previous violations identified by VDACS during regular shelter inspections, according to inspection records obtained by Cardinal News.
Dean said she and her team are doing the best they can to keep up with intake and do right by the animals.
“We are not perfect,” Dean said. “But we are not guilty of the things we have been accused of in this past year.”
Working to establish trust
Out of its Lynn Street location in the River District, Homeward Trails operates a pet food pantry and a foster-based rescue program.
It doesn’t house animals like a shelter would, but it can accept owner surrenders, find foster families and eventually transport Danville animals to shelters in its Northern Virginia locations.
Young also works in collaboration with the Danville Area Humane Society to pull animals from the shelter and find them local foster homes until they can be transported.
She has been working to establish trust with the shelter, which has had rocky relationships with some community groups and other animal shelters in the region, despite its steadfast and vocal support from the city government.
Young said the relationship between Homeward Trails and the Danville shelter is “a little different every day” and that “sadly, we’ve gotten some pushback about fostering locally.”
As she continues to build trust with the Danville shelter, Young said she hopes Homeward Trails can help shoulder the burden of the city’s high animal intake, reducing strain on resources and providing more welfare options for the community.
“I’ve found in my animal welfare work that most successful animal welfare communities function with multiple options. Municipal shelters, private shelters, rescues, transfers,” Young said. “We just wanted to bring that piece of the puzzle into Danville on a full-time basis.”
As the only animal shelter in the city, the Danville Area Humane Society has held the municipal contract with the city since 1984.
Every municipality in Virginia is required by state law to operate an animal shelter or to contract with another nearby facility, so residents have a place to take strays.
By operating with an open-intake model, the Danville shelter upholds a different philosophy than most modern animal shelters, which has caused friction in some relationships.
In contrast, limited-intake shelters can and do turn away animals and usually have lower euthanasia rates because they generally reserve euthanasia for terminally ill animals, those with a poor quality of life or those that are considered dangerous to the public.
Often, a locality has a combination of both public and private shelters that can share the burden of the community’s animal intake. Danville has never had a private shelter to help the municipal shelter manage intake.
Last fall, tensions came to a head when the Danville shelter refused an offer of resources and programming from national animal nonprofit group Best Friends Animal Society, saying that it disagreed with the organization’s sheltering limited-intake ideology.
Best Friends then launched a local campaign in Danville, called Danville Deserves Better, to call for changes at the shelter through social media posts, television commercials and a presence at city council meetings.
By the beginning of 2025, the tension had dissolved slightly, as both groups pursued separate initiatives.
Young said she is working to create a relationship with the Danville shelter after this kerfuffle.
Homeward Trails wants to collaborate with the shelter and help it balance the high animal intake, which it has been shouldering alone for so many years, Young said.
“We’ve been working on trying to build a relationship with the humane society,” she said. “I don’t want this to feel like competition. We’re not competing for donor dollars, we’re not competing for attention.”
Young’s animal welfare background is with municipal shelters, so she understands the unique challenges they face, she said.
A Martinsville native, she said she’s also familiar with the area and the sheltering struggles that smaller communities face.
“I worked with the Richmond Animal Care and Control, and I get the municipal side of things. I get serving the public and the amount of stress and work that it takes on a daily basis,” she said. “But I also know that progressive programs work at these kinds of shelters and can save lives.”
Young is the only full-time staff member of Homeward Trails in Danville, but she’s working to cultivate a reliable group of local foster families that can take animals while they’re waiting for transport.
Ideally, Homeward Trails would like to pull animals from the city shelter on a regular basis and place them with local fosters. This would alleviate space at the shelter, reduce the risk of spreading viruses and ultimately get animals out of a shelter environment faster, Young said.
Young said the shelter has been reluctant to fully support Homeward Trail’s local foster program because some of the foster volunteers have been vocal opponents of the shelter. The shelter is less willing to release animals to Homeward Trails if it works with those residents, she said.
“The shelter’s preference is for us to move animals north immediately,” Young said. “We’re still working on building the trust that we have good fosters locally. In most cases, animals are staying here for one week or a few weeks and then moving on.”
Dean declined to comment on the record about that, only saying that the shelter has “a long-standing transfer relationship with Homeward Trails.”
Young said she goes to the shelter on a weekly basis to gather information on animals and take their photos. Then she contacts the Homeward Trails shelters in Northern Virginia to see what they have space for, Young said.
Usually, that same day or the next day, she’ll inform the Danville shelter about which animals Homeward Trails can find placement for. After that, those animals are transported out of the Danville area.
“We continue to try to take as many animals as possible every week but are often given excuses as to why we cannot take them, only to learn later that they were killed or became ill and euthanized,” said Young in an October release from Homeward Trails.
Homeward Trails in Danville has taken in between 40 to 50 animals each month since opening. It took in 41 animals in July, 47 in August and 43 in September, according to the release.
Most of those were animals from the city shelter, Young said, although a small percentage were owner surrenders.
Homeward Trails also distributed over 8,000 pounds of pet food from the pantry to local pet owners over the course of July, August and September.
In the coming months, Young said she plans to continue to spread the word about Homeward Trails’ presence in the community. She spoke to the city council at its Sept. 16 meeting to introduce herself and the company.
In the release, Young said that “we hope the shelter will eventually embrace our efforts and offers of resources and programs that will stop needless killing.”
Young also hopes to eventually facilitate local adoptions through Homeward Trails in the future. She’d like to see animals stay with a local foster family until they’re adopted by other locals, rather than be transported to Northern Virginia.
At the very least, Homeward Trails is providing a second animal welfare option for Danville residents, she said.
Larger debate continues
The city shelter continues to receive both support and criticism within the Danville community.
While the city government has increased the shelter’s annual funding for the upcoming fiscal year, a group of residents has submitted a complaint about the shelter to two state agencies and plans to submit more.
“We did not think rules were being followed,” said Tanya Martin, one of the complainants. “We wanted to see if there was anything we could tell from their custody records, their euthanasia records, anything that could help us pinpoint what was wrong.”
Martin and Cherie Tamson are both Danville residents who participated in the Danville Deserves Better campaign last fall. The third complainant, Olivia Reid, is a veterinarian and former Danville resident who now lives in Richmond.
Custody records document an animal’s time at a shelter from entry to exit. They include intake forms, medical records and documentation for adoption, transfer or euthanasia.
Reid described the records they received from the FOIA as disorganized, inconsistent and mostly kept by hand, with the shelter’s euthanasia records handwritten in a composition notebook.
“I’m not going to be nice,” she said. “They’re embarrassing. … It’s just very bizarre to me how little attention seems to be paid to anything.”
Dean said that the shelter is working to transition to a digital record-keeping system. Initially, the shelter planned to have this completed by January 2025, but there have been some delays due to glitches and adding more information to the form, she said.
Recordkeeping is one of the most common violations in Virginia’s animal shelters, said Michael Wallace, director of communications for VDACS. Usually, this violation happens when a shelter doesn’t record all of the required information, he said.
After looking at the custody records, Martin said she spotted records with incomplete information, like missing health certificates.
She also said the records showed that some animals were euthanized before the end of a stray hold, incorrect sedation dosages and redundancies — like an adoption record and a euthanasia record for the same animal.
After receiving the records, Martin, Reid and Tamson filed a complaint with the Virginia Board of Pharmacy and the VDACS, which oversees animal shelters in the state.
The complaint alleges that the shelter intentionally disregards state code and isn’t doing enough to lower euthanasia rates.
Some concerns in the complaint are consistent with findings from shelter inspections by VDACS, which conducts regular inspections of Virginia’s animal shelters, usually once a year.
In December, VDACS inspected the Danville shelter and found that four dogs were euthanized before the minimum stray hold of five days, according to the shelter inspection report.
The inspection report says that four puppies were taken into custody on Dec. 7, 2024, and euthanized on Dec. 10, 2024.
This constitutes a “critical violation,” according to the report, which comes with a $1,000 fine.
Dean asked VDACS to waive the fine, citing “circumstances unique to those puppies,” which she said became sick on Dec. 10 and were “euthanized to relieve any suffering.”
She said she got the impression that the state agencies were not overly concerned with the shelter’s previous violations or with the complaint filed by Martin, Reid and Tamson.
“Most of the complaints were just not valid ones,” Dean said. “[The state] understood that.”
“The people that filed the complaint misunderstood something that I think is very important,” she said. “The state inspectors don’t want to bring shelters down. They don’t want to hurt them. They want to help. They want to point out deficiencies and make shelters better.”
Reid said that there was “no real result” to the complaint. “They did not even enforce a fine.”
Martin, Reid and Tamson plan to file follow-up complaints, Martin said, about what they believe are incorrect sedation dosages and other violations.
The October release from Homeward Trails said that these FOIAs are helpful to learn about which animals at the Danville shelter are being euthanized.
Dean said the shelter is working with VDACS to learn from inspection violations and make improvements.
The shelter is also collaborating with the city, which is contributing over $400,000 to the shelter for operating costs this year — about $125,000 more than last year.
The city is working with the shelter on several projects, like an expansion project of the isolation wing at the shelter and the development of software to keep track of adoptions.
City Manager Ken Larking said that the city will remain supportive of the shelter as it works to lower euthanasia rates.
“From what I know of the humane society, their board and Paulette, they care deeply about making sure the animals are put into a safe environment,” Larking said.
He said that the community should be part of the solution to the sheltering challenges in Danville, which largely start with high intake.
“A government can’t be all things, and a shelter can’t take in unlimited cats and dogs,” he said. “It takes a community willing to adopt, foster, and be part of that solution.”
Dean said more volunteers from the community would also be helpful. The shelter has three full-time and nine part-time employees.
Tamson, Martin and Reid said they don’t understand the city’s continued support.
“When almost all of the shelters in Virginia have an 80% or above save-rate, and then you have one that has an 80% kill-rate, something is wrong,” Martin said. “There’s something inherently wrong.”
Larking puts much of the local controversy down to a difference in sheltering philosophy. Conflicting ideologies about how to best care for a community’s animals exist within the larger sheltering world, also.
“PETA has one opinion, Best Friends has another opinion, they don’t even agree amongst themselves,” Larking said. “I do appreciate people having different perspectives and being passionate about this, and a lot of it is subjective.”
The city can’t choose the philosophy of the Danville shelter, Larking said, but it is willing to collaborate with and support the shelter with whatever it needs.