Hoarding
Authorities close dog shelter, calling it unsafe
By KIM HACKETT
December 7, 2011
SARASOTA COUNTY - Houdini had no chance of escape Wednesday afternoon.
An employee follows a Sarasota County sheriff's deputy out of the kennel room at MM Pet Rescue, where about 40 dogs lived until the Fire Marshal closed the adoption center and thrift store in Sarasota County on Dec. 7, 2011.
Surrounded by Sheriff's deputies and a dozen tearful volunteers, animal control workers loaded the Chihuahua-mix named after the famous escape artist, along with 40 other small breed dogs into a van after the Fire Marshal closed the MM Pet Rescue shelter and thrift store.
Sheriff's spokeswoman Wendy Rose said the facility in the 1700 block of S. Tamiami Trail south of Venice violated "life safety codes" that made it unsafe for the animals.
"We received numerous complaints," Rose said. "The cages are too small and there is no facility for the dogs to run around."
But the nonprofit shelter's manager said the closure caught her by surprise. She said the organization upgraded the flooring to meet code requirements over the weekend and was doing all it could to operate correctly.
"They said we had the wrong permit," said Dawn Simms, the shelter manager. She said the Department of Agriculture, the Fire Marshal and the Department of Health all showed up Wednesday to close the facility.
"We told them 'let us take the animals' and they wouldn't let us," Simms said. She said the volunteers could have provided temporary homes for all the dogs.
Rose said that MM is licensed as a pet store and as a thrift store, but not as a shelter. She said the decision to close the facility was not made by Animal Control but by the Fire Marshal.
The shelter opened in June in a stand-alone outparcel near Lowes. It buys dogs for $30 from a Miami-Dade animal control facility, cleans them up and puts them up for adoption, Simms said. It uses proceeds from the thrift shop to operate, she said.
A few feet inside the front entrance there is a kiosk with sunglasses and knick knacks, surrounded with tables and racks of clothing and linens in no particular order.
In the back of the building, cages lined the walls of two rooms, each with a small mixed-breed dog. A strong stench of urine filled the air, even with the door open.
Volunteers and employees would clean the dogs up, keep them socialized and play with them in a makeshift fenced pen behind the building, said employee Ivy Cote.
The dogs were brought to the county's animal control facility in Sarasota, and after an exam, will be available for adoption, Rose said.
