Local Animal ‘Rescue’ Bust Prompts Urgent PETA Warning

For Immediate Release:
August 11, 2021

Contact:
Nicole Meyer 202-483-7382

Armed with newly obtained damning graphic photos showing piles of animal waste and trash bags stuffed with dead animals at Tiggy Town, the self-proclaimed animal “rescue” busted by Mesa police, PETA has issued a strong warning against placing any trust, let alone any animal, in the growing number of unregulated “rescues.”

Will you please share this information with your audience? It may help prevent animals from suffering and enduring horrific deaths.

At Tiggy Town, animals’ skeletons littered the floor, nearly every inch of which was covered with feces. The emaciated animals who had managed to survive had resorted to cannibalizing others’ bodies—all at a “rescue” that claimed to care for animals and nurse them back to health. The fact is that Tiggy Town is not an isolated case: Nearly every week, PETA receives reports of law-enforcement action regarding animals who were abused, neglected, hoarded, and left to die of untreated illnesses or injuries at “rescues” nationwide. Countless more don’t make the news, and no doubt many more hide cruelty that remains undetected. That’s why PETA offers the following guidance:

• Never donate to or leave animals with “rescues” that you haven’t thoroughly investigated and personally visited.
• Never promote random “rescues” that you haven’t visited by “liking” or sharing their social media posts.
• Always consider supporting open-admission city or county animal shelters, which are open to the public, accept every animal in need, and never warehouse them so that they die slowly and painfully out of sight.

“Week after week, PETA receives deeply disturbing reports of yet another ‘animal rescue’ that turned into a crime scene,” says PETA Senior Vice President Daphna Nachminovitch. “PETA is warning anyone who cares about animals never to support a ‘rescue’ sight unseen—animals’ lives depend on it.”

PETA notes that abusive “rescuers” take advantage of animal shelters that are facing extreme pressure to focus on “live release” rates, with dire consequences. In an open letter to animal shelters, PETA urges them not to prioritize statistics above individual animals’ well-being, never to give away vulnerable animals just to avoid making difficult decisions (including administering euthanasia), and to implement rigorous safeguards and screening methods to ensure that animals don’t end up at unregulated self-proclaimed “rescues” where they’ll be at risk of being warehoused for years, neglected and deprived.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.