On the 11 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Mike Fry of No Kill Learning wrote about disaster profiteers who portray themselves as rescuers. In the wake of Hurricane Florence, which is continuing to cause havoc on North and South Carolina, it is wise to remember these words: "One thing that has not changed [since Katrina], however, is the fact that opportunistic people and organizations are working to make the most out of the floods in order to line their own pockets. Wi

It has been a while since we first wrote about the killing of animals at the Greater Birmingham Humane Society (GBHS), and how the shelter misrepresented the killing and then threatened advocates who complained. Since then, there is both good and bad news about that shelter. The bad news: Killing continues unchecked. The February, 2018 outcome reports for GBHS show a total of 431 animals were killed, euthanized or died that month, compared with 675 live outcomes. That compute

An emotional Facebook post was recently brought to our attention. The Executive Director of the Greater Birmingham Humane Society (GBHS), Alison Black Cornelius, posted photos of a large semi-like truck, loaded with dogs. The post indicated that "more than 130 dogs" had been loaded and were on their way "up north last night." If you believe the implied premise of the post, it is all good news. The general belief is that pets "up north" are safe and that there are simply "too

Editor's Note: This is another in our series on complaints about the Greater Birmingham Humane Society (GBHS). The series began simple enough: One of our contributors downloaded and analyzed the outcome reports published on the GBHS web site. She did that for the calendar year of 2016 and year-to-date for 2017. That contributor asked some of the rest of our group to review her assessment of the reports and we concurred with them. We concluded that for 2016 GBHS had a Live Rel

There are certain things that just aren't done. You don't abuse or victimize children. You don't abuse or victimize the elderly. You don't drink and drive. You don't engage in any behavior that violates the sanctuary of another person's home. And you don't kill healthy and treatable shelter animals. I am often criticized for being zero tolerance when it comes to organizations that destroy savable animals. I am told I would get much more cooperation and my message would be b

Editor's Note: When we first wrote about the Greater Birmingham Humane Society (GBHS), just 8 short days ago, we were not expecting what happened next: We received so many complaints from former staff, fosters, volunteers and others that we felt a need to write a follow-up piece. That article got so large we needed to split it into two installments. The first was published on October 16, 2017. This blog post is the second of that series. However, much has happened since. In t

We recently wrote about how the Greater Birmingham Humane Society (GBHS) bullied an animal advocate by threatening her with litigation for making complaints about GBHS on Facebook. We also described the poor and declining Live Release Rates (LRR) for this organization, and the misrepresentation of the LRR by its leadership. Since then, we have obtained a copy of a cease and desist letter sent to the advocate. The letter was signed by H. Arthur Edge (Art Edge) who is listed on

The Greater Birmingham Humane Society (GBHS) has reportedly sent a threatening cease and desist letter to a No Kill advocate in Alabama because she has complained about the very wealthy organization's declining save rate, among other things. So, we decided to look into it. The complaints include declining performance as well as misrepresentation of outcome statistics, a practice we have seen before. Our research included an analysis of animal shelter reports for 2016 and 201