COLUMBUS COUNTY -- Columbus County is one of the few places that still uses a gas chamber to euthanize animals. They sometimes put down more than a dozen animals at a time.
A former Columbus County Animal Control officer is stepping forward to speak out about a practice he calls outdated and inhumane.
"You're putting a lot of animals in together, and when you put a lot of animals into a confined area, and you close the door on them and you start giving something where they can't breathe, they're going to be fighting each other," Ralph Gann said. "They're going to be screaming, they're going to be hollering."
Mr. Gann is a retired Animal Control officer from Maryland who worked for a short time earlier this year at the animal shelter in Columbus County. He's was appalled to see Columbus County using a gas chamber to put animals down and says he complained to his supervisors.
Mr. Gann said, "If you can stand the screaming and hollering of the animals when they're fighting each other, trying to get out, then you got a bigger and a tougher heart than I have."
Columbus County Animal Control put down more than 3,000 dogs and cats last year. They adopted out about 600.
The county manager explains the gas chamber is more cost efficient than euthanizing animals with individual injections. Considering that the County's animal control budget for all of last year was only about $150,000, County Manager Jim Varner says there wasn't a lot of extra money to go around.
Mr. Varner said, "The animals are taken care of. We have a new animal control facility for them. We've had suggestions on how to handle things better and we take citizen input. But we can't make everybody happy, particularly when they think animals are more important than humans."
Members of the county's Humane Society have volunteered to work for free at the shelter on weekends so the public has more opportunity to adopt these animals before they're put down.
