From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2000:

IDIANAPOLIS––The Foundation Against Companion Animal Euthanasia (FACE) altered 7,000 dogs and cats at $20 to $30 apiece within a year of opening, and then picked up the pace.

Reaching 10,000 in just three more months, FACE set in motion plans to add more veterinary staff and build a pet adoption center. Founders Scott Robinson, M.D., and wife Ellen––expecting their first child any day but continuing to manage the FACE clinic–– were also investigating possible expansion into Bloomington, and/or adding a mobile clinic to serve rural Indiana.

As a specialist in human internal medicine who works in a Zionsville hospital emergency room, Scott Robinson wasn’t seeking a parallel career in veterinary humane work back in 1993 when he began bringing FACE together. He and Ellen, an animal rights activist since high school, had not yet met. All Robinson set out to do, he says, was encourage Humane Society of Indianapolis executive director Marsha Spring to look into some of the breaking-edge techniques that were and are knocking down the shelter killing toll elsewhere around the U.S.––notably the Animal Foundation high-volume low-cost neutering clinic in Las Vegas.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2000:

Animal control shelters and humane societies with animal control c o n t r a c t s across the U.S. flew into panic with the April/May onset of “kitten season” because Ganes Chemical Works o f Pennsfield, New Jersey, ran out of sodium pentobarbital, the standard injection euthanasia drug, while retooling facilities to comply with tightened Food and Drug Administration product control standards.

The Humane Society of the U . S., however, lobbied the FDA into allowing Ganes, the sole U.S. sodium pentobarbital supplier, to mix up a batch to meet the seasonal demand.

Brenda Barnette, executive director of the Pets In Need adoption shelter in Redwood City, California, was not impressed. “Instead of focusing on a restricted ability to kill,” she urged in an open letter, “let us focus on all the private shelters and rescue groups who are doing everything they can––including paying the tax-funded shelters for animals––to save the lives of dogs and cats. Lethal injections are used to kill thousands of animals who are suitable for rehoming,” Barnett charged.

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