From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

Animal Welfare Associates Inc., of
Stamford, Connecticut, on May 24 responded to a
warning from the State of Connecticut Commissioner
of Consumer Protection that “AWA’s
advertising, solicitations and other communications
are or may have been misleading in violation of the
Solicitation of Charitable Funds Act” by signing an
Assurance of Voluntary Compliance.
AWA admitted no fault, but pledged “to
cease representing to the public that it provides animal
placement or adoption services unless it shall:
maintain dated records of the identity/description of
each animal accepted, the manner in which each
animal is obtained, and the identity of the person
who accepts each animal or the eventual disposition
of each animal not adopted as a pet”; and “to cease
representing to the public that it in any way operates
an animal shelter.”

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

Recent appeal mailings by Tiger Haven,
Inc., of Knoxville, Tennessee, have drawn an
unusually heavy volume of inquiries to ANIMAL
PEOPLE as to what we know of the organization.
Tiger Haven is a project of Joseph
Donovan Parker, 52, and his wife Mary Lynn
Parker, who claimed in a 1991 affidavit that they
began working with tigers as Knoxville Zoo volunteers
in February 1988. The facility is actually located
at Kingston, 35 miles west of Knoxville. The
Parkers and Tiger Haven now have 63 tigers, lions,
jaguars, and other large exotic cats, including about
20 obtained when the Jimmy Carter Zoo went out of
business in 1997. (The North Carolina facility had no
connection with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.)
Joseph Parker reportedly ran bingo games
in the Knoxville area for some years, until thenTennessee
attorney general Charles Burson ruled in
early 1989 that bingo is illegal under the state constitution.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1999:

ANIMAL PEOPLE reader Victoria
Windsor was the first of many who noted the intense
resemblance of the Massachusetts SPCA appeal
mailing of April 12 to the appeal format long used by
DELTA Rescue.
DELTA Rescue founder Leo Grillo said he
wouldn’t mind if the MSPCA, with $75 million in
assets, including $65 million in cash and securities,
also copied the DELTA Rescue approach to helping
animals. If the MSPCA committed even half as large
a share of its resources to low-cost and free neutering
and care-for-life sheltering as DELTA Rescue,
Massachusetts could be a no-kill state in six months.
But the MSPCA isn’t even the wealthiest
humane society in Boston with a long history of sitting
on its assets. The Town of Pembroke recently
revoked the tax-exempt status of a house and land
purchased by the Animal Rescue League, ostensibly
to build a shelter, but used instead to house the
League’s director of operations. That caused the
Quincy Patriot-Ledger to investigate what else the
Animal Rescue League was and wasn’t doing.

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