Seattle Animal Shelter accused of safety issues, retaliation

Another longtime cat volunteer, Ed Hutsell, said he was let go in 2023 after pointing out that he didn’t believe staff were collecting from previous cat owners a form that detailed behavioral history, which was key to finding a good adoption match. Hutsell said he had volunteered at the shelter for 12 years under three directors, and was asked to be on the hiring panel for a new volunteer coordinator only weeks before being let go. 

Shelter spokesperson Mixon said just four volunteers of nearly 600 had been fired in the past five years, adding via email that she “cannot underscore enough how rarely pausing or ending volunteer relationships occur.” 

Rodriguez said feedback from volunteers is valuable and that volunteers can bring concerns to the volunteer coordinator and up the chain of command from there if necessary. He also said he would encourage them to speak with the ombuds office or the city’s human resources department. 

“What we don’t want is we don’t want them going outside of that to other avenues, right?” he said. “Because then it doesn’t get back to the shelter, and we can’t actually fix the problem.”

Gauri sent a letter detailing her experience with the shelter to the city’s human resources investigative unit. However, they told her they could not look into it because she was a volunteer – not an employee. 

Other volunteers, like dog foster parents Allegra Abramo and Catherine Wheatbrook, said they were not directly fired, but noticed reduced shelter account access or communications after expressing concerns. 

Abramo, who had been a foster for nearly 20 years, said she stopped receiving emails for foster volunteers. When she asked about it, the foster coordinator responded that they were “unsure when or why this happened” but maybe there was confusion because Abramo “expressed a fair amount of discontent with the program.”

(Abramo is a journalist whose work has been published at Cascade PBS, most recently in 2022.)

Wheatbrook volunteered as a foster parent for about a decade and was volunteering as a foster case manager when she noticed she was not receiving emails with new cases anymore. 

“You look around and go, ‘Gee, no one has called me in six months,’” Wheatbrook said. “And that’s odd because I’m hearing that there’s many, many, many dogs in foster homes with brand-new foster parents.” 

She then found out they had stopped using volunteer case managers and emailed the volunteer coordinator at the time to get clarification and express her frustration. The deputy director emailed her back asking for a meeting to discuss her future with the shelter, Wheatbrook said. Having heard about similar discussions with other volunteers, she quit. 

When asked, Mixon wrote via email: “It is not shelter policy, nor standard practice, to revoke an active volunteer’s access to shelter accounts.”