When I was starting out as a young animal rights activist, I remember reading in my new materials from several organizations (ASPCA, PETA, etc.) that you should never advertise puppies or kittens for adoption in the paper. I was just appalled at this idea when I first heard it—how else could you find good homes for strays that you ran across or babies that pets that hadn’t been neutered or spayed yet had given birth to?

I had a lot to learn back then.

It turns out that a lot of animal researchers scan pet ads for “free to a good home” animals to use in their experiments. I know it’s chilling, but it’s true, and it’s a good reason to not find homes for animals that way. Instead, it’s usually a good idea to spread the word among friends and people you already know, as well as enlist the help of a veterinarian or local adoption agency.

However, some adoption agencies may have tales to tell that are equally as chilling. Take the North Utah Valley Animal Shelter, for instance. It’s supposed to be a safe haven for homeless pets—a place to take them in and help find loving families to adopt them. Instead, it’s a more sinister place. Sure, on the outside it appears to be just as friendly and loving as any other animal shelter—but on the inside, it has a reputation for giving away its animals to people who don’t care about them for any reason other than their usefulness in cruel experiments.

The North Utah Valley Animal Shelter has been selling homeless pets to the University of Utah for this exact purpose. Can you believe an animal shelter—the words themselves bringing to mind safety and security for the animals within—would actually do this to the creatures they claim to love and support so much?

Live dogs sold from this shelter have had their chests cut open to have pacemakers inserted in them for scientific study. After this cruel, painful experience, the dogs were murdered and dissected for further “study.” No other animal shelter in the state of Utah permits this cruel and unusual practice to be done on its shelter animals other than the North Utah Valley Animal Shelter.

These heinous actions need to be addressed and remedied by the shelter as soon as possible; either that, or they need to call themselves something other than a shelter—such as “animal experimentation subject provider”—to prevent people who bring animals there, hoping to find them loving homes, from doing so, since all they will find is pain, suffering, and death.

To write the North Utah Valley Animal Shelter, please click here.