For the past three years, local veterinarians have paid several hundred dollars a year for the city to pick up the bodies of euthanized pets and take them to McKamey Animal Center for cremation.
That’s the practice those doctors have described to their customers who can’t afford to pay for the service with a private company and don’t want to bury a pet in their backyard.
But the veterinarians didn’t realize the city had stopped delivering the dead pets to McKamey more than a month ago and was instead dumping the bodies in the city landfill, said Ann Ball, the chairwoman of McKamey’s governing board.
“No one has notified us,” said Dr. Jim Hammon, co-owner of Northgate Animal Hospital. “I would have thought we would be the first to know.”
Ball said McKamey was never alerted to the changes either.