Animal Shelter Asks For Help After Its Dogs Are Apparently Forced To Fight

A rural Tennessee animal shelter is raising money to pay for security cameras after someone apparently broke in and forced two dogs to fight.

Volunteers arrived at the Best Friends Sanctuary in Jamestown, Tennessee, on Sept. 11 to find two dogs, Sam and Bucky, covered in blood and locked together in a cage.

“They look in your eyes, and he’s still breathing, but [there's] blood everywhere,” the shelter's president, Sharon Cravens, told local TV station WATE.

Shelter employees believe someone climbed over the facility's barbed wire fence, unlocked Sam's cage and pushed Sam into Bucky's enclosure.

Brenda Goett, the shelter's treasurer, told The Huffington Post she thinks the dogs may have also been drugged.

"There was vomit in the cages," she said. "Their eyes were dilated."

Bucky was so badly injured that he had to be euthanized.

The Jamestown Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Now, a week and a half later, Sam is recovering. Goett told HuffPost that when she saw him this past weekend, he seemed "happy and healthy. He usually does."

Best Friends is trying to recover as well. The shelter, an all-volunteer nonprofit that relies on donations and grants, is now hoping to raise $4,000 to pay for security cameras.

Generous donations have come in -- over $3,800 as of Monday afternoon.

"It's a shame we'll have to spend that $4,000 on equipment when the same money could neuter 80 dogs, or feed hundreds," Goett said. "We will carry on. We have to. There is no [one] else to do it for the animals."

Here's a video tour of Best Friends Sanctuary:

You can keep tabs on Best Friends Sanctuary on the group's Facebook page, and learn more about their fundraiser here.

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