Despite eight years of complaints, Hillcrest Pampered Pets stays open | Local News

Through a public records request, the Gillette News Record obtained police reports dating back to 2017 that include more than 35 separate complaints made to the Gillette Police Department concerning Hillcrest Pampered Pets, alleging sick kittens and reptiles, dead rats and puppies living in unsanitary conditions, among other allegations.

Hillcrest Pampered Pets — which sells a variety of birds, rodents, dogs, kittens, reptiles and more exotic pets such as sugar gliders and chinchillas — has fielded numerous Animal Control inspections and ongoing criticism over Facebook since opening its doors in 2016.

Five complaints made to the police’s Animal Control unit came from customers who bought pets, including kittens and rats, claiming the animals died shortly after they were purchased from the store. One pet owner, as documented in a police report, told officers her cat had to be euthanized.

“That place is so gross … it’s devastating, awful,” said Kelci Luken, a resident who filed a complaint about the living conditions of the animals sold at Pampered Pets in Sept. 2022. “There have been so many people trying to shut them down.”

Pampered Pets owner Patricia Case has one animal cruelty conviction on her record, a misdemeanor from municipal court last summer. That conviction came after she had been charged with three counts of animal cruelty during an inspection of the store, which followed a complaint to Wyoming Game and Fish.

The charges were reduced to one count as part of a plea deal, according to city court documents.

Complaints to Animal Control before and after Case’s conviction allege a broad range of upkeep failures, including cages and pens containing large amounts of feces and urine, contaminated water and food bowls, overcrowding and excessively high temperatures, according to police reports.

Case has denied many of the allegations against her and stands by the care she provides for pets in her store. She said that complaints about the business have been prompted by a mix of spite, after customers were refused a request like a discounted price, and ignorance about what it takes to run a pet store.

“They get really angry at us when we tell them ‘No,’” Case said. “We had to make a decision … I’m not going to give up, because there’s so many decent people that come in.”

Since Case was charged last year, it’s been business as usual for Hillcrest Pampered Pets. While residents have continued to file complaints about the business with police, Animal Control officers have declined to press charges.

The stakes of another violation, according to city ordinance, are significant. If a pet store owner is convicted of two violations of the city’s animal code laws, the city can revoke the store’s license, according to city code. At that point, the revocation would be up to the discretion of a city judge, said Animal Control supervisor Teresa Mills.

Since Pampered Pets received its first complaint in March of 2017, according to police reports, Animal Control officers have often addressed those concerns on a case-by-case basis with the store owner.

Case would agree to address the specific concern, whether an exceptionally soiled puppy pen or inside temperatures that seemed too hot for the animals’ comfort.

In many cases, officers would mark the complaint “unfounded,” writing in reports after visiting the store that the animals’ pens and cages were clean and to standard.

After a pair of complainants in July 2022 claimed the store had visibly sick kittens and litters of puppies with moldy food and no water, an animal control officer determined there was “nothing wrong with any animals, water, or health,” one report read.

Even in cases where the caller was assured by Animal Control the complaint was serious enough to address with the store owner, issues were sometimes dismissed.

After Luken, who filed a complaint in September 2022, told police there was a significant amount of feces and urine in the puppy’s pool pen, as well as a dead rat lying in a tank with other rats inside, an Animal Control officer said that the issue was serious enough to send a police officer to follow up, but that Animal Control’s power to punish the store was limited by the law, Luken said.

“It’s more of a legislative issue,” she said. “She said that they understood the conditions were obviously poor, but because there aren’t a lot of laws regulating pet stores (in Wyoming), there wasn’t much they can do about it.”

By city law, animal owners are required to provide “sufficient, good and wholesome food and water, proper shelter and protection from the weather, veterinary care when needed to prevent suffering, and humane care and treatment.”

Case says that her store provides that.

Teresa Mills, the city’s Animal Control supervisor, said that when it comes to determining when a pet owner is violating the city’s animal cruelty laws, Animal Control officers don’t have strict guidelines to follow. What qualifies as an “overcrowded” bird or rat cage, for example, might be subjective.

“We don’t have specific numbers on birds, rats, all of them,” Mills said. “We just do an investigation and call an expert sometimes.”

Animal Control officers cited Case in April 2023 with violations some residents claim to have observed in the store for years, after Andrew Heath Jenkinson, who owns the reptile store Mr. Critters in the same shopping center as Hillcrest Pampered Pets, drew the attention of the state’s Game and Fish department.

An Animal Control officer wrote in a report April 12, 2023, that he arrived at Pampered Pets at about 9:30 a.m., along with three other animal control officers from the city and the county.

The visit had been prompted by a Game and Fish warden, who received a complaint about “the health and welfare of the reptiles in this business, improper care, and treatment of the animals, as well as living conditions,” according to a police report. The animal control officer said that he’d check on the business, “as (he) had previous complaints on this business prior to this one.”

By that time, police had received about 25 separate complaints concerning the living conditions of the animals at Pampered Pets, according to police reports.

When the officer began his inspection of the animals in the store, he could see that the cages housing the larger birds in the main lobby were “filthy, full of excrement and bird seed and had not been cleaned in quite a while,” he wrote in a report.

When he moved onto the second bird room, he wrote that there were cages that were severely overcrowded, with one cage containing 20 parakeets. Another officer informed him that some of the birds had “cracked or broken beaks,” and that their nails were not trimmed properly.

The officer then evaluated a sick-looking gecko that three customers had tried to buy from the store at a discounted price the day before. He wrote that the gecko looked as if it had sunburns and had open wounds near its rear legs. Several other reptiles, he wrote, didn’t have protection from sun lamps or normal room lighting in their tanks.

Another officer said that in direct violation of city ordinance, there were about six Corgi puppies, about eight weeks old, being kept in a kiddie pool less than 6 feet in diameter. That officer also noted the pellets in the dogs cages were excessively urine-soaked, and that their water bottles looked as though they hadn’t been cleaned “in some time,” according to the report.

Case told officers that she couldn’t provide veterinary records related to the dogs, birds, rats, lizards, snakes or ferrets, because “she did not take any of those animals to be checked out by veterinarians,” the officer wrote.

Case told the News Record that when it comes to sick puppies, she’ll typically take them to Gillette Pet Vet Clinic or Animal Medical Center of Wyoming, but that she’s only ever had one rodent — a chinchilla, who lost an eye — sick enough to need treatment. She wasn’t able to name a local veterinarian who would be able to treat a sick reptile.

“Reptiles are different. They’ll either fight or give up,” Case said. “Usually they don’t get ‘sick’ sick. They don’t give you an advance warning.”

Case was cited for three counts of animal cruelty, according to the police report: One for failure to provide proper and adequate water, one for overcrowded cages resulting in inhumane conditions and one for failing to provide adequate veterinary care for the gecko.

At a follow-up inspection two days later, the officer was unequivocal about the improved conditions in the store. Case, for one, had the gecko transported to a veterinarian in Rapid City, South Dakota, as there were no local reptile veterinarians for her to take it to.

The officer wrote that in the main lobby, “All cages had been cleaned, wiped down and sanitized, completely reversing the condition they were in during the previous inspection. All the water dishes were full and clean.” The birds had been separated into different cages, and “many” of the reptile tanks had been cleaned. All of the lizards and snakes “now had adequate hides to get away from the light.”

Since that visit, about 10 more complaints have been issued to Gillette police about the welfare of animals in the store, according to police reports, describing puppies in dirty pens, sickly and extremely young kittens, overcrowded birds in cages and sick and mishandled reptiles.

Officers have declined to issue charges against Case stemming from those complaints.

Mills, the Animal Control supervisor, directed questions about Pampered Pets to Police Deputy Chief Brent Wasson. Wasson declined to allow the Animal Control officers involved in the April 2023 inspection to be interviewed.

When asked about why Animal Control Officers pressed charges at that time and not before or since then, Wasson said it “wouldn’t be appropriate” to speculate.

It was a Game and Fish employee’s report of a complaint that prompted the inspection at the time, according to police reports, but the state agency has no official authority to request a city’s Animal Control unit inspect a pet store, said Information and Education Specialist Christina Schmidt from Game and Fish’s Sheridan office.

“All we would’ve done is refer (the complainant) to Animal Control,” Schmidt said. “That would’ve just been (Game and Fish) passing along information … We’re a wildlife management agency, so we don’t regulate domestic pet sales at all.”

In the year and five months since Case was last charged, complaints have alleged that animals from the store have continued to fall ill and die.

In one complaint from last October, Abbie Lynn Alt, now a 21-year-old college student at the University of Wyoming, told police she’d “heard about someone buying a kitten and the kitten dying soon after.”

Alt told the News Record that several weeks before she made her complaint, Alt’s friend had bought two kittens from Pampered Pets. Alt, her friend and Alt’s then-boyfriend had agreed to care for the kittens. But Alt said the kittens showed signs of being extremely sick as soon as they’d been bought, looking “worse than you’d get at the animal shelter.”

“One of them puked and pooped all over the car,” Alt said. “They were so tiny, I don’t know how big kittens have to be before they’re sold … they had eye boogers, they were skinny.”

In less than a month, Alt said that both kittens had died. At the time Alt called the store to report what had happened, she also spoke with an Animal Control officer, who she told her “‘I’ll go look, but there’s not usually anything we can do … they’ve gone to the store before and there’s usually nothing bad enough we can charge them with.’”

In a report documenting the incident, an animal control officer wrote “(Alt) was informed of the legal limitation animal control has over these matters.” He noted that when he inspected the store, all kennels and cages were fairly clean, and that none of the kittens appeared to be sick.

In a separate incident, Lilian Bock, an animal rescue volunteer who was visiting Gillette from New Hampshire, told the News Record that one of the kittens she’d reserved at the store this summer on July 12 was dead by the time she came to pick it up July 15.

Bock said the four kittens, when she saw them on July 12, were extremely tiny. Bock said Case wanted to keep the kittens a couple more days to make sure they were big enough.

“(She said) she would sell the kitten in two days,” Bock said. “She put a collar around (their) necks to know what kittens were going to be sold.”

By the time Bock returned to the store on Monday, Bock said Case’s husband, Lester, told her that one of the kittens had died, and Bock said the other three were in “very poor health.” Case then refused to sell the other kittens.

Case told the News Record that when Bock asked to buy the kittens on July 12, Case had refused, saying that the kittens weren’t old enough.

“I said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think the kitten will make that long of a drive,’” Case said. “They were healthy, but they weren’t growing fast enough … Why would you want to pay for something and then lose it?”

Case said that not only has a kitten never died in her care, but that she’s never sold a sick kitten to a customer.

“I can’t remember the last time we lost a kitten,” Case said. “If they don’t look like they’re doing so well, we don’t sell them.”

An animal control officer who visited the store after Bock’s call told Case that she was in violation of two city ordinances, one of them animal cruelty, according to a report. The officer gave Case 24 hours to fix the issues he’d seen, including removing feces that was still in the Corgis’ pen that Bock had seen three days ago and taking the young kittens out of the store.

The officer wrote that while he did see some issues, he did “not believe there was enough evidence of neglect or intentional cruelty to any animal to warrant a citation to be issued. In previous cases, Patricia has been fully compliant with our requests.”

Jenkinson, owner of reptile store Mr. Critters, said that he’d called the Game and Fish Department in part because he felt that they would take the complaints about the living conditions of reptiles in the store more seriously than Animal Control.

“I figured, if Animal Control doesn’t see reptiles as living, breathing things, I thought that someone has to,” Jenkinson said.

Jenkinson said multiple customers had taken reptiles they’d purchased at Pampered Pets to his store to have them looked after, or have asked for advice about how to nurse them back to health. Jenkinson said in August he’d recently had a customer ask about a bearded dragon from the store presenting signs of metabolic bone disease.

“They’re all, ‘If we buy him, will you take care of it?’” Jenkinson said. “And I’m like, ‘No, because I’m tired of crying when it dies.’”

When speaking with the News Record about their complaints made against Pampered Pets, Luken and Alt were both under the impression city officers haven’t been able to find a charge to press against the store owner.

“Even to regulate cleanliness, (the laws) just don’t exist,” Luken said. “If it had been only a year of this, it’d be okay, maybe they’re getting settled … It’s still going, and that to me seems dangerous.”

“We have local government for a reason,” she added. “It’s just heartbreaking, because you’re just kind of stuck.”