When rescuers arrived at a Louisiana cruelty case in Greensburg, they found Frankie and Froggy, a bonded pair of French bulldogs, starved down to their bones. Frankie was so desperate he had eaten concrete from a nearby bag. X-rays confirmed it. He passed it in chunks and survived. Many animals in the same case were not as lucky.

Animal Rescue Corps pulled 32 dogs from the case and nine additional shelter dogs in a single trip. In 30 days, ARC rescued 268 animals total. The logistics required emptying a storage room to house an urgent influx of animals overnight.

That kind of response takes an entire organization working at full capacity. What it should not take is a network of rescuers scrambling to fill the gap left by a failure to prevent and prosecute animal cruelty in the first place.

The Greensburg case drew significant attention. A prison shelter program called for help. A national rescue organization responded. And yet there has been no public accounting of who is responsible for what happened to these animals or whether anyone will face charges.

We are calling on the St. Helena Parish District Attorney to publicly disclose the status of the investigation into the Greensburg cruelty case and pursue the strongest available charges against those responsible. We are also calling on the Louisiana Legislature to strengthen state animal cruelty statutes so that large-scale neglect cases result in felony charges, not misdemeanors or silence.

Frankie and Froggy are recovering. They will be adopted together because separating them after everything they survived would be cruel. The people who put them in that position in the first place should be held to the same standard of accountability.

Sign to demand justice for the animals rescued in Greensburg and stronger laws to prevent the next case.