On a chilly afternoon in early March, two pigs escaped from their pen at Heidi’s Haven, an animal rescue in Williamstown.
Veterinarian Sarah Spencer said animal control called her after they loaded the pigs into a trailer and took them to a local farm for holding. The officer told Spencer she had pigs that were “desperately emaciated” and needed an exam.
In fact, she had been scheduled to visit them at the Williamstown rescue the next day to follow up on a neighbor’s complaint that the two pigs had grown far too thin.
When Spencer saw them the following morning, one of them “was not that far away from the point of actually dying,” she said.
“Pigs this size, normally you go in a pen with them, and you have to be careful because they’ll mow you down if they’re not friendly,” she said. “And they were just literally huddled in the corner, shaking the entire time, and just you could tell they were totally exhausted, cold. They were not even eating because they were just like, ‘Oh my god, we have a comfortable, warm, dry place to lie down.’”
The pigs have since been moved to Merrymac Farm Sanctuary in Charlotte, where founder Era MacDonald said they have begun to gain weight and confidence in their surroundings.
The owner of Heidi’s Haven, Sheila McGregor, has been charged with animal cruelty, which could lead to fines or prison time. However, local advocates and community members are wondering what will happen to the other animals in McGregor’s care — somewhere between 40 and 80 dogs and an unclear number of cats and other animals, according to court documents.
A private Facebook group called Shut Down Heidi’s Haven has amassed 700 members, who claim to have been tracking reports of abuse at the rescue for years.
The case also highlights the continuing challenges of Vermont’s animal welfare system. Advocates like MacDonald believe there’s not enough training, staffing or enforcement tools available for game wardens and animal control officers to act on allegations of animal abuse.
Recent high-profile investigations, like the repeated seizure of horses from a Townshend farm, have revealed gaps in the system. What makes Heidi’s Haven unusual is its status as an animal rescue, which some advocates say illustrates the need for more regulation of rescues and shelters statewide.
In an email, McGregor declined to be interviewed about the allegations of neglect on the advice of her lawyers. She wrote that game wardens have responded to every complaint for more than two years and have been granted access to any building or animal they wanted to see.
“The vet who examined every animal on the property found no significant concerns,” she wrote. “I have implemented every suggestion made by veterinarians, animal health specialists or law enforcement.”
‘You have fresh water here’
At the Merrymac Farm Sanctuary in Charlotte, every animal has a backstory.
Walking through the barn on a hot July day, MacDonald points to each of its residents in turn. A pig named Buster escaped from a slaughterhouse in Connecticut. Another swine resident, Bernadette, was displaced by a barn fire in the Northeast Kingdom.
When MacDonald reaches the outdoor pen where former Heidi’s Haven residents Gladys and Olivia spent their morning, the pigs run up to her, snorting with excitement as they’re taken into the shade indoors. At first glance, they appear to have recovered from their time in Williamstown, but MacDonald said she’s noticed signs they are still struggling with the memories of their experience.
They still have to be fed separately so they don’t fight over food. It took months for them to stop drinking each other’s urine, which MacDonald believes is the result of them not having access to clean and regular water at their previous home.
“Pigs are considered almost at the intelligence of humans,” she said. “So they knew their survival mechanism was to drink each other’s urine. But it took them about three weeks to realize, like, you don’t need to do this. You have fresh water here.”
The roughly 7-year-old pigs appear to be a farm breed, as opposed to popular pet breeds like pot-bellied pigs. In other words, they’re very large. Spencer said a healthy farm pig could be roughly 500 pounds and could eat up to 10 pounds of food per day.
“If you know anything about pigs, I mean, a pig’s whole existence is eating,” MacDonald said.
When Spencer first evaluated the pigs after they were caught, she said they were closer to 350 pounds each. She also inspected their pen at Heidi’s Haven and found there did not seem to be enough feed on hand to provide for pigs of their size — and found the pen to be far too bare, dry and exposed to the cold winter wind.
The posts on the Heidi’s Haven Facebook page indicate that McGregor intended to keep her animals thin. The page has reposted photos of thin dogs from agility competitions and animal fitness pages, along with photos from her own rescue demonstrating her dogs’ fitness.
“It is truly disturbing that the general population thinks that fat pets are healthy pets,” she wrote in a September 2024 Heidi’s Haven Facebook post. “My pigs can potentially live to be 12+ yrs old ***IF I KEEP THEM THIN***. Fat pets live shorter, more uncomfortable lives. My girls will never be fat.”
Laurie Lawless, co-moderator of the Shut Down Heidi’s Haven Facebook group, is a behavior consultant for local animal shelters. She’s skeptical of McGregor’s assertion that her dogs are simply conditioned for agility, she said, since the work that goes into feeding and providing exercise regimens for agility dogs is far too much for a home-based rescue to handle.
“There is absolutely no way that the animals on her property are conditioned. They’re underfed, and they’re skinny and not being cared for adequately,” Lawless said.
Concerns about Heidi’s Haven date back to its previous location in Ferrisburgh. In 2018, WCAX reported that neighbors complained about the rescue’s smell, noise levels and rodent problems spreading onto their properties.
The town selectboard rezoned the property and demanded McGregor handle the rat problem, leading her to announce she was shutting it down. The rescue reopened in Williamstown shortly after.
“As animal control of the town, I have received multiple complaints from volunteers, adopters, and visitors to this rescue,” Williamstown Animal Control Officer Sam Puncher wrote in court documents. “Most complaints focus on overcrowding with over 60 dogs, 30 cats, multiple chickens and other small animals. The indoor areas are dirty and smell of ammonia and feces. People have noted that dogs have hair loss, are thin, and are ‘feral’. Dogs are left in crates for over 20 hours a day and water is only offered a few times.”
Game wardens from the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department visited the property 10 times in the past three years in response to complaints from neighbors, volunteers and potential adopters, court records show.
In five of those visits, wardens could not substantiate the complaints, finding the animals in good health or the condition of the dogs’ living space to be in good shape. But in four instances, the wardens observed thin or underweight dogs. On two visits, they noted an overwhelming odor of ammonia, according to court records.
Lawless and MacDonald said that game wardens, who often enforce fishing, hunting and wildlife management laws, might not have had enough training about domestic animals to recognize signs of abuse.
It’s also difficult to prove a certain animal’s health issues are the result of abuse, Lawless said. Often a veterinarian’s evaluation must prove the animal’s needs are not being met, and someone could claim the animal came to the rescue already in poor health.
“It makes it really hard for (officials) to do their jobs, and it makes it really easy for people to get away with doing bad jobs at taking care of the animals and tracking their medical care,” she said.
MacDonald said she feels compelled to “make sure that the pigs have a voice.” She’s concerned that the state will settle rather than prosecute McGregor to the fullest extent of the law.
She was frustrated when McGregor filed a motion requesting the right to visit the pigs in April, citing her “emotional attachment” to the pigs in court documents. MacDonald fought back in a filed motion, although she was ultimately overruled.
How does Vermont plan to fix the system?
MacDonald is not the first person to raise concerns about how the animal welfare investigation system allows potential abuse to slip through the cracks. Those complaints reached the halls of the Statehouse in 2024, when legislators passed a bill that created a new Division of Animal Welfare at the Department of Public Safety.
Lisa Milot, appointed by Gov. Phil Scott, assumed her role as director of the division in May. Her first task is to study the state’s existing animal welfare system over an eight-month period. She is then expected to produce a report and issue a set of recommendations for its reform.
Milot plans to draw on her previous experience as a lawyer and academic in Athens, Georgia, to help guide her work in Vermont. In Athens, she helped bring the region’s first state-level animal cruelty prosecutions, a step up from local code enforcement. She also worked on ways to prevent animal abuse, like spay-neuter programs and animal welfare classes.
“We were looking at it in terms of, how do we prevent these problems from getting worse? As well as, once we are down to the offenders who need to actually be prosecuted, how can we effectively do that, as well as come up with remedies that might fix the situation instead of just punishing people,” she said.
She said she was not familiar enough with the Heidi’s Haven situation to discuss it specifically. But when asked about some of her top priorities for her upcoming report, the lack of regulation of animal rescues was one of the top things that came to mind.
“There’s been no oversight of how rescues and shelters operate,” she said.
The lack of regulation in Vermont is not unusual, but many other states have higher operating standards than Vermont does, she said. She cited Maine and Massachusetts as examples of places that have specific health and welfare rules for rescue agencies.
“It’s a growing trend to have this sort of regulation, both on the in-state domestic entities as well as on the animals being brought in from out of state, being imported from other states for adoption,” Milot said.
In the 20 years she has worked in the field, she’s seen an increasing number of animals coming through national networks that transport pets for adoption, mostly from southern states to northern states like Vermont. That can give animals better opportunities for adoption, but it can put pressure on the receiving jurisdictions to keep up with the inflow of animals.
“The amount of stress rescuers feel, legitimately, when they see the number of animals that are being euthanized simply because there aren’t homes for them, is incredibly high,” Milot said.
She said a lot of rescuers get overwhelmed as a result.
“They are either panicked and getting over their heads, or they step back, and they do less, but maybe do better when they set boundaries better,” she said.
Many southern shelters and rescue organizations are “flooded with animals, and they are simply trying to bail out their sinking ship,” Milot said. That means rescues in Vermont might receive animals with little to no information about their health status or likelihood of adoption.
Lawless said she believes that there should be minimum standards on things like kennel size, noise levels and regular vet care. Rescues should also have better documentation on the animals in their care, she said. She’s seen prospective adopters get taken advantage of by rescue staff who downplayed a dog’s bite history.
For Vermonters who are looking to assess the quality of a rescue, Lawless advised taking a hard look at the location’s “capacity of care,” essentially how many staff members and volunteers it has compared with its volume of animals.
“This is something that ethical shelters will do, is make sure that, yes, if they’re taking animals, they are able to adequately provide for them, with the theory that if they can’t provide for those animals in the shelter, it’s no better than them not being in the shelter,” she said.
People in animal rescue are tired of cases like McGregor’s that keep happening in Vermont, Lawless said.
“It’s really a bunch of people who are just doing their best to tie the strings together and not able, at the end, to get anybody actually really prosecuted,” she said.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated which department oversees the Division of Animal Welfare.
