When Jackie Sarchett discovered a dozen puppies locked in the trunk of a car on Saturday afternoon, she called police. They told her they couldn’t do anything, she said. A couple passing by called animal control.

A spokesman for the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region says the organization followed procedure in handling the matter and is satisfied with the outcome.

Sarchett is not.

“It was so horrendous,” she said. “I was so upset they didn’t take puppies away immediately because it was such abuse.”

The puppies “thankfully were not found to be in immediate danger,” said Cody Costra, spokesman for the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region.

Therefore, an officer from the organization’s Animal Law Enforcement division did not confiscate the litter, he said.

He credits the reporting parties alerting the Humane Society at the time they did for the incident not spiraling downward.

“This is why reporting suspected animal cruelty or neglect is so important,” Costra said.

The owner of the puppies was issued a warning, he said, which authorities believed was appropriate in the case.

“There is no requirement to provide a warning first, but there does have to be an immediate threat for us to impound without a warrant,” he said. “Animals are property by Colorado law, so we have to have an exception to getting a warrant for us to seize them without one.”

Sarchett described the scene as distressing to neighbors and park users who watched the event unfold.

Sarchett was doing her usual good deed over the weekend, picking up left-behind dog poop at the park near her Shooks Run home, when something startled her.

As she bent down to retrieve a lump of old feces, she heard muffled whimpering.

She looked around, up and down, her eyes settling on a car in the building’s parking lot.

The noise was coming from the trunk, Sarchett said, and it sounded like puppies.

She said she was so startled that she dropped the bag of dog poop she had collected and power-walked home to enlist her son’s help.

Colorado Springs police initially said they wouldn’t do anything, Sarchett said.

Other neighbors said they had called police the night before, also to report animals crying inside the trunk, and were told the puppies were being cared for, she said.

When an animal enforcement officer from the Humane Society arrived at the parking lot on Saturday, the officer said that “her hands were tied,” Sarchett said.

“My son said he was going to pop the trunk with a crowbar to get them out,” she said. “We thought they were dead because they quit crying.”

The animal officer called her supervisor, who called police.

Four Colorado Springs police officers showed up, Sarchett said, and after some time, found the owner of the car and ordered him to open the trunk.

“The puppies were tiny pit bulls, stuffed in a crate, dehydrated, in filth, with poop and pee all around them, they were cold and crying, with no water or food.” Sarchett said.

“We raised hell when we saw the condition of those puppies. We were all unnerved at what we saw.”

The mother who had given birth to the litter was not with the pups, which were only about 3 weeks old, Sarchett said.

The man who owned them said he was weaning them because there were so many that the mother couldn’t handle them, she said. And he told authorities he had already sold some of them.

“As community citizens, we’ve got to be diligent,” Sarchett said. “People don’t want to get involved — it’s uncomfortable — but if something like this is OK in how we treat animals, something is very wrong.”

The Humane Society’s enforcement division is continuing to follow up on the case, Costra said.

An officer has “already viewed and verified that the puppies are being cared for now — not in the vehicle,” he said, adding that the officer will keep checking on them.

If anyone suspects animal cruelty or neglect and reports it, the Animal Law Enforcement team will open an investigation on the claim, Costra said.

Last year, the division, which contracts to provide enforcement services for El Paso, Douglas and Pueblo counties, and the city of Centennial, responded to 4,627 cruelty case investigations, according to the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region.

The division fielded a total of 43,416 calls for service in 2021, which also included 4,474 responses to reports of aggressive or dangerous domestic pets.