The brindled mama dog sat in the child's seat of an old shopping cart that had been rolled up to the stainless steel euthanizing table, her six shaggy puppies wobbling and nuzzling around her.

She'd been hit by a car and couldn't walk. Her back was probably broken.

Kennel Master John White had picked her up the night before. She supposedly was a stray and had given birth to the puppies under a shed.

Now she was about to die, along with her puppies.

"It's hard to keep puppies healthy, even though we vaccinate constantly," said shelter Director Bonnie Bragdon.

In the end, she decided not to kill the puppies.

"Ms. Rosemary convinced me to keep the puppies," Dr. Bragdon said, referring to the shelter's health technician, Rosemary Brooks. "Usually I'm the one that's trying to save everything."

Dr. Bragdon has come under criticism for doing just that during her two sometimes-controversial years as director. Some members have left the Animal Control Advisory Board complaining that overcrowding in the cages increases aggressiveness, fighting and injuries among the animals.

The puppies were removed, and Mr. White lifted the mama onto the table while Willie Barnes prepared the syringe and hummed, Mrs. Brooks wrote down the amount of drug used, and Harriett Ramos got a blue bag ready for the body.

In less than 30 seconds, the dog was dead.

"Sometimes, they're unconscious before we even take the needle out," Dr. Bragdon said.

Somebody turned on a radio and found a station playing rhythm and blues.

Next came an older dog with a metal pin sticking three inches out of his hip.

"He probably had a broken leg, and they took him to the vet and had it fixed," Dr. Bragdon. "And then we found it running loose. We called all the veterinary offices, and nobody knew anything about it. We kept it through the weekend, and now we're going to destroy it."

The euthanasia had to be done because the tissue around the pin was becoming infected, and Dr. Bragdon does not have the necessary facility or instruments to remove the pin.

Number three for the day was a little dog with such severe mange that the lethal drug had to be injected into its abdominal cavity. It took five to 10 minutes for the drug to work.

Number four was a red fox that animal control workers had picked up in the Apple Valley subdivision. He had to be eu-thanized via a syringe on the end of a pole. It took some time - he screamed when he was stuck, then lay in the cage and died after awhile.

A black Akita-Chow mix refused to be muzzled and tried to bite Mr. Barnes. He had to be put into the "squeeze cage," where he was injected through the bars.

"In a different situation this dog might be perfectly fine, but in this situation where it's tense, it's stressful, where we don't know anything about the dog, we can't afford to have someone bitten," Dr. Bragdon said.

Next came a female black Labrador retriever, hugging the ground, her tail wagging. Ms. Ramos led her out, a job she hates, she said.

"These animals have already been betrayed once by their owners," she said later. "I take care of them back there, and they become attached to me, and then I have to betray them again."

The black Lab was trembling and still wagging her tail as she lay on the eu-thanizing table.

Ms. Ramos and the others are daily witnesses to the callousness of people to animals.

"People bring dogs out here to turn them in and say it's not their dog, and the whole time the dog is scrambling to get back in their car," she said.

Last year, 11,608 dogs and cats were admitted to the facility, and 7,095 of them were killed, according to the records. Staff spend 12 1/2 hours a week euthanizing animals and need to spend even more, Dr. Bragdon said.

"We have too many animals and not enough people who want them," she said.

The killing went on almost all day.