FBI Uses Animal Shelter To Destroy Drugs, Sickening Workers

Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.

Because everything is completely normal in 2025, the government has gotten decidedly more efficient, especially if you ask them. And sometimes when cutting through red tape, another thing cut is corners. If you have to do more with less, then so be it – if life hands you lemons, make lemonade. However, in the case of an animal shelter in Billings, MT, when the FBI was handed some methamphetamine, the only thing they made was a bunch of people, and sadly, some animals, sick after burning it in the shelter’s incinerator.

Until last Wednesday, the biggest mishap Yellowstone Valley Animal Shelter executive director Triniti Halverson and her 13 co-workers suffered from was cuteness overload from the dogs and cats at their place of work. That all changed when she walked into her office and saw smoke in the hallways, coming from the city’s animal control incinerator located in the same building.

Halverson and her co-workers quickly donned masks and evacuated the 75 animals, which included four litters of confused kittens. Everyone got out okay, but Halverson said that afterwards, she and her co-workers, who were exposed to the smoke for an hour, which smelled “like bleach,” were “sweaty and dizzy.” Which, to us, sounds like a perfectly normal Friday night. Okay, so we do our laundry on Friday, that doesn’t mean our dance card isn’t full! We have been meaning to have a word with the laundromat about their ventilation, however.

The shelter workers all went to the hospital, where they were asked what had been burning in the incinerator. It turned out the answer was meth! FBI workers apparently have been regularly disposing of “evidence,” aka drugs, using the incinerator, which had also been used by the city’s animal control center to euthanize wild and domestic animals (although Yellowstone is a no-kill shelter). Halverson and her co-workers were treated for smoke inhalation from the meth, spending three hours in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and 16 hours painstakingly arranging everything in their homes first by color, then alphabetically. 

Thankfully, most of the cats and dogs are doing well. They’ve been moved to foster care, which is kind of the second time this has happened to them if you think about it. The kittens are being taken care of by staff members in another building, and while some have respiratory issues, Halverson is hopeful they’ll bounce back. The shelter will be out of business for two weeks to a month while everything’s decontaminated, and is accepting donations. They had no idea until last week that the incinerator had been used to burn drugs.

As for the Billings Police Department, they confirmed that the FBI has been using the incinerator to get rid of drug evidence. Smoke had entered the building a few times before, but the only symptoms reported included the munchies and talking about the Dead’s awesome live rendition of “Scarlet Begonias” in 1974 on this bootleg cassette, man. Hopefully, the “negative pressure issue” the Police Department said was responsible for the smoke backup won’t happen again. Or maybe, just maybe, they can just burn the drugs in a different building, perhaps one where people, and more importantly, pets, won’t inhale them.

This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.