Power to you for publishing such a helpful website. I imagine, as stated previously, that the shelter people think you are trying to profit from their work. I'd write the shelter director and explain what you are doing and that AdSense is meant to pay the bills for the site, that it helps keep the site, which is trying to help get animals adopted, online.

I also doubt that a local animal shelter, which is probably a non-profit, has the funds to hire a lawyer. It's probably just a threat.

Not to be argumentative, but the agency is probably correct that the OP is trying to make a profit off the page. Maybe that's not necessarily wrong, but there's a reason people are dubious about ads appearing on charitable web pages/sites.

Here's another question. what if someone islinking to you in a derogatory manner.

just an example here: say your site is example.com
spam.example.com
badwidgets.example.com
badbusiness.example.com

etc.. you get the idea.

I would think that a company could and should be able to defend against those.

Now you're getting into trademark/servivce territory, not copyright.

If you had

BadBusinessBureau.example.com

I would bet that the Better Business Bureau would win a trademark infringement suit against you because you are most definitely weakening a registered mark.

On the other hand if you had

BadSoftware.com

which was a vicious attack on Linus Torvalds and his mega-software empire that's taking over the world, you would be in the clear as far as the domain name, but you could of course still get into trouble with content (is that a public domain picture?)

The MikeRoweSoft.com case never went to court, but he wasn't even being critical of Microsoft and wasn't really even competing with them. It was clear that he was leveraging their brand recognition, even if just for humor mostly. It would have been interesting to see how a judge would rule, but I bet Mike Rowe would have lost that domain. Of course, if it has been a local pillow store that for thirty years had had the slogan: "Don't settle for soft when you can get Mike Rowe soft" then he should be okay.

Are you sure they haven't been speaking to any Belgian newspaper publishers recently? Copiepresse are currently threatening a round of legal action against the EU commission for linking to their content as well.

If it's burning you up so much then just remove the adsense and hey presto the problem goes away.

Just pick up the phone and call them. The situation is more likely to be resolved amicably over the phone than through an email volley.

Right now you can't even tell if the email's legitimate since they did not sign the email.

Edit: Fixed typo

we had someting similar

we had a govenment agancy that licences people who work as bouncers get realy stoppy about an acredited training company using the logo on there site.

struck me as odd ist not as if we where saying courses whernt acredited when they where!

Not surprised that Panorama had a big expose on the cockups at that agency a few days ago.

So I pulled all the links so they the agencys SERPS will suck even more than they do now :-)

I don't know if anyone said this, but what do you think Googlebot does?

I never got an email from Google before they indexed my site.

Tell the shelter that you require a:

<meta name="animal-shelter" value="noindex" />

tag if they don't want their link on your site :)