Friday, November 16, 2007

NEW YORK TIMES UPDATE ON THIS STORY (registration required).

SOURCE: National Geographic (Associated Press story)

I'll warn you right now. This story is just awful. Talk about inhumane.

Back roads, gorges, and garbage dumps on this tropical island are littered with the decaying carcasses of dogs and cats.

An Associated Press investigation reveals why: Possibly thousands of unwanted animals have been tossed off bridges, buried alive, and otherwise inhumanely disposed of by taxpayer-financed animal control programs.

Witnesses who spoke with the AP said that, despite pledges to deliver adoptable strays to shelters and humanely euthanize the rest, the island's leading private animal control companies generally did neither.

Good grief. How Animal Control Solutions' employees can sleep at night is beyond me. Fortunately, former employees of ACS and its previous incarnation, Pet Delivery, have stepped forward, lending some authority to activists' claims that animals are being brutally disposed of (900 of them, "on a good month"), rather than being brought to shelters, as promised.

A former Animal Control Solutions employee told the AP that he witnessed another worker in 2005 dragging 12 to 15 small dogs out of a van along a road outside San Juan. Normally, workers injected animals with a euthanasia drug but on this day there was none. The animals were instead given an overdose of a sedative and flung 50 feet into a trash-filled gully.

Some of the dogs were alive as they crashed on top of junked beds, bottles, and other garbage.

"I could hear some of the dogs whimpering as they hit the tree branches and then the ground," the former employee said as he stood with AP journalists in the muck at the site, which still holds the stench of death.

As bad as the shelter situation is here in the U.S., this news from AP is appalling. Reporters found that no shelters had ever been brought an animal by ACS, and the government in Puerto Rico has done nothing to ensure animals are treated humanely. They send ACS $20,000 a year to handle the problem and then turn a blind eye, allowing shocking cruelties to occur.

The AP saw and was told about a scale and brutality far beyond even what animal welfare activists suspected, stretching over the last eight years.

According to the article, Puerto Rico has at least 100,000 stray dogs and cats and no spay or neuter programs. Not only have strays been rounded up and tossed 50 feet to their deaths, but people in city projects have also had their animal companions forcibly taken from them and disposed of in this fashion. It seems animals are not allowed in the projects. Miraculously, some animals occasionally survive this ordeal, and one of them was actually returned home.

Clearly there are many people in Puerto Rico who care about animals, but it seems that the overall picture there is very grim:

Cockfighting is legal, with matches shown on television. One of the island's beaches is known as Dead Dog Beach—a place where teenagers drive over live puppies sealed in bags or cruelly kill them with machetes and arrows, according to animal welfare groups that photographed the atrocities.

Thanks to Lily for bringing this story to my attention. She also included the following:

I tried to find some information about who to contact about this, and all I've found is Puerto Rico's American representative, Luis Fortuno.

Here is the information I have for him:

Washington D.C. Office
126 Cannon House
Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Phone: 202-225-2615
Fax: 202-225-2154

District Office
250 Calle Fortaleza
Old San Juan, PR 00901
Phone: 787-723-6333
Fax: 787-729-7738

I know it's sad, and it doesn't seem like there's much we can do, especially when there's so much wrong in people's attitudes toward animals in our own countries, but it could be worth taking the time to contact Luis Fortuno. If he hears from enough outraged people, the pressure might be enough to get the government to start paying more attention to the problem.

I'm not going to hold my breath, but international opinion seems to be relatively important to most countries, and no one wants their dirty laundry aired, so it can't hurt to let them know what we know, and see if they do something to improve the conditions there.

Labels: animal cruelty, companion animals, euthanasia, pets