Pet Dumping

[Bird]

Some sorry, lowlife character stopped just past my driveway about this time yesterday evening, dumped two pups out, and took off. So I had to make a 50 mile round trip into town this morning to take them to the animal shelter./w3tcompact/icons/frown.gif That happens a couple of times a year around here. Do you rural residents in other parts of the country have the same problem?



Bird

 

[Anonymous Poster]

There's got to be a special place in hell for such folks. I try not to dwell on what I would like to do to such people. Sahara Desert or Middle of the Pacific seems fair.

Survival? An adult cat who has hunted all it's life and is not an indoor cat. Maybe in the outback, but even those critters probably lose a lot of the instinctive abilities. They usually end up dumped out on a dead end street in an area where other cats and dogs have staked out the territory. I guess they figured "someone" would adopt them or try to help and felt to gutless to do anything. With all the low cost or free neuter clinics you'd think people would learn. Dogs...Kittens, Rabbits, we even had a whole chicken coop dumped in the ditch. A lot of people think of pets as well...pets. Without my trusty furry folk to keep me calm over the years I certainly would have rented a dozer and taken out the local shopping mall. Our "pets" are family members.

Why should we expect anything less? There are humans that do the same with their own species. Garbage dumpsters etc seem to be increasingly populated by newborns. These ladies and gents that dump their own offspring, that don't have sense to at least leave it in a safe place...? Please, save me the fill dirt in my perk holes, jump in and sleep. Ah, a nice quiet Sunday afternoon after the days work is done, adding gentle tractor thoughts to the forum...

 

[Thomas]

Bird.
Its truely sad when someone gets that selfish and acts like.......!!
At my father farm its the young kittens that gets drop off.
In the court cases once in a while people do get caught but the fines are a joke.
Kinda to bad its not and eye for and eye.
Bird you gave those puppies a better second chance on life.


Thomas..NH

 

[Anonymous Poster]

I live about 5 miles outside of the suburbs on a section line road. It is the first exit off I-40 as you are leaving the city. People drop their pets? here on a regular basis. I have a three rail fence along the front of my property which won't keep anything in the yard. Even if I chose to keep one of them, it would be run over in a matter of days. I haul them to the pound when they dump them and really hate to do it. Why these thoughtless morons think people in the country want their pets is beyond me.

 

[BobT]

We live about 3 miles out a country road, and besides our place there's a 80 cow dairy farm next door. Let's see, at one time we had 38 cats and kittens! Mostly compliments of the "dumpers." Most all of them wound up living in our or the neighbor's barn, and either caught their grub out in the fields, or licked up milk here and there. We had no mice or rats, that's for sure!

The biggest problem is, they WILL duplicate. If you don't get hold of a kitten by three weeks or so, they are wild. You really can't catch or handle them. Once when I was a young boy, I helped a neighbor of ours try to lower his wild cat population. He wanted me to help him catch a half dozen kittens, about 6 weeks old, he figured. Well, he wore a large leather falconer's glove, and I held a grain sack. Those cute little "kittens" fought worse than lions. We got three of them in the sack, and had to let the rest go on being wild.

We finally got our local population under control, and keep it that way, by spaying and neutering all "pets" that people share with us. The local vets are understanding, and only charge $15-20 each. Oherwise, you'd just have to shoot them after a while, or you would literally have hundreds of wild cats running around in a very short time. May sound creul to some, but if you live out in the country and near the suburban communities who dispose of pets they don't want anymore, it can really be a problem. Taking them to the "animal shelter" isn't being kind to the pets, since they are gassed after a few weeks anyway.

BobT.

A Indiana Boy

 

[W5FL]

Bird, My wife saw two black dogs nearly starved to death laying beside the barn. Now Parker County does not have ANY animal shelter and Tarrant won't take any animals unless you live in their city. Nice recipe for disaster. You can let them starve to death, shoot them, or keep them.

They were brothers and I had over $200 in them when I put up signs that they were found, but no takers. People usually abandon dogs when they get large and these were pretty large dogs.

They are now about 100# dogs and watch the place pretty well. I can leave the gate open now and they don't leave. Guess they found out that they were wanted here. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[TomG]

Yes, it happens here too. There's a place a little closer to town than us that's known as a favourite spot for pet dumping. Doesn't happen here much. People that do such things don't seem to want to drive too far either. Might give them more time to think about what their doing and what they are.

On the bright side, friends near our camp got a good dog last fall. Campers found a young dog on a logging road and took her into the community asking whose dog it was. Our friends hadn't had a dog in a few years, and now they do.

 

[Bird]

We do have a number of feral cats in the area, and you're not likely to catch one of them. Fortunately, there's not too many of them. Like you said Bob, when I was a kid, and there was no animal shelter, Dad & I occasionally had no choice but to shoot a stray dog or cat, and of course, the quickest and cheapest thing for me to do now would be to just shoot them, but I don't want to (and therefore, won't) do it. But I can't leave them out there to starve or be eaten by coyotes, either. There's no doubt our local animal shelter has to euthanize a number of animals, but they also do a lively business in stray adoptions (in fact, we got our own dog from them), so there's a pretty good chance the ones I took in yesterday will find good homes.

Bird

 

[BobT]

Bird,

Glad to hear your little critters are likely to be "adopted." Depends on the locale I guess, how active the shelters are.

BobT.

A Indiana Boy

 

[MarkV]

I could not dump one of our dogs anymore than one of the kids. Family is family in our house. Besides that, my wife would have me euthanize./w3tcompact/icons/frown.gif