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.
News that live animals had been thrown to their deaths from a bridge reached the public last month when Animal Control Solutions, a government contractor, was accused of inhumanely killing some 80 dogs and cats seized from three housing projects in the town of Barceloneta. A half dozen survived the fall of at least 50 feet.
The AP probe, which included visits to two sites where animals were slaughtered, found the inhumane killings were far more extensive than that one incident. 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.
People in Puerto Rico don't have the same attitudes towards pets that Americans do. It's common for someone to just drive their dog out to the middle of nowhere and drop them off when the owners get tired of the pet. I've seen packs of stray dogs everywhere I go.
The pet disposal scandal adds to Puerto Rico's poor reputation for treatment of animals. 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.
My parents always told me that if you want to see a person's true nature, you must observe them doing one of two things - driving, or playing sports. Because that's when the mask slips. They concentrate on doing something else, and not on putting up a show for the world. I would add that how a person treats their pet is an indicator of how they'll treat someone else.
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.
Not all the dogs died, however. A dog that was not a stray, but a sickly pet whose owner wanted it euthanized, managed to limp home. The angry owner telephoned the company and demanded it retrieve the dog and do the job right, the former employee recalled.
Do you feel sick yet?
One dog, stuffed in a sack, was found recently at the Cayey site among other bagged carcasses. It apparently survived the fall and managed to poke its head out of the bag before dying, said Carmen Cintron, who runs an animal shelter.
I can't wait to leave. I really, really cannot wait to leave.
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