Three young kittens were dumped on the Esschebaan in Vught on Saturday. So there is work to be done for volunteers from the Animal Ambulance. But before the three soaked kittens found a safe home in the shelter, they were taken by an unknown man. The kittens have been missing since then. Unfortunately, pet abandonment happens in all sizes, smells and colors. We made a selection from our own archive, resulting in this (brief) overview of recent years.
For example, volunteers from the animal ambulance found three kittens in a closed gray garbage bag in Geffen. Sandra van de Rooij from Maasland animal shelter didn’t understand it. “It’s crazy. If people find a kitten somewhere, they can simply call the ambulance and no questions will be asked whether it is their own kitten. What they have done now, putting it in a sealed bag somewhere, is completely unnecessary and cruel.”
And even more kitten suffering in Tilburg. There, a woman found four kittens in her wheelie bin. She opened the lid because she heard meowing and squeaking and discovered the animals.
A classic dumping in Eindhoven during the summer. A pit bull was found hanging from a tree there. The owner, who wanted to get rid of his animal, had been kind enough to provide a bowl of water and a bag of dog food.
A snake was even dumped in Helmond at the end of 2020. Not loose on the street, but complete with terrarium and all. It was a corn snake, also called a rat snake. This species of snake is neither aggressive nor poisonous.
A few years ago, roosters were dumped en masse in the polders of the municipality of Altena. “In the months of December and January alone we caught and cared for fifty roosters,” said Joost Evenhuis of the Altena animal ambulance at the time.
“It probably concerns several people who enjoyed purchasing a few chickens. They then buy a few of those fluffy chicks, but it turns out that there are also roosters among them. They start to crow and are then dumped.”
Guinea pigs are also high on the list of dumped animals. Not one, but many rodents at the same time. Such as in Den Bosch and Schaijk where twenty guinea pigs were dumped at the same time. They were mainly males and some of the animals were in very poor condition. At a pet shop in Den Bosch there was a box in front of the door with seven male guinea pigs in it. Shortly afterwards, the animals were taken to a temporary shelter in Schaijk. They looked quite neat.
A day later, another thirteen guinea pigs were dumped at the same shelter. These animals were in very bad shape.
They experienced the same scene at a petting zoo in Uden. Within a week, eight hamsters were dumped in the guinea pig cage. Leaving hamsters at the petting zoo may have been well-intentioned, but the petting zoo was still not happy with the animals. “Hamsters are not nice animals. They sleep during the day, so they are of no use to us as a petting zoo.”
A dumping that made the news in 2020 was the abandoned puppy on the A2. That in itself is bad, but it became even worse when it turned out that the story about the truck driver who allegedly found the puppy turned out to be completely fabricated. The ‘finder’ wanted to get rid of the animal and pretended he had found her. A friend of the man found the story suspicious and took it to the animal ambulance.
Another notable dumping from a few years ago involved a goat. The police distributed photos of a man who had dumped the animal in Liempde. Earlier, the police had already shown a video of the goat and asked the man to report. When this did not happen, images of the suspect were posted online.
Freshly born and then already rejected. It happened to a piglet that was dumped at the ‘t Veldje zoo in Rosmalen in 2019. The animal had just been born, the umbilical cord was still attached.
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