French animal shelters are sounding the alarm about an increase in the number of abandoned pets. About 100,000 pets are abandoned in France every year. It gets even worse in the summer when the French go on summer holidays and dump their pets en masse “on the side of the road or at a roadhouse”.
French holidaymakers are leaving their pets en masse on their way to their holiday destinations, animal shelters and local authorities say. La Societe Protectrice des Animaux (SPA), an animal welfare organization headquartered in Paris, issued an urgent appeal for donations and adoptions this weekend. Our exhausted team has saved more than 12,000 animals this summer alone.
As a result, the rise in the number of abandoned pets is causing “a major lack of space” in shelters across the country, despite caretakers “exceeding maximum capacity” to rescue as many animals as possible. “Our shelters are overcrowded and so many animals are waiting for families,” the company wrote in the call.
(Read more below the call)
100,000 animals abandoned every year
About 100,000 pets are abandoned in France every year, “60,000 of them in the summer,” said Transport Minister Clément Beaune during a visit to a shelter.
“This indicates that many people still go on holiday and leave an animal by the side of the road or at a roadside restaurant,” says Beaune.
Pet owners, eager to get off on a trip quickly, sometimes unobtrusively drop off their animals in boxes at shelters or leave them at a location, then call animal organizations to pick them up.
France now ranks “first in Europe for abandoning pets,” the animal welfare organization Brigitte Bardot Foundation said.
Despite many owners dumping their pets, it is illegal in France to leave a pet in the wild. New laws in July 2022 increased the sentence from two years in prison to three years, with a maximum fine of 30,000 euros.
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