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63 neglected kittens dumped at shelter
Mount Vernon, NY (US)Incident Date: Thursday, Aug 9, 2007
County: Westchester
Disposition: Open
Suspect(s) Unknown - We need your help!
Case Updates: 1 update(s) available
The three boxes filled to the brim with kittens, 63 in all, heaped on top of each other and covered in fleas, were dumped at the Mount Vernon Animal Shelter.
The kittens will be available for adoption as soon as they are medically cleared, which may take up to a week, Young said. Right now, the center is in need of foster homes for some of the kittens.
Finding homes for them quickly is a priority, said Jeannie Johnson, president of the Pet Adoption League of Westchester, because it is important to get them stabilized.
Johnson said she was speechless when Young called her and told her about the number of abandoned kittens.
"I thought: It is going to be almost impossible to find so many homes for them," Johnson said.
A few of the kittens are now at the shelter and Johnson and her family are holding a few, but Young has the bulk of them at her home.
Case UpdatesWhen Paula Young, director of the Mount Vernon Animal Shelter, found three boxes stuffed with mewing, flea-infested kittens on her doorstep, she had no doubt where they came from. Just days earlier, the shelter had rescued a severely injured pit bull lying in a pool of its own blood.
Both cases offered strong evidence that illegal dogfighting is occurring in underground locations in the Westchester County suburb, according to Young and Sean D'Aloise, the shelter's manager. The kittens and the pit bull were almost certainly being used as "bait" to train fighting dogs, they said in phone interviews on Thursday.
"It's a problem that's been around and it will stay around until the people doing it get caught," D'Aloise said. Like the recent arrest of Atlanta Falcons star quarterback Michael Vick on charges of alleged involvement in dog fighting, he said, "this helps to bring it to light. It's in everybody's back yard."
Actually, he said, clandestine dog fighting takes place in basements of homes and abandoned buildings but also may simply involve dog owners who challenge each other on the street to see whose dog is toughest.
How widespread it is as a commercial enterprise, however, is unclear.
Daphna Nachminovitch, domestic animal director for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said dog fighting exists on three levels, with an estimated 40,000 "professional" entrepreneurs involved in breeding, training and fighting, and many more amateur and street-corner participants. "The less organized, the more common it is," she said.
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals also rates the number of participants in the "tens of thousands" and says the practice appears to have surged anew after declining in the 1990s, partly due to the Internet making it easier to pass information.
Dog fighting is not confined to particular regions and has been reported in urban, suburban and rural areas, the ASPCA also said on its Web site.
Mike Pastore, field officer for New York City's Animal Care and Control, said organized dog fighting in the city is uncommon and arrests are rare. "Even in the shelter do we rarely have a dog come through with the pockmarks and other signs of a fighting dog," he said.
Dog fighting is illegal in all but two states, Idaho and Wyoming. In New York, fighting dogs is a felony, penalized by four years in prison and a $25,000 fine.
Spurred by the Vick case, Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., is co-sponsoring a bill in Congress to toughen federal law by increasing penalties for three to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and making it a crime to attend a dog fight or transport an animal across a state or international border for fighting purposes.
The kittens, 63 of them, were left on the Mt. Vernon shelter's doorstep Tuesday night, and were found by Young when she stopped by the shelter after hours on an impulse. "I didn't expect this," she said.
About 11 of the kittens may have been stolen during a recent break-in at the shelter, Young said. She speculated that recent publicity about the Vick case had prompted someone to get rid of the kittens after using them as "bait" in training fighting dogs. D'Aloise said young cats are useful for the purpose because they can't injure the dogs. The felines will be put up for adoption, she said.
Five days earlier, D'Aloise answered a call to retrieve a dog in the street and found the pit bull, bloody and suffering from multiple injuries that showed the earmarks of an abused fighting dog.
"Its hind legs were paralyzed and it had 45 puncture wounds," he said. "It appeared the dog had been hung upside down by its legs and muzzled so that it couldn't fight back when other dogs attacked it. Then it was just dumped in the street and left to die."
Floyd, as he named the dog, is responding to medical treatment, having regained use of his legs, but has a long way to go toward passing a "temperament" test, D'Aloise said. | Source: nydailynews.com - Aug 9, 2007
Update posted on Aug 22, 2011 - 6:39PM |
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