Shas­tri Boodan

Free­lance Con­trib­u­tor

Sev­er­al stray an­i­mals were found poi­soned to death yes­ter­day near the Tem­ple in the Sea at Wa­ter­loo, prompt­ing strong con­dem­na­tion from an­i­mal wel­fare ad­vo­cates.

Dale Balka­rans­ingh, an an­i­mal rights ac­tivist and founder of the so­cial me­dia group Dog Fa­thers Res­cues, dis­cov­ered the bod­ies while on his rou­tine rounds to feed the an­i­mals.

Balka­rans­ingh re­port­ed find­ing one dog ac­tive­ly suf­fer­ing, shiv­er­ing and froth­ing, con­firm­ing it had been poi­soned, and im­me­di­ate­ly took it for vet­eri­nary care. He was in­formed by Cou­va/Tabaquite/Tal­paro Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion (CT­TRC) work­ers that they had al­ready found mul­ti­ple dead an­i­mals, in­clud­ing dogs, cats, and birds, at the near­by cre­ma­tion site.

The work­ers said they dis­posed of the car­cass­es by throw­ing them in­to the sea, ex­plain­ing they “couldn’t leave the dogs ly­ing around” be­fore cre­ma­tion ac­tiv­i­ties.

It is es­ti­mat­ed that be­tween eight and ten dogs, along with nu­mer­ous cats and birds, died in the in­ci­dent. Ap­prox­i­mate­ly 21 dogs and 100 cats are be­lieved to re­side on the com­pound. A sus­pi­cious, large­ly un­touched tray of food found at the scene is sus­pect­ed to have been laced with poi­son. The area lacks sur­veil­lance, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to iden­ti­fy those re­spon­si­ble.

Balka­rans­ingh, who has been feed­ing over 200 stray an­i­mals dai­ly for five years, high­light­ed the ab­sence of shel­ters for strays in the Wa­ter­loo area. His or­gan­i­sa­tion op­er­ates a trap, neuter, and re­lease pro­gramme to man­age the lo­cal stray pop­u­la­tion. He is­sued a plea to the per­pe­tra­tors, stat­ing, “An­i­mals are God’s cre­ation... please don’t hurt them.”

He al­so said the site is fre­quent­ly used by in­di­vid­u­als to aban­don pets they can no longer care for, par­tic­u­lar­ly those with new lit­ters, lead­ing to com­plaints from area users.

Alan “Taxi” Seep­er­sad, the lo­cal gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tive on the CT­TRC, con­firmed the cor­po­ra­tion’s K9 unit is cur­rent­ly non-func­tion­al. He ex­pressed his dis­may at the poi­son­ing and in­di­cat­ed that once the unit is op­er­a­tional, the in­ten­tion is to re­move strays and house them in a shel­ter for adop­tion.

Vet­eri­nar­i­an Dr Glenn Ra­mad­hars­ingh urged gov­ern­ment sup­port for an­i­mal spay­ing and neu­ter­ing pro­grammes, point­ing out the high cost of such pro­ce­dures, which can be around $800. He sug­gest­ed a na­tion­al pro­gramme un­der the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, util­is­ing gov­ern­ment vet­eri­nar­i­ans, to make these ser­vices more af­ford­able and ac­ces­si­ble.

Dr Ra­mad­hars­ingh al­so ad­vised po­ten­tial pet own­ers to con­sid­er the fi­nan­cial im­pli­ca­tions of food, med­ical care, and over­all main­te­nance be­fore ac­quir­ing a pet.