A pair of 2-week-old orange tabby kittens is recuperating with a foster momcat after being discarded like trash in a Massachusetts dumpster.
Shareka Young said she was taking her aunt’s trash out in a Dorchester neighborhood when she heard meowing coming from a covered trash bin. She opened it up and discovered two wee kittens inside.
MSPCA spokesperson Brian Adams said, “If she had been a little later and somebody with a noisy trash truck didn’t know any better, they might have just started to toss him in and not realized until it was too late.”
“They were just sitting there crying, their mom wasn’t around, they didn’t have any food,” said Adams, “so she decided to pick them right up and bring them over to the MSPCA so that we could care for them.” Once they weigh about two lbs. — at around eight weeks of age — they’ll be ready for a loving furever home.
Adams says as appalling as this may be to most animal lovers, pets have been abandoned at an alarming rate this summer – in fact four cats have been found in the garbage in the past week.
“Earlier this week somebody did bring in a cat that was found nearby in Haverhill that was left tied up in a garbage bag next to a Salvation Army dumpster,” Adams said, “and then somebody before that had brought us a cat that was actually found in Derry, New Hampshire in a cat carrier placed in a dumpster.”
Adams says with the bad economy it seems many people can no longer afford their pets, but he stresses there are other options.
“What we ask is that they just bring an animal to us when they no longer can care for them rather than just abandoning them,” said Adams, “they are all animals, but they’re domesticated animals, they really can’t survive out in the wild.”
Abandoning a pet is a crime in Massachusetts. The MSPCA has a 24-hour emergency desk at which you can surrender pets anonymously, although they encourage people to provide info on the pet’s health history and behavior.
s the MSPCA seeks new owners for hundreds of homeless cats in its care, staff members wish to remind the public that animals should be properly surrendered through an adoption center or shelter and never abandoned. Abandonment constitutes animal cruelty in Massachusetts and perpetrators may receive a fine of up to $2,500 or five years in prison.
Anyone with information on these cases or any other abandoned pets should call the MSPCA’s Law Enforcement department at 1-800-628-5808.
Here’s a video report:
In a reader? Click here to watch video report.
[SOURCE: necn.com]
