Council Tells Finder of Stray Dog to ‘Put her Back on the Street’
Posted By Freelance Writers Date: 2/08 Posted Under: Animal Welfare, Social IssuesDerby City Council has had to apologise after one of its employees told a woman to turn a dog out onto the street.
The woman, who found the stray after it wandered into a pet shop where she works, called the council after not being able to get through to the dog’s owners from the number on the dog’s collar.
The dog, a West Highland Terrier named Bella, has now been reunited with her owners.
The council employee had told the finder of the dog that council kennels were full.
They said: ‘There are no kennels for tonight, they’re all full, so either someone can take her in for the night or put her back on the street’.
“There was no way I was putting a stray dog on the street.
“Nobody in their right mind should put another living being on to the street and expect someone else to deal with it.”
City councillor Bob Troup apologised: “She should not have been told that. She should have been helped to find a place for the dog overnight.
“There is a problem in the summer - the number of stray dogs peaks because of children on school holidays playing with dogs and letting them get away.
“We are planning to get some more kennels in Derby to act as a holding kennel at peak times.”
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Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 8:29 am and is filed under Animal Welfare, Social Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
shoocking
Disgraceful!
This is what happens when councils do not take the issue of stray dogs seriously.
Surely by ‘telling’ the finder to let the dog go, if there had been a subsequent accident or incident then the council would have been liable for advising this course of action?
DEFRA is partly responsible for this state of affairs as well by not forcing councils to provide adequate stray dog facilities now that the police no longer deal with them out of hours.
Refusing to accept dogs because there is nowhere to take them obviously shows that this council needs to spend more effort and resources on the issue!
If the council employee who told the finder to let the dog go was a dog warden, they should possibly reconsider why they are doing the job!