French animal shelters are sounding the alarm about the increase in the number of abandoned pets. About 100,000 pets are abandoned in France each year. It gets even worse in the summer when the French go on summer vacation and dump their pets en masse “on the side of the road or in the road”.
Animal shelters and local authorities said French vacationers are leaving their pets en masse on their way to their vacation destinations. La Societe Protectrice des Animaux (SPA), an animal welfare organization based in Paris, issued an urgent appeal for donations and adoptions this weekend. Our exhausted team has saved over 12,000 animals this summer alone.
As a result, the high number of abandoned pets is causing a “massive shortage of space” at shelters across the country, despite their caretakers “exceeding maximum capacity” to rescue as many animals as possible. “Our shelters are overcrowded and many animals are waiting for families,” the company wrote on the call.
(Read more at the bottom of the call)
100,000 animals are abandoned each year
About 100,000 pets are abandoned in France every year, “60,000 of them in the summer,” Transport Minister Clement Bonn said during a visit to a shelter.
“This suggests that a lot of people are still going on vacation and leaving an animal on the side of the road or at a roadside restaurant,” says Boone.
Pet owners, eager to get off a trip quickly, sometimes drop their animals unobtrusively in crates at shelters or leave them at a site, then call animal organizations to pick them up.
The Brigitte Bardot Animal Welfare Foundation said France now ranks first in Europe in abandoning pets.
Although many owners dump their pets, in France it is illegal 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.
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