Albert Kleyn, chairman of the Animal Care Society, is about to embark upon the busiest week of his year, helping to rescue abandoned and unwanted animals, often given as Christmas presents.
If you were in Cork on New Year's Eve you may have noticed the Animal Care Society fundraising around the city and its suburbs.
Its chairman, Albert Kleyn, a retired IBM manager, says it
relies on its money-raising efforts to stay afloat. "We have a
massive shortfall to overcome each year. We get a grant of about
€25,000,
but our vet bills alone come to €74,000."
If Kleyn's workload at this time of year is anything to go by,
the message that pets are for life, not just for Christmas, is
still not getting through. "Kids are persuasive, so they convince
parents that a pet is the perfect present, and promise to feed and
walk it, but they quickly lose interest. Christmas is the worst
time possible to introduce a pet into a home. There will be
accidents, because everything is fair game to a puppy: presents,
lights, the tree. The joy turns to frustration, and the pounds end
up full of unwanted presents."
Pound animals face a grim prognosis. "Some Irish pounds have a 100 per cent destruction rate. We are the dregs of Europe in terms of animal welfare. At ACS we have a no-euthanasia policy, and we are the only organisation that spends money trying to save animals."
The week ahead will be the busiest of the year. "We see pups
abandoned in woods, dying slow, agonising deaths from starvation;
people who think it's okay to drown an animal they don't want. We
came across a farmer who had a working dog that once saved his
kid's life, but when that dog could no longer work, because of
sheer exhaustion, he wrapped baling twine around his neck and threw
him off a cliff. I found a dog that was tied to a rock on a beach
and left to drown; kids in Cork who put kittens on a main road and
were betting on how long it would take for them to be run over.
Sometimes this job
really challenges your view of human beings. But we rejoice
every time we save an animal."