Foreign Property News | Posted by Si Thu Aung
Japanese health officials have found 164 emaciated dogs crammed into a tiny house in one of the country’s worst cases of animal hoarding, an animal-rights activist said on Wednesday,
The parasite-infested animals were found in the home in Izumo city, western Japan, in mid-October after neighbours had complained, said Kunihisa Sagami, the head of animal rights group Dobutsukikin.
Public health officials had first visited the house, where an elderly couple lived with their daughter, seven years ago after getting complaints from neighbours about the noise and bad smell, but the owner refused to let officials investigate at that time.
The dogs lived crammed onto shelves and under tables, sinks and chairs in a one-storey house measuring 323 square feet. “The entire floor was filled with dogs and all the floor space you could see was covered with faeces,” Sagami said. The garden soil outside was also found covered with poo.
The dogs had consumed some of their own dung, causing them to be affected by parasites. According to a local media report, the family had kept one stray dog some 30 to 40 years ago, which gave birth to a litter. The family said they could not afford to spay and neuter the dogs, so they kept getting more of them.
In a post on Instagram, Dobutsukikin described this as “an obvious case of abuse”. The family agreed to give up the dogs. Dobutsukikin said it would sterilise all the animals and look for foster homes for them after they received medical care. The number of suspected animal abusers in Japan has been rising in recent years, according to the National Police Agency, which has been tracking such data since 2010.
There were a record 105 cases investigated last year, including some which had videos uploaded online, Kyodo reported. Of those, 66 cases involved cats, while 27 dogs were victimised. Other abused animals included horses, raccoons and ferrets.
A man arrested in July last year had posted a video online in which he put a condom over his pet parakeet and then poked the animal with a stick. Police were alerted by viewers and the man was fined 200,000 yen (US$1,900).In January this year, police arrested a man in Tochigi Prefecture on suspicion of animal cruelty after they found 73 dogs in his home following a neighbour’s tip-off, Japan Today reported.
Ref: SCMP
