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According to animal shelters, an increasing number of people are abandoning unwanted companion animals - either in the countryside, mistakenly assuming they can survive on their own there, or in the city, imagining they'll find food and shelter among thousands of people.
Only a very few of these abandoned animals, however, are found by people who will care for them or take them to a shelter. Most are doomed to a cruel and tragic end.
In North Texas, for example, shelters are seeing abandoned animals in alarming numbers. By the time they arrive at the shelter, most are half dead.
Abandoning a pet is illegal under Texas law, but the guilty parties rarely suffer the consequences of their acts. Wilberger County Deputy Jeff Case hasn't heard of a single arrest in the past five years for abandonment.
"It's very difficult to catch people doing that," he said.
Beverly Pedigo, manager of the Wilberger County Humane Society, said most people abandon animals when they think they won't get caught, and they do so mostly in the spring and summer; but all seasons are dangerous.
During the warm months, abandoned animals may suffer from dehydration; in cold months, from hypothermia. In all weathers they are likely to starve and are at the mercy of predators.
"Dogs are domestic animals, and they're used to being fed," Pedrigo says. "There's not many that know how to hunt still...They just wait - and some of them wait until they die - for their owners to come back."
The Audubon Society of Portland reports that not just dogs and cats, but many kinds of birds, small mammals and reptiles, are being abandoned outdoors by individuals and by classrooms.
These animals, released into an ecosystem to which they are not native, will either suffer and die, or will wreck havoc on the landscape, displacing native wildlife, destroying habitat, and introducing diseases and parasites to native populations.
For this reason the State of Oregon has banned the sale of many animals as companions because they pose a threat to Oregon's native wildlife.
The reality for all unwanted and abandoned companion animals is an ugly one; most will die slowly, or have to be euthanized.
Source : Answers.com
