Pet Massacre Alleged In Puerto Rico

Police Probe Company That Was Supposed To Take Strays To Shelters

(AP)  Back roads, gorges and garbage dumps on this tropical island are littered with the decaying carcasses of dogs and cats. An Associated Press investigation reveals why: possibly thousands of unwanted animals have been tossed off bridges, buried alive and otherwise inhumanely disposed of by taxpayer-financed animal control programs.

Witnesses who spoke with the AP said that, despite pledges to deliver adoptable strays to shelters and humanely euthanize the rest, the island's leading private animal control companies generally did neither.

News that live animals had been thrown to their deaths from a bridge reached the public last month when Animal Control Solutions, a government contractor, was accused of inhumanely killing some 80 dogs and cats seized from three housing projects in the town of Barceloneta. A half dozen survived the fall of at least 50 feet.

The AP probe, which included visits to two sites where animals were slaughtered, found the inhumane killings were far more extensive than that one incident. The AP saw and was told about a scale and brutality far beyond even what animal welfare activists suspected, stretching over the last eight years.

A $22.5 million lawsuit against Animal Control Solutions and city officials - including those who helped round up the animals - was filed on behalf of 16 Barceloneta families whose dogs or cats were seized under rules prohibiting pets at the city projects. The animals' deaths show "a cold and depraved heart and has stirred public outrage around the whole world," the lawsuit says.

Julio Diaz, owner of Animal Control Solutions and a co-founder of another company, Pet Delivery, declined AP requests for an interview but told reporters there is no proof his company was responsible for the Barceloneta pet massacre. "We have never thrown animals off any place," he said.

A police investigation into the Barceloneta killings has not led to charges, but police Sgt. Wilbert Miranda, who heads the probe, said the information gathered so far indicates Animal Control Solutions was responsible. He declined to give details.

Maria Kortright, a lawyer involved in the suit, said it's clear the pets Animal Control Solutions removed from Barceloneta were the same ones hurled off the bridge because the survivors have been identified by their owners.

"Last Tuesday, I saw one of the survivors back at its home," Kortright said.

Animal welfare activists have complained to government agencies for years about allegations of improper disposal of animals, but say officials didn't act. Preventive action also is almost nonexistent: Puerto Rico has at least 100,000 stray dogs and cats - and no island-wide spaying or neutering programs.

Activist Alfredo Figueroa said the animal disposal companies acted with impunity because government agencies ignored allegations of cruelty, rather than investigate the companies or address the overpopulation of strays.

"There is apathy," Figueroa said. "No one wants to take responsibility."

A former employee of one of Diaz's companies told the AP that the firms rounded up thousands of animals over the years, brutally killed many of them and discarded the corpses wherever it was convenient. One of the former employees led the AP to two different killing fields and he and another former employee described a third.

"Not a single animal was turned over to a shelter," a former dogcatcher for Animal Control Solutions told the AP. Both he and an ex-employee of Pet Delivery, who was interviewed separately, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Both said they left the animal disposal jobs voluntarily.

The AP contacted all eight animal shelters and sanctuaries across Puerto Rico, and they confirmed that none had received animals for potential adoption from Diaz's companies.

Diaz co-founded Pet Delivery in 1999 and created Animal Control Solutions in 2002. Pet Delivery appears to be defunct, having reported no earnings since 2004. Facing little competition, the companies had 85 contracts with municipalities and other clients worth US$1.1 million in the past eight years, according to the Puerto Rican comptroller's office.

The AP could find no sign that any of the municipalities checked to make sure the companies dealt with the strays humanely.

"It wasn't our responsibility," said Edwin Arroyo, special assistant to the mayor of Barceloneta, which paid Animal Control Solutions up to US$20,000 per year and in October hired the company to remove banned pets from housing projects - allegedly the ones that wound up at the bottom of the bridge.

The pet disposal scandal adds to Puerto Rico's poor reputation for treatment of animals. Cockfighting is legal, with matches shown on television. One of the island's beaches is known as Dead Dog Beach - a place where teenagers drive over live puppies sealed in bags or cruelly kill them with machetes and arrows, according to animal welfare groups that photographed the atrocities.

Figueroa says he met Diaz in 1999 and introduced him to city officials in Fajardo. The city then awarded Pet Delivery a contract to remove strays. But Figueroa said he later learned that Diaz's company also was removing pets with collars and ID tags, and dumping their bodies in a field.

"Crying children, old people, a sick woman were all calling us, thinking we were involved," Figueroa said.

A former Animal Control Solutions employee told the AP that he witnessed another worker in 2005 dragging 12 to 15 small dogs out of a van along a road outside San Juan. Normally, workers injected animals with a euthanasia drug but on this day there was none. The animals were instead given an overdose of a sedative and flung 50 feet into a trash-filled gully. Some of the dogs were alive as they crashed on top of junked beds, bottles and other garbage.

"I could hear some of the dogs whimpering as they hit the tree branches and then the ground," the former employee said as he stood with AP journalists in the muck at the site, which still holds the stench of death.

Not all the dogs died, however. A dog that was not a stray, but a sickly pet whose owner wanted it euthanized, managed to limp home. The angry owner telephoned the company and demanded it retrieve the dog and do the job right, the former employee recalled.

The former employee also showed AP reporters a highway rest stop near a gorge outside the town of Cayey where, he said, workers would inject dogs. At the edge of the gorge lay the skeletal remains of more than a dozen dogs amid matted fur and two dog collars with no tags.

Asked if the number of dogs and cats killed by Animal Control Solutions was in the hundreds, the former employee shook his head.

"It is in the thousands," he said. "On a good month, we would pick up 900."

One dog, stuffed in a sack, was found recently at the Cayey site among other bagged carcasses. It apparently survived the fall and managed to poke its head out of the bag before dying, said Carmen Cintron, who runs an animal shelter.

"I am having nightmares when I think about what that poor dog went through before it died," Cintron said.

Until 2003, Pet Delivery ran a shelter where workers injected strays, often not knowing what the drugs were or their proper doses, the former employee of that company told the AP.

Some animals were adopted from the shelter, but others - including puppies and kittens - were euthanized, the ex-employee said. Euthanizing animals that cannot be adopted is standard practice in pet shelters, but the former employee said animals at Pet Delivery's shelter were inhumanely killed.

"Any available employee at that moment would use the drug that was available and they were thrown half dead into a hole, and that's why there were some live dogs among them," he said. "What he (Diaz) had us do was to throw dirt on top of the live dogs along with the dead ones, so they all would die."

[yetim-2009]

drivelphobe...
I can read, bu the question is... can you write? Your comment came across as a generalizing statement, which caused an effect. I usually dont write on these panels, but I felt that I needed to thi stime. I am very proud of where I come from and have very little tolerance of people that make broad statements and generalizing statements. I know what I read and you did not expressed yourself clearly.

So, I say to you, please read and re-read your stuff, so you dont get attacked by something you wrote, which was something you did not mean.

[ladyephesus1]

Lord, what is this world coming to??
Any human being capable of this, deserves to be jailed and the key thrown away!!

This is disheartening to me. I cannot believe this *** im reading.

[fibonacci_]

yamaha I agree. Animals are for the most part such sweet creatures. How can anyone be so insensitive.

[amontenegro]

logicanada...... I apologize for my mistake....I guess I am going to Costa Rica after all........

[mitzitr44]

Oh, that is the most horrible treatment of an animal I have ever read. How do people live with them selves to do such cruel stuff?

[amontenegro]

bequialife......I totaly agree with you on wasting money (my money) on scums.

[logicanada]

readerfan, you don''t find a lot of kids in Puerto Rico that have had all the advantages. By contrast many work in the service industry and are exploited by employers. Many young men see their little sisters working the *** trades which cater to mostly white adult males.
I don''t think they have declared war on animals. I think they MAY be venting their angst the only way they know how.
In any event it will all come out in the wash eventually

[lovemylo]

These people are sick!! I hope they meet the same cruel, horriable death that they have inflicted upon these poor helpless animals. I hope they rot in h*ll!

[readerfan]

logicanada..ahhhh...not everyone had "something done to them" to make them this way. Some people are just bad people, some are just evil. Some murders/pet abusers had great parents and had all the advantages in the world...i don''t believe all (though there are some..I will agree) these people had something happen to them..that is just an excuse for these people to do what they do.

[readerfan]

logicanada ..why can''t you advocate 2 things? I don''t believe in the war in Iraq and I can speak out about that but I can also speak out about this as well. Each group has their own purpose. PETA, ASPCA are speaking out for the animals and the other groups speak for minority rights, other groups speak for humane rights...You can be part of more than one group...

[logicanada]

readerfan..further, what was done to these people that they feel the need to do this to animals? There is a question worth answering because cruelty to animals is a harbinger of a murderous bent.

[logicanada]

readerfan, I do love our mini schnauzers however I prefer to advocate more fervently against cruelty to people. It goes back to my first post at 12:17pm.

[readerfan]

logicanada..does that matter? diseased or not they should have been put down humanely. Some dogs/cats need to be, I understand that...
Obviously you either don''t have pets or have them and get you kicks out of beating them. Does it make you feel bigger and more powerful? Doctor Moreau? Are you kidding...?? Get real. Get some compassion...

[logicanada]

readerfan..if you want animals to have a voice you will have to visit the Island of Dr. Moreau.
Does anyone know if these animals were destroyed due to disease?

[readerfan]

logicanada..totally different subject there..we know that congress/president are going to do exactly what they want regardless of what we want when it comes to the war...
I guess I just believe that animals should have a voice too and someone should be looking out for them since no one else will...

[logicanada]

readerfan. PETA pestering the S**t out of people is half the reason people go crazy enough to kill animals.
The folks at PETA could better use their energies pestering the s**T out of congress to stop the killing of people in Iraq.

[logicanada]

Jetranger7... you are a moron/moran.....however you like it. Just don''t burn me to death with drugs!

[bequialife]

Between this and the oil spills in San Fransico, the Black Sea...we are doomed.

[readerfan]

logicanada..Why not? Someone needs to do something since the government don''t care...PETA can pester the s*** out of them and maybe they might try to clean up a little.

[spay2]

This is truly on a scale and brutality far beyond even what anyone would believe the most Vile, Atrocious, and Merciless Monsters could do.
Black Hearts is what they have! Black Hearts!
This mass genocide of horrorifing torture, being buried alive, etc., must have been like going through a "Dante''s Inferno" of Hell for these precious souls.... And this had been happening for over EIGHT YEARS and the knowing government officials DID NOT CARE!!! They did nothing about it! Think about this~~~~~
This adds up to a staggering, heart wrenching FIVE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED innocent beings being butchered and murdered!
Neither I, my friends or relatives will ever
vacation, visit or purchase from this horrible country.
Please pass on this webpage to all you know!
"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don''t do anything about it."
-Albert Einstein
"Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight" ~ A. Shweitzer