Campaign against abandoning pets kicks off, Saddaa lends star power
Chennai: Chennai seems to be going the way of other metros, with pets being abandoned more often than ever, complain animal activists. To drive the message home, animal welfare organisation People For Animals on Saturday launched a ‘Don’t Abandon Your Pets’ campaign along with Amrutanjan Healthcare.
The number of abandoned pets has grown from two or three a month five years ago to around two a week now. To highlight this issue, actress and animal lover Sadaa has agreed to be the brand ambassador for the campaign.
“PFA Chennai has over 1,000 animals — horses, cattle, dogs, pigs, cats and sheep — all rescued from various situations of purposeful violence. Among these are around 500 dogs, all of which have been abandoned by their owners. Our focus was on preventing the interstate transport of live animals in terrible conditions. We find that now one of our biggest missions is handling abandoned pets,” a PFA spokesperson said. These animals go through immense anguish and many of them do not survive the trauma, sadness and shock of being thrown out on the streets or abandoned in a shelter, the spokesperson said.
Activists say the reasons for abandoning pets range from rising costs, new jobs forcing people to move, landlords who don’t allow pets, birth of a child, wrong advice from doctors, old age of pets, lack of manpower and time to care for pets. “We come across several dogs belonging to the German Shepherd and Doberman breeds who have been abandoned because of health problems associated with inbreeding, caused by unscrupulous commercial breeders,” the PFA spokesperson said.
