Three pups wrapped up in barbed wire left to die on IIT campus. Student calls animal activists, who rush the dogs to hospital. Two of them succumb to injuries, one is out of danger. It is not just a story of animal neglect but one of appalling cruelty.
Three pups, wrapped in a plastic bag bound with barbed wire, were pulled out from a trash-filled ditch in the IIT campus at Powai on Friday. The pups, barely a month old, were badly infested with maggots. Two of them died soon after their rescue by animal activists. The third, a male, is currently recuperating at a foster care with a maggot infection under one of his legs. “This pup has survived horrible cruelty that only man is capable of,” said animal activist Christina.
Lobo Jha who coordinated the six-hour rescue operation to pull out the pups from the ditch. Jha received a call on Friday afternoon from a campus student. The boy had heard a howling sound coming from the ditch and had dug into the trash and managed to pull out one pup through a gap in the barbed wire. He could not reach further down to rescue the other pups. Jha told him to keep the rescued pup warm and dry and to feed it some milk.
Little later, Rajesh Savla who runs Paws Pet Taxi, a private animal ambulance service, reached the spot with another animal activist Amit Pathak to retrieve the remaining pups. Over the next several hours they cleared the trash in the ditch and pulled out two more pups. “The maggots had made holes in their bodies. There were maggots even in their eyes,” said Pathak, adding that the wounds looked at least four days old.
The pups were rushed to Dr Umesh Jadhav, a veterinary physician in Oshiwara. “Two of the pups, which were female, succumbed there while the third is now out of danger,” said Pathak. The activists are wondering whether to take police action in the case, but they have no eye witnesses.
The dumping of the pups amounts to attempt to murder, said J C Khanna, Secretary of the Bombay Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The Society receives 100 to 150 complaint calls every month about mistreatment of animals. “The calls have increased over the last two years. People are getting more intolerant towards strays and others’ pets.”
Only recently, a 58-year-old elephant Bijlee died from weight related disease. She too had huge maggot infested wounds which made it difficult for her to even stand. Last month, MM had reported on the death of a pug which was thrown out of a residential tower in Powai. A yearand-a-half back, four stray dogs were poisoned to death in a posh housing society in Thane.
