Degradation and filth, chain-driven animals found among carcasses and sewages

Corpses, sewage and a piercing odor of decayed flesh.  When the operators of Servizio Interprovinciale di tutela animale (Interprovincial Service of animal care) and the Carabinieri entered the property in via San Giovanni Evangelista, Caidate, they immediately understood that they were up against something terrible.

The warning was made because of some neglected dogs that were seen. For days, in fact, the operators have been monitoring the three dogs that, visible from the street, for at least one month, had been sleeping in the open, tied to a chain, without a kennel or anything else, weather-beaten, exposed to the cold and the chill. But when they went in, they found all the rest: a concentration camp for animals.

ALL THE PICTURES OF THE RECOVERED ANIMALS

Among the dogs visible from the street, one was female, tied to a chain 1.5m long, without any refuge from weather conditions, with the exception of a metallic cargo bed full of mud and the skin of dead animals. The chain impeded her to reach water and food, and had penetrated the skin and hypodermis of her neck, causing an evident, deep and blooding laceration. Two other mongrels were found segregated in a corridor of the house’s basement, completely submerged by the mud (around 30 cm), in the dark, without neither water nor food. Another dog was segregated in a trapdoor of the house’s basement, completely in the dark, without neither a refuge nor water or food.  When the operators found it, it was scared by the light.

Then, the inspection focused on the pig station. One pig, was found in a metallic box that was so small to impede it any movement. It could not even sit down or lie down, it was immersed in its droppings and had lesions on all the ventral region of the body that can be referred to burns due to the contact with its urine. Another one had to share the space with a pig carcass evidently decaying, and was pushed to take the “cannibalism” attitude.

All around, there were thousands of bones, among which the operators found chicken and pig skulls and a horse skull.

Two people were reported. The charge goes from animal abuse, to uncontrolled abandonment of waste, to the hypothesis of theft against the State because of the finding of two red partridges, that is two examples of wild, native avifauna, member of the state assets and unavailable without the possession of a regular hunting license.

At the end of the intervention, all the area was seized (around 4 hectares), because full of every kind of waste, among which there were some plates of asbestos cement,  a roost, a pigpen and the basement of the house, where, at the moment of the inspection,  a dog was penned, completely in the dark.

Among the animals, 10 dogs, 9 pigs, 40 poultry items and 2 red partridges were seized. All the animals were entrusted with judicial custody to the major of Sumirago and to the ASL of Varese. The dogs, the poultry and the partridges have already been moved; the pigs are still in loco and the ASL and the municipality have to pinpoint as soon as possible an appropriate place where to move them.