María Pérez I Málaga, (EFE).- The holidays are here and the Andalusian animal protectors are preparing to face the summer, the worst time of the year, when abandonments increase and foster care, adoptions and the number of volunteers decrease. and all this in difficult conditions for humans and animals, with temperatures that often exceed 40 degrees.
In the Protectora de Málaga the situation in summer is usually complicated, according to what its president, Carmen Manzano, explained to EFE. Mainly because of two factors. The return of many volunteers to their towns and cities, mostly students, and the end of the hunting season.
“We fear much more the abandonment suffered by hunting dogs, now that new litters are beginning to be born. Most of them end up at the door of the shelter”, they lament from this protector, “saturated” also due to the arrival of pups from illegal hatcheries dismantled by the police.
dropouts on vacation
Verónica Pozuelo, a volunteer and vice-president of Arca de Noé, a protector that has been operating since 1997 in the city of Córdoba, laments the notable increase in dropouts in summer. “The animals acquired during another time of the year are left over when the summer season arrives.”
When going on vacation, “the owners have no one to leave them with and are not willing to take them with them. Or to pay for a dog residence, for which they resort to abandonment”, says Pozuelo.
For Ana Torres, manager of the Huellitas Happy association in Granada, the season “is being brutal in all aspects.” With “a sharp increase in abandonments” that she attributes, in part, to the adoption or purchase of puppies at Christmas. That “by the time summer arrives and they have grown up, they no longer want them.”
Measures against extreme heat
If something characterizes Andalusia in summer, it is its high temperatures. During this second heat wave, the provinces of Córdoba, Seville, Granada or Málaga have exceeded 44 degrees. And dogs and cats also suffer from this extreme heat.
For this reason, the protectors try to adopt measures that make the situation more bearable. At the Arca de Noé shelter, says Verónica Pozuelo, “the dogs have their covered and uncovered area inside their kennel. And when they go out for recess we fill basins and inflatable pools with water or we shower them with hoses”.
In the Protectora de Málaga they also mitigate the heat of the animals by cooling them with water. “We hose down the kennels and patios daily and fill inflatable pools. We take them out only in the hours when it’s less hot and the entire shelter is covered with awnings so they don’t get direct sun.”
Protectors like Huellitas Happy, who do not have their own facilities, notice the effects of heat on the physical condition of the animals when they are rescued. “The dogs, especially the puppies, arrive very thin, full of parasites and with swollen bellies,” says Ana Torres.
With cats it is different, because the protectors affirm that they have better adaptation capacities and their resting places, being higher and having more nooks and crannies, allow them to stay sheltered from the heat.
Instability in foster care
Huellitas Happy is sustained thanks to the shelters, voluntary or paid, to which dozens of people from Granada offer themselves every day. However, when the summer holidays arrive, availability plummets: “Your foster care leaves you from one day to the next. You run out of people.”
The students who leave at the end of the university course play a crucial role: “Until recently, 60% of my foster parents were students, now this percentage has dropped,” says Torres.
From Noah’s Ark they value that the number of receptions is always “variable”, but they also observe a decrease with the departure of the students, who “yes can receive throughout the course, but in summer they no longer continue”.
The importance of castrating and chipping
The increase in dropouts is noticeable every summer, but this much more. “So far this year we have collected more than 200 animals,” says Ana Torres, who warns of the need to stop this trend “by castrating and microchipping pets.”
Carmen Manzano adds emphatically: “When you adopt a pet, you assume a ‘promise’ for life. The moment you abandon him, you break his life. The owners will have a hard time, I don’t doubt it, but the one that will never recover will be the abandoned animal”.
The animal abandonment rate in Spain is one of the highest in Europe. According to data from the Affinity Foundation, in 2022 more than 288,000 dogs and cats (170,105 and 11,352, respectively) were collected by protectors throughout the country during that period, which represents almost 3% of the total number of companion animals estimated who live in Spanish homes.
Unwanted litters continue to be, for yet another year, the leading reason for animal abandonment in Spain (more than 19% of cases). They are followed by problems with the animal’s behavior and loss of interest in it, in both cases with 12%, and the end of the hunting season (11%). EFE