“HATTIESBURG, MS (WDAM) – An employee of the Southern Pines Animal Shelter arrived at work Monday morning and found 11 Shepard[sic] mix puppies tied to the gate.
Surveillance video at the shelter showed a woman taking two puppies at a time by the neck from her vehicle and using zip ties and baling wire to tie them to the fence. The zip ties had been tightened around their neck.” (7/12/11)
The full article can be found here.
It’s possible that it simply did not occur to the woman that zip ties are, perhaps, a less than appropriate method for attaching puppies to a fence. That sort of thing is what brings one to add the tags “puppies” and “ignorance” to the same article (and mourn the state of a world in which that happens).
However, ignorance of puppy-tying methods aside, this sort of behavior — breeding unwanted litters of puppies, abandoning the puppies at all, dropping them off at the shelter after hours to avoid hassles — is the kind of thing that happens when humans stop viewing animals as living things and begin viewing them as just things.
This is the kind of thing that we, as a culture, as a species, need to fight. The ability to view another living creature (human or animal) as an object to which we owe no responsibility is behind, well, a lot of our problems.
Animalfeasance 