Friday, September 22, 2006

A woman and her pets

Every once in a while you hear about older women who collect a lot of pets (usually cats, it seems to me). A woman like this was arrested and committed for 72 hours of psychiatric observation in Kitchener the other day. They found over 4000 mice, 50 guinea pigs and rabbits, three turtles, and two pigeons in the house. They've condemned the house due to wiring damage from the rodents. All of the animals have been taken into custody by the Kitchener-Waterloo Humane Society. There is a story about this situation in the local paper here (I hope you can read it). I feel sort of sorry for the woman - she's clearly got issues. I wonder whether they can actually help people suffering from whatever she's got.

Unfortunately, the humane society doesn't have the resources to look after all of these animals. They've received free food and supplies from a local business, but they don't have enough resources for the increased staffing, vets, and ongoing upkeep of these animals in addition to the animals they already have there. I ended up donating money to them - I don't think that they're a registered charity, but I still wanted to help.

In the process of making my donation, I wound up with a PayPal account. I think I may be just about the last person in the Western world to have one - but then, I've never bought or sold anything on eBay :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When I brought home 2 kittens to bring our animal count to 3, Don told me that 5 and over is a sign of eccentricity!!

Hope the animals all survive and find new homes
Aunt Margaret