I'm just outside of town surrounded by orchards and alfalfa, and being just a couple miles outside city limits we become the dumping ground and frequently get trash left on the roadside and in the orchards for those too lazy to drive 5 more miles and spend a few bucks at the county dump, as well as dealing with plenty of abandoned dogs and cats ... sucks.
Sometimes the cats end up as successful ferals, the friendly ones come to the houses looking for a new home and I'll either keep them or find someone to adopt them, sometimes I find the taped up boxes of abandoned kittens too late to save them, and sometimes they end up as coyote food. All of my cats were dumps that I either found or they came to the house and found me.
The abandoned dogs sometimes "pack up" and start causing issues and harassing the neighbor's horses and goats. Just this week a roaming pack of 4 young-ish german shepherds showed up, they normally trigger the cameras between 11pm-3am and have been causing issues harassing the neighbor's livestock. The friendly dogs I find homes for or call a rescue that is well aware of the issues out here. I'd say 30-40% of the very friendly and very clean obviously recently dumped dogs are chipped, and the owners sound very awkward on the phone when the Sheriff's animal control officer calls them and says we found your dog.
Had this super sweet girl show up early this year during a light rain, she wasn't soaked and had zero mud on her legs or paws. Saw her on the cameras while I was running errands and found her sleeping on the lounge chair on the back patio. She was chipped, the address showed her home about 8 miles away in the center of town... there's no way she ended up 8 miles from home while still super clean and nearly dry if she had to walk through rain and muddy orchards unless she was dumped near the house. Sheriff went to have a talk with them after they sounded sketchy during the "we found your dog" phone call. I felt kind of bad when the animal control officer took her, because if she took them back to the owner on the chip chances are she got dumped off again.
We also get quite a few dead dogs dumped that were obviously used for fighting, tore up badly with lots of bite wounds and usually in a garbage bag or rolled up in carpet remnants or a tarp. While out shooting ground squirrels last Sunday I found another dead dog about 400 yards off the road in the walnuts. Had been there a week or so and was pretty ripe, no collar, no obvious fight wounds... no idea if it was dead when dumped or was dumped off and didn't survive.
We have cameras set up in the frequent trouble spots and have caught a few people in the act, and according to the Sheriff they were charged with animal abandonment and convicted.
Even though I know you can't save or find homes for them all there's absolutely no excuse for doing this crap, but it's very frustrating when all the shelters around here are overfull and not taking any more animals and the 2 clinics that do low cost neutering are 3+ months out for appointments for males and 6+ months out for appointments for females; makes it nearly impossible for the caring people who are short on money to get their pets fixed for a low cost, and makes it hard for others to do trap-neuter-release for feral cats and keep the feral cat populations in check when you can't get an appointment in a reasonable time. Some of the rescue organizations have standing appointments with the neutering clinic every two weeks and sometimes they have an open appointment you can use, but me having terrible luck every time I manage to trap a feral I can't get them into the clinic in a reasonable time and I can't keep them caged up for weeks hoping to get an available appointment.
And now for something even worse than just dumping them off out in the country-- the neighbor's son is an evening/night delivery driver for a warehousing and distribution company around here and 3 times just in the last 2 months he's seen people toss boxes of critters out of their windows onto the freeway while driving. One box of puppies and 2 boxes of kittens. I've read about that happening in the news from time to time but it's another thing to hear him talk about it and then show me the dashcam videos... really makes your blood boil. He stopped for all of them, unfortunately none of the puppies made it and most of the kittens didn't make it, but he managed to run out between traffic and snag 2 surviving kittens from one box and 1 kitten from the second box... unfortunately the rest got hit and didn't make it.
Here's one of the kittens the neighbor saved from one of the boxes dumped freeway they decided to keep... I suggested they name him Kitler for obvious reasons but they declined. Hope he doesn't invade Poland one day.
And a couple months later...
And here's the last dumped cat that we kept. Going to dinner one night and saw eyes glowing inside the orchard at the corner, stopped the car and called and she came running over, totally clean paws even though the sprinklers were on in the orchard... obviously not a feral and a fresh dump. Picked her up and she immediately started purring and wanting attention, drove her back home (was totally cool and unfazed with the car ride), and she immediately was friendly with the dogs and just wanted to snuggle with everyone. She's still super friendly with anybody, kills every mouse and gopher she finds, has caught 3 doves out of the wheat stubble just in the last couple of weeks (I told her it isn't dove season until September but she doesn't seem to care), follows you around to help with all the yard work, and is still good friends with the dogs. No idea how anyone could dump off a cat this cool. She went into heat about a week after we found her, so maybe they dumped her off because she was in heat and they didn't have the money to get her spayed... still not a good reason to dump her off outside of town.
This was right after getting back to the house after picking her up:
This was the next morning, totally relaxed even with a hyper lab puppy that wouldn't leave her alone:
And just a couple months later, friends with everyone.
Every evening her and the lab chase each other all over the yard. She'll wait around corners or hide in the bushes and ambush him and jump onto his back then jump off or box his head a few times and then run across the yard and up a tree and he'll follow, then repeat. A lot of the time if you throw a ball to the lab he'll take it to the cat and drop it in front of her and sit and stare at her wagging his tail instead of bringing it back to you, lol
Also, this deserves posting...
