They Kept Digging
It started as an Associated Press story on what seemed to be an isolated incident: "Pet Massacre in Puerto Rico: Pet Owners in Puerto Rican Housing Projects Mourn Dogs, Cats Thrown Off Bridge to Their Deaths." The story, written by Michael Melia and posted on Oct. 13, was followed in the next few days by AP reports on the outrage caused by the massacre. Then the story seemed to fade away.
But the AP kept digging. On Nov. 14, Yaisha Vargas and Andrew O. Selsky reported in an AP Impact story, "Pet Massacres Carried Out in Puerto Rico: Puerto Rican Companies Brutally Killed Thousands of Dogs and Cats, Ex-Workers Say," the bridge incident was not isolated:
The AP probe, which included visits to two sites where animals were slaughtered, found the inhumane killings were far more extensive than that one incident. The AP saw and was told about a scale and brutality far beyond even what animal welfare activists suspected, stretching over the last eight years….
A former Animal Control Solutions employee told the AP that he witnessed another worker in 2005 dragging 12 to 15 small dogs out of a van along a road outside San Juan. Normally, workers injected animals with a euthanasia drug but on this day there was none. The animals were instead given an overdose of a sedative and flung 50 feet into a trash-filled gully. Some of the dogs were alive as they crashed on top of junked beds, bottles and other garbage.
"I could hear some of the dogs whimpering as they hit the tree branches and then the ground," the former employee said as he stood with AP journalists in the muck at the site, which still holds the stench of death.
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