Animal cruelty in plain sight in Lisbon – and (almost) no-one does a thing…

A truly hideous example of animal cruelty played out in plain sight in Lisbon on Friday, with almost no-one batting much more than an eyelid.

The video (difficult to watch) shows a child (possibly aged between 8 and 11 years old) seemingly trying to drown a young puppy.

The film clearly shows people ‘relaxing’ in the foreground, either oblivious (or uncaring) to what was going on as the child, yanking the puppy this way and that on a lead, repeatedly pushed the struggling animal under the water.

Fortunately, a flurry of indignation over social media impelled a member of the local animal protection society to rush to the scene, rescue the puppy (allegedly 40-minutes into its ordeal), and frogmarch the child straight to the local police station, where he was left, after a complaint over what he had been doing had been duly filed.

The point of this story is to encourage people to act when they see bad things unfolding. National media has been full of horror stories recently, about situations in which bad things happening to human young (not baby animals) were ‘tolerated’ by people in the vicinity, until such time as the bad things culminated in the childrens’ deaths.

Had this incident not made it to social media pages, the puppy would almost certainly be dead. By the time he was examined by a vet, he was found to be ‘exhausted’, with a distended stomach due to the amount of water he had swallowed. His paws were also raw from trying to escape/ clawing the bottom of the artificial lake in which he was being tortured.

As it is, he has been cared for and is now under the protection of the Lisbon Animal Association that rescued him.

A text explaining this incident has been published online. The boys’ parents were present at the police station when the complaint was filed.

Source: noticiasaominuto

Natasha Donn

Journalist for the Portugal Resident.