Laura Noël, manager of our Refuge du Marais in Coutisse, shared her concern on RTL-TVi’s “Images à l’appui” program about the staggering number of serious cases of mistreatment since the beginning of the year.
Our Marais team has been involved in a dozen seizures and taken charge of over 30 animals since mid-January. Underfed horses, clandestine zoos, farm animals wading in their own excrement… This animal misery is caused by the economic crisis and the total precariousness of the owners of these abandoned animals.
In 2022, the Walloon Region carried out 47 seizures for reasons of animal abuse, for a total of 700 animals seized.
In 2023, 1,379 abused animals were seized.
And yet, as we learn in Images à l’appui, only 40 people were banned from owning an animal. That’s very, very few compared with the number of cases handled by the Unité du Bien-Être Animal and by Walloon shelters.
Our requests are as follows:
- We would like the subsidies paid by the Walloon Region to be increased according to the veterinary report submitted and the species seized;
- We would like to see the perpetrators of these abuses banned from keeping any species of animal for life, and for the penalties to be commensurate with their misdeeds. Any recurrence would be intolerable, and for this reason we are calling for more controls.
You can watch the show again here :