By Martin Hellicar
TOURISTS looked on in horror as a little grey terrier called Patch was first run down and then shot dead in a Limassol street by a municipality dog catcher, the animal’s distraught owner said yesterday.
Ignoring onlookers’ pleas to spare the exhausted dog, the catcher shot the pet and then drove off, leaving the dead dog behind.
The owner – who wished to remain anonymous – told the Cyprus Mail the incident happened outside a crowded swimming pool in Yermasoyia at about 9.30am on Thursday. It left shocked tourists vowing never to return to the island.
“It was barbarous behaviour,” the owner said.
“Witnesses saw a Yermasoyia municipality van chasing Patch down the street. After a while the dog collapsed and they ran him over; then a municipality worker got out and shot him in the street right in front of children and tourists, who were begging him not to shoot it,” the owner said.
“He then left the dog in the street, only returning about two hours later to carry it off in a plastic bag,” she added.
By law, stray dogs have to be rounded up and then kept for at least 24 hours in a pound – giving owners a chance to recover their pets – before being put down humanely. Yermasoyia municipality could not be contacted for comment yesterday.
“No one can put down a dog unless he is a government vet, and no grace period was given, as stipulated by law,” the owner protested.
She said her efforts to speak to Yermasoyia municipality about the incident had led nowhere.
“The municipality workers probably went there because someone had complained of a stray dog. But it was not: it had been but we had taken it in and were looking after it,” the owner said.
“It was young and playful but it was certainly not dangerous,” she added.
A local representative for a British travel agent said he had received a list of “about 20” British visitors who had witnessed the incident and who were now determined never to return. They also planned to tell their story to newspapers back home.
“It was the way in which it was done, right outside a public swimming pool and in front of children,” he said.
Municipalities launched concerted campaigns to round up strays in the wake of a spate of dog attacks last year, including one in which an alsatian savaged a five-year-old boy to death in Larnaca.
“Ever since that little boy was tragically killed there has been a craze to put down all dogs. One isolated incident does not prove that all dogs are bad,” the owner said yesterday.
