Bonnie, a golden Labrador, wagged her tail playfully for the last time on Monday before succumbing to the veterinarian’s lethal injection.
She is one of 600 dogs that once guarded now abandoned white-owned farms being put down by veterinarians in a euthanasia blitz. Those dogs, along with hundreds of domestic pets, horses, swans and even goldfish, are the innocent bystanders in Zimbabwe’s political unrest, animal welfare workers say.
”People have suffered in this, but the animals have no mouth to speak, no ability to make other plans, they are the silent victims of the tragedy,” said Meryll Harrison, head of the independent Zimbabwe National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Harrison strokes Bonnie’s fur gently, and veterinarian Anthony Donohoe pumps the phenylbarbitone into a vein in Bonnie’s right foreleg that will take the fatal drug straight to her heart and vital organs in a second or two.
”It’s all right, sweetheart, it’s all right,” Harrison holds and comforts the Labrador as she slumps, her eyelids flutter and she quietly dies.
Her body is laid alongside the dogs that came before her. Further away, a four metre deep grave has been dug for the 24 dogs put down on Monday in the once thriving farming community of Nyabira, 30 kilometres northwest of Harare. Graves nearby hold the remains of 130 other guard dogs put down since Friday.
About 440 others, abandoned after the security company that
owned them collapsed a week ago, will also die. ”I cannot think of anywhere else in the world where 600 dogs have to be put down because all we can provide them with is a dignified death,” Harrison said.
The security company had provided crop guards and protection for some 300 white farmers in the Trelawney and Darwindale tobacco and corn district. It shut down after most of the farms were seized under a government program to take white-owned land and give it to blacks.
The government has targeted 95% of the nation’s 5 000 white-owned properties for confiscation. Many of the farmers were ordered to leave their land by August 8. Ruling party militants have attacked or threatened many of those that defied the eviction order.
Since 2000, when the militants began occupying white-owned farms and the government said it would seize the land, animal welfare officials have seen animal abuse and cruelty on ”a huge scale,” Harrison said.
As farmers fled, horses, chickens, domestic pets, hamsters, cranes, geese, swans, hand-reared lion cubs, at least one tamed baby elephant and even goldfish were abandoned, she said.
Some animals had their tendons cut by militants. Some were clubbed. Others were slashed, axed or torched to death in hay. In the collapsing agricultural economy, farmers were forced to sell pregnant cows for slaughter. Where fences were broken down, sheep ran amok and pigs fled their sheltered styes. ”We found sows lying exhausted and sunburnt, unable to move, and boars unused to each other that had fought each other to the death,” Harrison said.
”We saw a cow with an ax embedded in its back and horses with open blade wounds.” Conservation groups have also reported the hunting and killing of more than half of the nation’s small game animals as well as endangered rhinos bred in nature preserves.
Deer and African antelope have been sighted in some impoverished peasant areas for the first time in 40 years. They apparently fled a wave of poaching on seized game farms, and now face the traditional snares and traps and half-wild dogs usually used by peasant hunters to kill rabbits, rodents and birds.
Conservationist Gill Munn said her animal welfare group rescued 83 horses from farming areas, but had to put down 27 of them while searching for new homes for the others.
Donohoe said his veterinary practice in Harare was putting down about 60 domestic pets — about 10 of them cats — each week as farmers and others leave amid the worst economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe since independence in 1980.
He has helped Munn round up abandoned horses where grazing has been burnt by new settlers. ”Those we’ve killed we’ve had to shoot. Drugged darts are unbelievably expensive – and it’s not that easy to drop a horse stone dead with a single rifle shot,” he said. – Sapa-AP