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Last farm guard dogs put down
11/10/2002 16:50 - (SA)
Howard Burditt
Banket - Zimbabwean vets put down 45 farm guard dogs on Friday, the last of 500 abandoned animals who were destroyed after a forced exodus of white farmers.
"We thought that with humane euthanasia we could promise all the animals a good death. There was no way we could promise them a good life," said Meryl Harrison of the Zimbabwe National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Vets killed the dogs using lethal doses of sedatives supplied by a South African charity and then piled the bodies into mass graves.
The dogs were owned by a company called Tredar Security and guarded commercial farms, Harrison said.
But after thousands of white farmers were evicted under a government programme to redistribute farms to landless blacks, the dogs were abandoned when the firm's guards left properties to demand redundancy money.
Harrison said the society had agreed to help put down the dogs at Tredar's request.
She said some of the dogs had been left tied to trees on empty farms and others had been locked in kennels.
"A lot of them were not even proper guard dogs. They were family pets that had been given to the guards," she said.
- Reuters
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